Pizza Talk

Pizza Talk: "Black Lives Matter: Reflecting on the Development of African American and African Diaspora Archaeology"

Submitted by mswanson on March 24, 2016 - 9:40am

Speaker: Merrick Posnansky, UCLA Professor Emeritus

Black Lives Matter has been a contentious political and Social concern in recent years but most of the heat has concerned the present situation of Police violence on Black youth in the USA. My own concern is with the general decrease of interest in the lives of poorly documented Blacks before the 1960's. Archaeology has been the key for understanding much of the nature of the transplantation and acculturation of Africans in the New World.

Pizza Talk: "Mortuary Practice in the Mid-Chincha Valley, Peru: New Discoveries and Emerging Models"

Submitted by mswanson on March 24, 2016 - 9:37am

Speaker: Jacob Bongers, PhD Candidate, UCLA

This talk addresses local mortuary practices in the mid-Chincha Valley, Peru dating from the Late Intermediate Period, or LIP (AD 1000 – 1476) to the Late Horizon (AD 1476 – 1532). Ethnohistorical documents state that a complex, centralized state known as the Chincha Kingdom dominated the Chincha Valley from the LIP until the Late Horizon, when the Inca conquered and consolidated the Chincha. Here, we summarize mortuary data from three years of fieldwork (2013-2015) in the mid-Chincha Valley.

Pizza Talk: "The Centrality of the Outer Fertile Crescent: A View from Aradetis Orgora"

Submitted by mswanson on March 24, 2016 - 9:36am

Speaker: Marilyn Kelly Buccellati, UCLA

2010 was our last excavating season in the ancient city of Urkesh in the northeastern corner of Syria although we went to the site in December 2011 to meet with the local staff to assure continuing their work on conservation and site presentation. With the impossibility of excavating at Urkesh during the war, and in view of the affinities between the third millennium at Urkesh and the Kura-Araxes culture I decided to actively return to my early interests in the southern Caucasus and join an excavation in the Republic of Georgia.