ABSTRACT: This talk presents research I have been developing since 2019 on the former House of Detention of São Paulo, commonly known as Carandiru. In 1992, a police operation resulted in the deadliest recorded prison killing in Brazilian history. Days later, the government acknowledged the deaths of 111 incarcerated men. Since then, this number has been contested by survivors and

witnesses, although it has never been formally incorporated into legal proceedings. My research examines how these informal allegations can guide an investigation of the remaining material traces of Carandiru, asking how claims of human rights violations are expressed in material evidence. The project combines methods from forensic anthropology, urban archaeology, and material culture studies. Preliminary findings point to public tolerance of everyday violence, institutional complicity, the lack of control inside the prison, the destruction or concealment of evidence, and multiple problems in the postmortem examination reports. Together, these elements may contribute to questioning the official death count. By strengthening survivor accounts as valid lines of evidence, this work also raises methodological challenges: how can researchers document and analyze material evidence when the State itself participates in its erasure, deploying sophisticated mechanisms of disappearance under the veneer of legality?

BIO: Marília Oliveira Calazans is a staff researcher at the Center for Forensic Anthropology and Archaeology (CAAF–Federal University of São Paulo). She is a PhD candidate in Archaeology at the University of São Paulo, currently completing a Fulbright-supported visiting research period at UCLA. Her work focuses on investigating and producing evidence of State violence. Her research moves across Archaeology, History of Science, Cultural Heritage, Forensic Anthropology, and Human Rights.

Professor William Schniedewind's talk situates the remarkable archaeological site at Tell Shaddud at the crossroads of history—Armageddon, the strategic gateway of the Jezreel Valley. Excavations reveal fortresses that mark shifting powers: an Egyptian stronghold, an early Israelite administrative center, a neo-Assyrian fortress, and later a Jewish village from the Roman period, living in the shadow of the Roman legionary camp at Legio. The story continues into modern times, with traces of a British Mandate army trench and defenses of the Haganah. This lecture demonstrates how Tell Shaddud’s layers embody the enduring relationship between the land and its people, showing archaeology’s power to illuminate resilience, identity, and continuity across millennia and into modern times.

Learn More & RSVP: https://bit.ly/UCLA_Jan-13_Excavating-Tell-Shaddud

William Schniedewind is Professor of Biblical Studies at UCLA, and the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies. He received his Ph.D. in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies from Brandeis University, has been a Visiting Scholar at the Hebrew University and a Research Fellow at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, and is the Associate Director of the excavations at Tell Shaddud. He served for many years as the Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. He is the author of numerous articles and seven books including How the Bible Became a Book (Cambridge University Press, 2004), A Social History of Hebrew (Yale University Press, 2013), The Finger of the Scribe: How Scribes Learned to Write the Bible (Oxford University Press, 2019), and Who Really Wrote the Bible: the Story of the Scribes (Princeton University Press, 2024).

Aaron A. Burke (moderator) is Professor of the Archaeology of Ancient Israel and the Levant, and the Kershaw Chair of the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. He is a member of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at The University of California, Los Angeles, where he also serves as editor-in-chief. His research interests address the social history of the Levant and Eastern Mediterranean during the Bronze and Iron Ages with a particular interest in identity transformations in connection with warfare, forced migration, and long-distance exchange. Since 2007, he has directed The Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project, an NEH-funded excavation and publication program. His current research seeks to address the Early Iron Age in the southern Levant, ca. 1200–900 B.C., the period of the rise of early Israel. In connection with this research, between 2018 and 2023 he co-directed excavations with David Ilan of Hebrew Union College at Tel Dan in northern Israel. He is the founding series editor for The Elements in the Archaeology of Ancient Israel, published by Cambridge University Press.

ABSTRACT: This presentation will focus on our technical study of two polychrome ceramic tomb figures of dancers dating to the Han dynasty (206 BCE-8 CE). These figures were temporarily stewarded at the Cotsen Institute as part of the Waystation Initiative and were returned to China in June. The purpose of the study was to identify the pigments used and how they were applied. To answer these questions we combined a series of analytical techniques, such as pXRF spectroscopy, polarized light microscopy, multiband imaging, and hyperspectral imaging, with art historical comparisons to related Han dynasty objects. This talk presents the results of our analysis and highlights the research possibilities that are available to students and faculty here at the Cotsen.

BIOS:Vanessa Muros is an archaeological conservator and director of the Experimental and Archaeological Sciences lab at the Cotsen.  

Moupi Mukhopadhyay joined the Conservation Center at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in August 2025 as the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, Research. She recently completed her Ph.D. in the Conservation of Material Culture at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), with a focus on pigment analysis of the outdoor wall paintings in Kerala, India. Prior to joining LACMA, she lectured at the UCLA/Getty Conservation department (Winter 2025) and also volunteered at the Experimental and Archaeological Sciences Laboratory (EASL) at the Cotsen Institute at UCLA (January-July 2025).

Dani Dsouza graduated from UCLA with a BA in Classical Civilization and has been volunteering in the EASL since January 2024. This fall she’ll be applying to grad school for Conservation and Art History.