ABSTRACT: This presentation investigates urbanism and settlement patterns through multiple lines of remote sensing data in Northern Sudan. The site of Jebel Barkal, located 400 km from Khartoum, near the Nile, is known for its elite palaces, temples, and pyramids. The site served as the royal capital of Kush from the 8th century BCE and remained a major urban and religious center throughout the Meroitic Period. Recently a Meroitic settlement was identified, known as the “East Mound.” Since 2018 the Jebel Barkal Archaeological Project, in collaboration with the National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums of Sudan, has been excavating and surveying areas of the East Mound. This talk will present preliminary results of a new project aimed at analyzing LiDAR and thermal imagery data. The LiDAR and the thermal imagery extend beyond the East Mound into the modern dense and lush agricultural fields adjacent to the Nile. The data will allow us to more accurately map the settlement’s spatial extent and situate it within its broader landscape context. Objectives also include identifying any previously undocumented features such as architecture, activity areas, and paleochannels. This work contributes to our understanding of how major Kushite cities grow, evolve, and respond to environmental factors throughout their life histories. Lastly, this project ruminates on the impact of archaeological inquiry in Sudan, which is currently experiencing a civil war after years of political unrest, while centering Sudanese voices and local archaeologists.

BIO: Kate Rose is an anthropological archaeologist, specializing in landscape analysis and ancient urbanism in the Near East and North Africa. Her PhD dissertation at Harvard University is a comparative spatial analysis of Kushite royal cemeteries in Northern Sudan. As a researcher with the ERC DiverseNile Project at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany from 2022 to 2024, she investigated landscape changes during the Bronze Age borderspace of the Attab to Ferka region. She has also held numerous lectureships and teaching positions at Harvard University and Boston University, and is interested in the intersection of pedagogy and fieldwork. She has served in various leadership positions on projects in Sudan, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, and Spain. She is currently the Director of Programs at the Institute for Field Research, and a Fellow with the Center for Ancient Middle Eastern Landscapes at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicago.

ABSTRACT: In 2023, the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology debuted its new graduate certificate in Cultural Heritage Research, Stewardship, and Restitution as part of the Waystation Initiative, which organizes and facilitates ethical returns of international archaeological and ethnological objects to the nation or community of origin. In this presentation, Lucha Martinez de Luna, Maryan Ragheb, and Mary Anastasi share the results from their first year working with Waystation. By combining provenance and art historical research with material analysis, they were able to compile object histories for various cultural objects from ancient China to reconstruct the life history of these objects. In the future, these and other cultural heritage artifacts will be returned to Shandong University in China, accompanied by provenance information obtained through our work with the Waystation. .

BIOS: Mary Anastasi is a PhD candidate in the Classics department at UCLA. Her research interests include philosophy, rhetoric, Imperial Greek literature, and epistolography, and she regularly teaches courses in Classics and Ancient Greek. Mary completed the Waystation certificate in the spring of 2024. 

Lucha Martinez de Luna is an a PhD candidate in archaeology at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology focused on Mesoamerican and Contemporary Archaeology. She has participated in archaeological projects in the Southwestern U.S., the American West, and central and southern Mexico and curator of archaeological and historical museum collections. As the La Providencia Archaeological Project director and a visiting professor at the University of Science and Arts in Chiapas, Mexico, Lucha also leads the Chicano/a/x Murals of Colorado Project.

Maryan Ragheb is a PhD candidate in archaeology at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology who works in ancient Egypt. Her dissertation addresses people’s interactions with their material culture during social change in ancient Egypt, focusing on body ornamentation production and practices. Maryan worked on different archaeological projects in Egypt and Ethiopia. For the Waystation Certificate Program, she worked on jade neolithic objects from China.

ABSTRACT: Southern Peru's Urquillos Valley hosts a series of Inka sites that exist in various states of integration with homes, farms, and the Peruvian tourist economy. Local Indigenous communities' ongoing use of these Inka sites frequently puts them at odds with the Peruvian government's Ministry of Culture, which often seeks to transform locally-managed "ruins" into state-run "archaeological sites." Examining three sites within the valley—Inkaq Mallquin, Apiypanki, and Choquekasantuy—reveals that different points in this transformative process can be linked to differences in plant communities living on those sites. Contemporary plants on heritage sites are both proxies for and drivers of archaeology-associated social, economic, and physical changes to the valley's Inka sites. In this talk, I study how botanical ecologies are employed by competing groups in struggles for control over land and heritage in the Urquillos Valley, and propose that a form of ecological imperialism is involved in creating proper archaeological sites as envisioned by Peru's Ministry of Culture.

BIO: Gabriel Silva Collins is a third-year PhD student at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. He received a BA in Anthropology from Williams College, and completed his MA in Archaeology at UCLA last spring. Gabriel's mixed archaeological and ethnographic research has focused on the relationships between precolonial Peruvian archaeological sites and the people who now live in, on, and around them. His dissertation work will continue these themes while examining a group of understudied sites near Cochabamba, Bolivia.

ABSTRACT: Highland landscapes present both conceptual and practical challenges for archaeology and archaeologists, and remain both understudied and undertheorized. In this talk, I will discuss those issues and how they have informed fieldwork that I and my collaborators (Hannah Lau and Jeyhun Eminli) have been conducting in the Talış Mountains in recent years. This highland zone, which is part of the Alborz range, is a unique ecosystem at the southern limits of the Caspian Sea. I will highlight results of fieldwork from our 2024 season of SHARP (the Southeastern Highlands Archaeological Research Project) in the Yardımlı district of Azerbaijan, where we have begun to expose a surprisingly landscape of large-scale stone-built architecture dating to the late 1st millennium BCE, providing entirely new datapoints for our understanding of post-Achaemenid developments in this region.

BIO: Lara Fabian is an assistant professor of Iranian archaeology in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA whose work focuses on Iran and the Caucasus, and broader Southwest Asia, in the Iron Age and later. Her current book project considers the material imprint of empire in its afterlife through an examination of the post-Achaemenid world. Her scholarship is informed by historiographic and reception studies on the development of thought about antiquity and the question of Iran in the Russian Empire, Soviet Union, and post-Soviet Eurasia. As part of this wider research, she has co-directed collaborative Azerbaijani-American fieldwork in Azerbaijan since 2016. Before coming to UCLA, she worked on the “Beyond the Silk Road” ERC project at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg.