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.

ABSTRACT: Conservators have a responsibility to care for and protect cultural heritage materials. When it comes to the illicit trafficking of cultural heritage materials, there are many opinions throughout conservation about what to do in the case of treatment. As will be discussed, there are formal ethical guidelines for the profession of both conservators and museums. In order to fulfill these professional responsibilities, conservators may be tempted to knowingly treat illicitly trafficked cultural heritage property as a preventative measure. This is done with a genuine hope that one day this cultural heritage will be recovered, and by treating it now, the object has a better chance of surviving to that point. This is also grounded, in part, by the history of unethically but legally acquired cultural heritage in museums that conservators are responsible for caring for. In comparing these ethics with the legal framework within the United States, this talk will explore what, if any, are conservators’ ethical obligations to stolen artifacts and, in practice, what are the legal risks associated with treating a potentially stolen object.

BIO: Paige Hilman received her BA in Art History with a minor in Arts Administration from the University of Arizona and certificate in Field Archaeology from Pima Community College. Prior to starting her MA, she worked with the National Park Service as a Conservation Assistant, serving the Intermountain Region. Her research interests include archaeological ceramics from the American Southwest, provenance research, and conservation ethics.

ABSTRACT: The Gran Chiriquí culture area encompasses southern Costa Rica and western Panama, spanning at least three topographic subdivisions: the Pacific Coast, Central Highlands, and the Caribbean Coast. The Caribbean Coast has been the least studied, particularly in comparison to the Pacific Coast. However, from 2003-2014, excavations on Isla Colón, the largest island in Bocas del Toro, Panama, identified multiple sites and recovered large, complex ceramic assemblages that include locally-made pottery, imported wares, and local imitations of exotic styles. Ceramics from several distinct culture areas are evident stylistically, though the cultural processes and community dynamics that resulted in these diverse deposits are still poorly understood. To assess the chronology, scale, and cultural practices that shaped these assemblages, ceramic samples from sites across western Panama have been analyzed using thin section petrography. The identification of distinct paste groups in comparison to pottery styles serves to distinguish possible locations of production, the movement of peoples and goods, and shared visual languages.

BIO: Carly Pope earned her BA in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University in 2016, where her senior thesis focused on the emergence of several early pottery traditions in Latin America. She continued her education at the University College London, where she obtained a MA in Archaeology in 2018. . She specializes in the archaeometric analysis of ceramics including the use of laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry, neutron activation analysis, portable x-ray fluorescence, and petrography. In 2024-25, she held research positions at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Missouri University Research Reactor Archaeometry Lab, and Georgia State University’s Department of Geosciences.

ABSTRACT: Plaster reproductions of Classical and Mesoamerican archaeological materials displayed at World’s Fairs or universal exhibitions and their connections to colonial perceptions of imperialism and empire. 

BIO: Dr. Caitlin R. O’Grady is a trained conservator and conservation scientist specializing in analysis and preservation of archaeological materials. She is currently Assistant Professor in the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Department of Anthropology and UCLA/Getty Program in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage. In this capacity, she teaches and advises undergraduate and graduate students in Anthropology and Conservation, as well as conducts research in the history of conservation and archaeology disciplines. Previously, she held a faculty position at the University College London’s Institute of Archaeology where she taught in the postgraduate conservation programs and managed the FTIR and Raman instrumentation in the Institute’s Wolfson Archaeological Science Laboratories.

Caitlin’s research interests include the disciplinary histories of conservation/conservation science and their intersection with that of archaeology, as well as the preservation and scientific analysis of ceramics, historic conservation materials, lime-plaster wall paintings, and mudbrick.