ABSTRACT: In Iron Age Celtic temperate Europe (450/400 BCE to late 1st c. BCE), opaque red glass was used in the decoration of gold, copper alloy, and iron prestige goods such as helmets, swords, fibulae, chariots, and horse equipment. Opaque red glass was difficult to produce and to work into a final product; craftspeople needed intimate knowledge of the ingredients necessary to create and color a gem-like and easily workable red glass, the correct firing temperature and furnace conditions for melting, and various techniques for application to a metal surface. In this talk, I will address the technical know-how to create opaque red glass and its many associated products discovered through the analysis of glass samples from the late Iron Age and early Roman provincial period settlement of Mont Beuvray in France and an ongoing experimental project to recreate opaque red glass.

BIO: Rachel Wood is a PhD candidate in the Archaeology IDP at UCLA. Her research focuses on the value and social networks created through the trade, production, and consumption of opaque red glass in late Iron Age and early Roman provincial western and central Europe.

ABSTRACT: Over the past twenty years, archaeologists have come to realize that far from being a cultural backwater, the northern lowlands of the Yucatan Peninsula were integral to the development of the ancient Maya civilization. Communities constructed humongous platform mounds around the edges of the hilly Puuc Region as early as 800 BCE, at the same time that some intrepid settlers established the first farming villages within the Puuc Region itself. These earliest Puuc agricultural communities followed similar site plans that included central platform mounds and, surprisingly, full-scale ancient Mesoamerican ballcourts. Investigations at the two early ballcourt sites of Xanab Chak and Paso del Macho over the past five years have uncovered amazing ritual offerings including a series of jade pendants and the only known Preclassic Period ceramic figurine from northern Yucatan. This talk will focus on what these very recent findings tell us about the importance of even the smallest communities in the north, and how they will necessitate even further alterations to our understanding of the origins of the ancient Maya civilization.

ABSTRACT: In recent years, the focus of Egyptological scholarship has slowly moved away from narratives focused solely on royal monuments and texts to interrogate how kings and kingship fit into broader ancient Egyptian society. My current book project seeks to better understand where, when, why, and how non-royal Egyptians in specifically the Middle Kingdom period (ca. 2030 - 1650 BCE) engaged with kingship.

In this talk, I will go over my initial motivation for working on this topic and the ways in which my thinking has evolved, shifting from focusing on binary absence vs. presence of kingship in non-royal lives to more carefully considering the ways in which kingship was engaged with by those outside of the royal court. Rather than impose strict categorizations, my approach instead highlights the variability of engagement with kingship in the non-royal sphere, including for instance encounters hinging on the durability of architecture or the experience of occasion.

BIO: Luiza Osorio G Silva is Assistant Professor of Art History, Archaeology, and Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is currently the Assistant Director of the Mastaba of Akhmerutnisut Documentation Project (MAD-P) in Giza, Egypt. Her research interests include ancient Egyptian kingship, monumentality, and the audiences and contexts for art and architecture.

ABSTRACT: As the second most prolific exporter of cotton in the mid-19th century, Mobile, Alabama was built by enslaved laborers. As such, after the Emancipation Proclamation, there was, necessarily, a dramatic reordering of both economic and social structures. In addition to this new economic landscape, newly emancipated Black people gained geographic autonomy, with the ability to live far from the prying eyes of a former overseer or enslaver. By doing a comparative analysis of the archaeological material found at two free Black sites in what was at the time unincorporated Mobile-I explore the different ways in which 'free' Black life was carried out in the American South directly after Emancipation. The two sites, one in Africatown, Alabama, and the other near Magnolia cemetery highlight opposite ends of the spectrum of Afro-diasporic experiences in America at the time (generational enslavement vs. 5 years of enslavement) allowing for multifaceted representation of Black life. Additionally, as I engage with these two sites through collections already excavated, I discuss the value of collections-based research, especially in the archaeology of marginalized communities.

BIO: Madison Aubey received her BA in Anthropology from Columbia University. This past Spring, she completed her MA in Anthropology at UCLA. Her research has focused on broadening academic understandings of the African Diasporic experience in the United States and her work has taken her across the American South as well as the hinterlands of the Republic of Bénin. She is continuing this same line of research, with a focus on foodways, for her doctoral research.