Speaker:

Dr. Michael W. Love

Professor

Department of Anthropology

CSU Northridge

Abstract:

The Preclassic Period on the Pacific coast of Guatemala and Chiapas was a dynamic time, beginning with the establishment of the first sedentary villages and ending with the large city-states of the Late Preclassic.  Although royal tombs and stelae with portraits of rulers capture the headlines, household archaeology offers the best route to understand changes in social relationships and the basis of political power.  Excavations at La Blanca, as one of the largest settlements of Middle Preclassic Mesoamerica, have recovered one of the largest samples of Preclassic domestic remains.  These data document social differentiation, along with the economic and ritual activities of a cross-section of households dating from 1000-700 BCE.

Speaker: 

Dr. Carla Hernández Garavito

Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Anthropology, UC Riverside

Abstract:

The Inka expansion on the Central Andes brought into the Empire several polities with different histories, traditions, and identities. The increasing pressure to manage diversity and territorial expansion led the Inka to build upon familiarity with their subjects whenever possible. In this presentation, I explore once such familiar space: ritual spaces. Inka plazas are well known to archaeological research as places for feasting, displays of Inka power, and affirmation of social solidarities. However, in many cases, Inka plazas were attached to other sacred built and natural places that rather than affirmed imperial control, embodied the identities of the subjects. I will discuss the history of such a sacred place or w’aka in Huarochirí before and after the Inka. I contend that the plazas fully adapted to the embodiment of community identity already at play in the w’aka. Consequently, the closeness between this w’aka and Inka plazas reinforced the notion of local communities appropriating and retelling their history of subjugation by the Inka as one of alliance and broadening of community ties. Finally, I look at how the experience of this local community with Inka imperialism informed how they engaged with Spanish colonialism and evangelization. Overall, my work aims to recognize the importance of experience and reinvention among Andean communities in the face of political imposition

Speaker: 

Elena Sesma

UC Berkeley, Postdoctoral Fellow

Bio:

Elena Sesma received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2019 and is currently a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley. Elena specializes in historical archaeology, community based methods and engaged anthropology, Black Feminist Theory, and memory studies. Her most recent research focused on an early 19th century cotton plantation site in Eleuthera, Bahamas and the descendant community who has lived on the property for the past 150 years, drawing connections between land, memory, and political action. Her current research examines the shared histories of late 18th-century Loyalist migration and slavery in the Bahamas and Atlantic Canada. She has been involved in archaeological projects in Massachusetts, Maryland, Nevis, the Bahamas, and northern Israel.

Abstract:

This talk addresses a community-based archaeology project focused on the history of a 19th century Bahamian cotton plantation and the present-day communities who live on and around the former plantation acreage. The Millars Plantation on Eleuthera, Bahamas was established in 1803 as a cotton plantation and remained in operation through the 1830s. The last plantation owner left the 2000-acre property to the descendants of her former slaves and servants at the time of her death in 1871. Many local residents today trace their lineage to the families named in the Millar will, and continue to uphold their rights to the land in the face of a series of legal challenges by Bahamian and foreign investors who would seek to develop new tourism-based economies in the area. In the process of documenting the historical landscape of the Millars plantation estate through oral histories and landscape survey, the research revealed ways that residents today have materialized memory – piecing together object, story, and space – on a living landscape that has more often been framed as empty or relegated to the past. This research demonstrates how these contemporary Bahamian communities mobilize historical objects and memory as tools for community-building and activism, illustrating the transformative power of a contemporary archaeology of historic spaces.

Speaker:

Karime Castillo

UCLA Archaeology Ph.D. Student

Bio:

Karime Castillo is originally from Mexico City. She received her B.A. in Archaeology from Universidad de las Américas Puebla and her M.A. in Artefact Studies from the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. She is primarily interested in Mexican historical archaeology and colonial material culture. Her master’s thesis proposes a typology of pharmaceutical glass from London. As a historical archaeologist, she has done research on Colonial Mexican majolica and the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla, Puebla, Mexico. She has worked for archaeological projects in different parts of Mexico, including Sonora, Mexico City, and Puebla, and has collaborated with the Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico City and London Archaeological Archive and Resource Center in London. At University of California Los Angeles she will study glass production in Colonial Mexico.

Abstract:

difficulties as they established their crafts in the New World. Glassmakers in particular, struggled finding the resources they needed in an unfamiliar land where glass had not been artificially made before. Nevertheless, colonial glassmakers found ways to adapt to the local resources and the industry

flourished in New Spain, predominantly in Mexico City and Puebla. By bringing together archaeology, history, ethnography, and materials science principles and methods, it is possible to explore the processes of technological transfer, adaptation and development of glass production technology in Colonial Mexico. This talk presents some results of the analysis of glass from the two main glass production centers in New Spain. The chemical composition of archaeological glass from Mexico City and Puebla reveals the various ways in which colonial artisans adapted the technology to the resources available in a different and. Historical documents bring to the fore the social aspects of the technology and help to contextualize colonial glass production within the broader scope of Spanish colonialism.