Past Events
Interested in Cotsen events? Sign up for our mailing list.Speaker: Rachel Moy, PhD Candidate, UCLA
This talk will summarize the preliminary results of the first season of excavation and research of the UCLA Shire Project at the site of Mai Adrasha in the northwestern Ethiopian highlands. I will discuss how Mai Adrasha fits into what we know of a larger pre-Aksumite to Early Aksumite cultural and political context. Due to how few excavated sites date to these periods, research needs to start with basic descriptions before we can make any firm broader conclusions. My dissertation will focus on the ceramic data from Mai Adrasha. I plan to start with the raw data to create four typologies each with a different method. I will then compare the four typologies taking into account the strengths and weakness of each. From these results, I will develop a more robust method to describe the ceramic data, and from this base, we can begin to describe more broadly the site of Mai Adrasha, its surroundings, and its broader cultural and political context.
Contact Matthew Swanson
Email mswanson@ioa.ucla.edu
Phone
Speaker: Dr. Thomas Schneider, University of British Columbia
The First Intermediate Period has presented archaeology and historiography with significant epistemological problems. Gaps in the evidence available to us and the uncertainty about how to interpret a variety of material and textual sources, have as much led to widely different views as modern paradigmatic shifts, depicting the
FIP either as a time of crisis or to the contrary, a time of regional innovation. This paper will look at the methodological problems with which archaeologists and historians of the FIP are faced today. What can we know today and what are possible avenues of future research?
Contact Matthew Swanson
Email mswanson@ioa.ucla.edu
Phone
Speaker: Dr. Marriana Nikolaidou, UCLA
Marianna Nikolaidou holds a Ph.D. in archaeology from the University of Thessaloniki in Greece, and is a research associate at the Cotsen Institute since 1994. Her research and fieldwork focus on the Neolithic and Bronze Ages of the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean. She has published extensively on gender issues, symbolism and ritual, ceramic iconography and technology, adornment, and the history of archaeology. Projects with the Cotsen include: the publication of ornaments and ceramics from Sitagroi, study of ceramic technology at Tell Mozan in Syria, and currently the analysis and study of prehistoric pottery at the excavations at Ancient Methone.
The pottery from Methone is the topic of her talk. Dating to the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, the material illuminates three millennia of prehistoric occupation at this key site on the Northern Aegean coast, and provides insights to the prehistory of the region."
Contact Matthew Swanson
Email mswanson@ioa.ucla.edu
Phone
The ancient world is characterized by technological innovations and the creation of beautiful objects of art and daily life. On this public lecture day UCLA graduate and undergraduate students will explore who the people were that made these, what techniques they used, and how we can learn about their social circumstances.
This event is free and open to the public.
Schedule:
10.00-10.20 Carrie Arbuckle Wood
10.20-10.40 Adam Dibattista Bone
10.40-11.00 Cara Lam Slaughtering as a Religious Act
11.00-11.20 Salah Halim Bread
11.20-11.30 questions
11.30-11.40 coffee break
11.40-12.00 Vera Rondano Faience
12.20-12.40 Chelsi Dimm Pottery
12.40-1.00 Sam Gonzalez Pottery
1.00-1.10 questions
1.10-2.15 Break
2.20-2.40 Timberlyn Woolf Mud brick
2.40-3.00 Ceanna Van Eaton Quarrying
3.00-3.20 Idi Okilo Stelae
3.20-3.30 questions
3.30-3.40 tea break
3.40-4.00 Nadia Ben-Marzouk Metal
4.00-4.20 Dani Candelora Hyksos
4.20-4.40 Heidi Hilliker Textile
4.40-5.00 Luke Breinig Time
5.00-5.10 questions
Contact Willeke Wendrich
Email wendrich@humnet.ucla.edu
Phone 1-310-206-1496
Speaker: Merrick Posnansky, UCLA Professor Emeritus
Black Lives Matter has been a contentious political and Social concern in recent years but most of the heat has concerned the present situation of Police violence on Black youth in the USA. My own concern is with the general decrease of interest in the lives of poorly documented Blacks before the 1960's. Archaeology has been the key for understanding much of the nature of the transplantation and acculturation of Africans in the New World. This presentation seeks to review the history of and growth of African American archaeology from the 1940's when it was realized that much of African culture and behavior survived the Atlantic Slave Trade. UCLA doctoral research has been in the forefront of American research and has covered plantation societies in the Caribbean and Louisiana, the nature of free maroon societies in remote parts of the Caribbean and South America, the nature of free African life in both the Caribbean and the United States and the excavation of landmark sites such as the Harriet Tubman house. Though reference will be made to current research, including biogenetic studies and the extension of Diasporan archaeology to both maroon (runaway slaves) societies in the New World and to the West African points of departure, the talk seeks to emphasize that more work urgently needs to be done in Africa American Archaeology. It is vital that African American archaeology, as well as the archaeology of other American minorities, be integrated into University courses both in Anthropology and History courses dealing with the early histories of peoples in North America.
Contact Matthew Swanson
Email mswanson@ioa.ucla.edu
Phone
Speaker: Dr. Cathy Costin, California State University, Northridge
Although some have suggested that North Coast ceramics are characterized by a stable technological style over thousands of years, evidence indicates that several aesthetic and technological styles "coexisted" with one another; they waxed and waned in popularity depending in large measure on the social and political environments in which ceramics were made and used. In this presentation, I consider how choices made in the production of decorated ceramics on the North Coast of Peru influenced and were influenced by the use of these vessels as information technology. Choices about forming, decorating, and firing processes conditioned how pottery looked and felt and affected the efficacy and efficiency of wares used to convey information about individual identity, social group affiliation, and important ideological concepts. I discuss those technological and aesthetic choices that relate specifically to appearance within their broader sociopolitical contexts, focusing on how pottery was used to encode symbolic messages and visually transmit significant messages.
Contact Matthew Swanson
Email mswanson@ioa.ucla.edu
Phone
Contact
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Speaker: Scott Fitzpatrick, University of Oregon
For many island societies worldwide, the acquisition and exchange of prized resources was fundamental to developing and maintaining social, political, and economic relationships. The patchiness of resources like stone, clay, tempering agents, shell, and animals often led to differential access which then helped to fuel the rise of social complexity. This presentation considers questions of resource acquisition as mediated by oceanographic and wind conditions, comparing results from archaeological projects in the Pacific and the Caribbean
.
Contact Matthew Swanson
Email mswanson@ioa.ucla.edu
Phone
Fowler OutSpoken Talk
Tua Pittman on Traditional Sea Voyaging and Navigation
Saturday, April 30, 1:30 pm
Internationally recognized as a traditional voyaging seafarer, Tua Pitman has navigated canoes for over thirty years without the use of modern instruments. He uses a traditional navigation system based on observations of the stars, sun, moon, the ocean swells, the flight patterns of birds and other natural signs.
Contact Cotsen Institute of Archaeology
Email ioaadmin@ioa.ucla.edu
Phone 310-206-8934
Speaker: Dr. Owen Doonan, California State University, Northridge
Ancient Sinop was the crossroads of the ancient Black Sea, which has been itself described by the distinguished historian Georges Bratianu as the "Turntable of Eurasia."
Owen Doonan has led an interdisciplinary archaeological expedition to the Sinop region since the mid-1990s and through that research program has established a basic sequence of settlement, economic and cultural history in the region. The research has significant implications for the understanding of: (1) the entanglement of colonial and indigenous communities (ca. 630-200 BC); (2) the establishment of Roman infrastructure (1st – 3rd centuries AD) in a remote region of Asia Minor (the Roman term for modern Turkey); (3) the impact of the establishment of Constantinople (modern Istanbul) as the seat of a world empire, ca. 330-600 AD; and (4) the mysterious collapse of the flourishing Byzantine rural system ca. 650 AD.
Starting in the summer of 2015 Dr. Doonan's team has initiated a long-term program of excavations at Sinop kale, the heart of the ancient port and colony. He will speak on the new excavations in the context of the systematic survey and broader cultural and economic trends in the region.
Contact Matthew Swanson
Email mswanson@ioa.ucla.edu
Phone
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