Upcoming Events

This talk will investigate processes of urban dissolution, a phenomenon herein defined as the loss of the urban scale. In contrast to the robust body of archaeological literature on urban formation and urban maintenance, comparatively few analyses have targeted urban decline, particularly in an Aegean context, where the disappearance of urbanism has been presumed the byproduct of the collapse of the state. Positioned in opposition to these narratives, the talk examines the urban dissolution of Late Bronze Age Knossos (Crete, Greece). From the mid-18th to mid-15th centuries BCE, Knossos was the largest city in the Aegean, almost twice the size of the region's other settlements. About 350 years later (ca. 1100 BCE), it had lost three quarters of its urban fabric and dwindled to the size of a village. The talk analyzes how and why the loss of urbanism occurred, through study of tempero-spatial patterning in occupational evidence recovered by over a century of archaeological exploration in the Knossos valley, including dozens of excavations and an urban survey.

Egyptian Borderlands: Immigration in the Eastern Delta in the Second Millennium BCE (Dr. Danielle Candelora)

This lecture is part of the series Migration, Borderlands, and Social Boundaries in Antiquity. This program of public lectures takes place monthly on Thursdays at 9:30 AM Pacific, from September 2024 through May 2025.

Watch live on the ARF YouTube channel here: https://bit.ly/arf-channel or watch later on the ARF & Badè YouTube channels.

Indigenous boarding schools are a complex and tragic part of North America's history. Recent community interest in documenting and sharing these histories is creating new opportunities for partnerships between communities and researchers. During an oral history project in partnership with the White Mountain Apache Tribe about the Theodore Roosevelt Boarding School living Ndee elders shared powerful experiences of cultural loss and persistence resulting from attending the school. This presentation will highlight Ndee experiences and memories of the school as well as some of the ways Ndee youth structured their educational experiences through intentional cultural persistence, resistance and survivance.

Please join us to learn about opportunities for archaeologists in cultural resource management (CRM). This event will feature brief presentations, a discussion on the state of consulting, and a chance to speak with representatives from six CRM firms. This event is especially for students (from UC Berkeley and other Bay Area colleges and universities) who want to learn more about working in CRM. 

Please join the Archaeological Institute of America, San Francisco Society, for our annual National Lecture. We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Scott Fitzpatrick (University of Oregon) to give a lecture titled, "Stones of the Butterfly: Archaeological Investigation of Yapese Stone Money Quarries in Palau, Micronesia." We hope to see you there!

Lidar technology has revolutionized archaeology by providing unprecedented insights into landscapes and structures that remain hidden to the naked eye but at Tugunbulak, Uzbekistan, specifically, this technology has revealed the vast scale of highland urbanism, challenging scholars to rethink the traditional division between settled agricultural societies and mobile pastoralist cultures.

More broadly, archaeological work in the mountains and grasslands of Central Asia is essential for understanding the complexity of historical exchange networks, commonly referred to as the Silk Roads. These perceived "remote" areas, often associated with "less-developed" mobile pastoral groups, offer rich yet underexplored evidence of dynamic trade routes. We have the opportunity to piece together how these networks operated across diverse landscapes, revealing that populations beyond the sedentary oases—typically the focus of Silk Road studies—played a central role in facilitating regional and even broader connections. At Tugunbulak, early excavation results suggest that access to rich metal ores may have contributed significantly to the development of a vibrant economy, one that was well-integrated into these networks.

This symposium will host interdisciplinary discussions on the traditions and innovations of Japanese material culture, with a focus on mingu (traditional everyday tools), porcelain, and lacquerware. 

History of Art Lecture Series: "Africans in Byzantium: Kings, Merchants, and Holy Men". By Dr. Andrea Myers Achi.

In Fall 2023, The Metropolitan Museum of Art presented the critically acclaimed exhibition Africa & Byzantium, which explored complex connections between North and East African communities and Byzantium. This landmark exhibition included significant loans from thirty-six lenders, including prominent institutions in Tunisia and Egypt. Reviews highlighted not only the visual splendor of the artworks but also the growing interest in the African individuals who commissioned, traded, or were depicted in Byzantine art.

This talk builds on the research conducted for the Africa & Byzantium exhibition, offering new case studies that examine the visual and literary portrayals of Africans within the Byzantine context. Dr. Achi will also address the challenges of revealing these often-overlooked narratives from an art historical perspective and provide insights into the broader implications for understanding cultural interactions in the medieval world.

History of Art Lecture Series: "Africans in Byzantium: Kings, Merchants, and Holy Men". By Dr. Andrea Myers Achi.

In Fall 2023, The Metropolitan Museum of Art presented the critically acclaimed exhibition Africa & Byzantium, which explored complex connections between North and East African communities and Byzantium. This landmark exhibition included significant loans from thirty-six lenders, including prominent institutions in Tunisia and Egypt. Reviews highlighted not only the visual splendor of the artworks but also the growing interest in the African individuals who commissioned, traded, or were depicted in Byzantine art.

This talk builds on the research conducted for the Africa & Byzantium exhibition, offering new case studies that examine the visual and literary portrayals of Africans within the Byzantine context. Dr. Achi will also address the challenges of revealing these often-overlooked narratives from an art historical perspective and provide insights into the broader implications for understanding cultural interactions in the medieval world.

The legacy of the enslaved peoples working and living at The Hermitage, Andrew Jackson's plantation, was previously lost within the overarching narratives of the Confederacy and Jim Crow. In this talk, we will discuss the decades-spanning efforts to understand the lives of the enslaved peoples and bring their names into the historical record, detailing the search for the sacred grounds of their cemetery. Often referred to as the "People's President," Andrew Jackson represented white, anglicized post-Revolutionary War America: an America that used enslaved peoples labor and forced Indigenous peoples off of their land. The Andrew Jackson Foundation (AJF) currently maintains the land and buildings of The Hermitage and began a multi-year effort to research the enslaved peoples working on the land and to locate their final resting place. The AJF hired the Vanderbilt Institute for Spatial Research to georectify historic maps and to conduct a ground-penetrating radar survey to locate potential burials. As the lead investigator for the project, I will describe the process in its entirety—from the initial mapping and the noninvasive techniques to our findings. I will also discuss the broader significance of this research and provide suggestions for future maintenance and stewardship of the land.

Please join the Archaeological Institute of America, San Francisco Society, for its first lecture of the spring semester. We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Aaron Brown (Stanford University) back to Berkeley to present a talk titled, "Recovering Culinary Practice and Household Dynamics in the Pompeian Home."

Join us for ARF's Spring Lecture and Reception!

This talk examines Indigenous food systems in the North American Plateau through modern and archaeological perspectives, with a focus on collaborative research with the Kalispel Tribe of Indians. The studies aim to deepen understanding of the historical importance of first foods while addressing contemporary challenges related to food security and health within the Kalispel community. Ethnoarchaeological and nutritional research on traditional camas harvesting, processing, and roasting in Kalispel homelands, guided by Tribal experts, reveals that traditional methods significantly enhance nutritional density and improve transport and storage efficiency. These insights informed archaeological investigations at the Indian Creek site (45PO358), where excavations of 10 earth ovens uncovered evidence of diverse diets. This diversity challenges the narrow archaeological focus on singular resources and highlights the complex, integrated nature of Kalispel foodways, offering a richer perspective on adaptive strategies and cultural resilience.

Shifting Boundaries, Moving People? Investigating Change in Archaic Western Anatolia (Jana Mokrišová)

This lecture is part of the series Migration, Borderlands, and Social Boundaries in Antiquity. This program of public lectures takes place monthly on Thursdays at 9:30 AM Pacific, from September 2024 through May 2025.

Watch live on the ARF YouTube channel here: https://bit.ly/arf-channel or watch later on the ARF & Badè YouTube channels.

How can unfree labor be rendered visible in the archaeological record? How can we do an archaeology of slavery in contexts that offer no unambiguous evidence of enslaved lives, from a society where the same tasks might have been done by free and unfree people working side by side? Beginning at the Hellenistic Sanctuary of Poseidon at Kalaureia, Greece, I trace the events that at some point in the second century BCE led to the pieces of a pot that had been repaired with lead being deposited at the sanctuary. Following the flow of the lead from the moment of deposition back to when it was mined, I think through the labor that shaped the metal's itinerary, and the enslaved and free, human and non-human agents that would have performed this labor.

Ancient Roman authors regularly discuss the doorkeeper, ostiarius in Latin, typically an enslaved person who was stationed near the front of a house in order to control movement into and out of the house. While archaeologists have often been eager to identify spaces as doorkeepers' rooms, there have not been any systematic investigations of such spaces in Roman houses. This talk addresses this issue by offering preliminary investigations of potential doorkeepers' rooms in Pompeian houses. The approach includes mapping such spaces with ArcGIS in order to trace patterns in the urban environment, as well as looking at individual case studies. This forms the basis for one chapter of a larger dissertation project titled, "Living under Lock and Key: Slavery and Security in the houses of Pompeii."

Based on oral historical interviews funded in part by the Stahl Fund conducted in August of 2024, this talk explores community and Indigenous values and memories about birds at Picuris Pueblo. This oral historical research is part of a larger investigation into avian-human relationships at Picuris Pueblo in tandem with a legacy collection of avifaunal remains from the 1960s excavations at the pueblo. I will describe how Picuris community members describe their own relationships to birds, and the larger environment as well as relate these narratives with the zooarchaeological narratives emerging the faunal analysis of the avifaunal collection. I explore how close avian relationships in the past shape Picurian values of reciprocity and respect with animals and the larger animate environment. As described by interviewees at Picuris, birds are teachers that have given knowledge to Indigenous peoples in New Mexico for time immemorial and continue to do so. Methodologically, this research demonstrates how zooarchaeological interpretations are bolstered and bettered by knowledge from descendent communities who continue to foster Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), even when the knowledge is fragmentary due to centuries of colonialism and estrangement from traditional activities. 

'Their Servitude I Loosened:' A Reexamination of Persian Period Judean Re-migration in Light of the U.S. Bracero and Border Industrialization Programs (Marvin Wiser)

This lecture is part of the series Migration, Borderlands, and Social Boundaries in Antiquity. This program of public lectures takes place monthly on Thursdays at 9:30 AM Pacific, from September 2024 through May 2025.

Watch live on the ARF YouTube channel here: https://bit.ly/arf-channel or watch later on the ARF & Badè YouTube channels.

What does it mean in today's world to be a historian who teaches and researches the ancient Mediterranean and West Asian past? What does it mean to do these things in a British settler colony built on stolen Land and genocides? And what does it mean to do these things as livestreamed genocide unfolds in Palestine? In this talk, Katherine Blouin will share some reflections on how these questions have informed the 2024 Routledge Handbook of Classics, Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory. Blouin will also reflect on what the last year has taught her about the intimate relationship between ancient history and modern settler colonialism, the moral duties of critical historians, and the disruptive potential of public-facing scholarship.

As one of the founding members of the Society of Black Archaeologists, I have seen the organization grow dramatically since 2011. What started as a small group of about 10 Black archaeologists, the SBA has grown to over 300 members of numerous races, ethnicities, and nationalities scattered around the globe. This growth has not been easy as it has taken place amongst the backdrop of political transformations, economic fluctuations, and worldwide antiblack movements. In the face of these pressures, SBA's mission remains focused on ethical treatment of African Diasporic sites, increasing the number of Black archaeologists, and including Black people in the study of our own history. The SBA has also provided a place of belonging for archaeologists of African descent while building durable collaborations with government agencies, cultural resource management companies, and Black communities. This talk summarizes some of the current efforts under way as the SBA approaches its 15-year anniversary. The goal is to talk about the hope we have for archaeology everywhere.