Upcoming Events

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. See the list of lectures and dates below.

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

Leah Packard-Grams worked in Egypt over the winter at the site of Amheida, a Roman town in the remote Dakhla Oasis in the Western Desert. At this site, elements of Egyptian and Roman culture can be seen in the mixed architectural forms, the bilingual texts, and the vast array of material culture. She focused on analyzing ceramic evidence, translating newly-excavated ostraca, and developing a working theory about the material culture of writing in the town. This talk will summarize findings from the season and hopes for the future of this promising site and its interdisciplinary team of excavators.

Between January and March 2022, astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) performed the first archaeological work in space, the Sampling Quadrangle Assemblages Research Experiment (SQuARE). The crew of the ISS defined six sample locations ("squares") around the ISS and documented them through daily photography over a 60-day period. Walsh will present an overview of the SQuARE payload and results from two of the six squares.

Please join the Archaeological Institute of America San Francisco chapter to hear UC Berkeley graduate students report on their summer research and excavation experiences at various sites across the globe. 

Urgent Archive 

A talk by Syrian-born Cambridge (UK)-based visual artist Issam Kourbaj on his response to the ongoing Syrian conflict and about the destruction of his homeland and cultural and natural heritage since March 2011.

He will also be speaking about his recent two major solo exhibitions in Cambridge, UK: Urgent Archive and You are not you and home is not home at Kettle's Yard and the Heong Gallery, respectively (March–June 2024). These concurrent and evolving exhibitions reflected on loss, memory and renewal, and included installations, moving images, sculpture, performance and works on paper.

This talk will be in person at the ARF and on Zoom (register here: https://bit.ly/ARFtalks-2425).

About the speaker:

Issam Kourbaj was born in Syria (1963) and trained at the Institute of Fine Arts in Damascus, the Repin Institute of Fine Arts and Architecture in Leningrad (now St Petersburg), and Wimbledon School of Art. He has lived in Cambridge, UK, since 1990. He has been artist-in-residence and bye-fellow, and is currently a lector in art, at Christ's College, Cambridge University. Kourbaj is one of five members of the jury for the UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture (2023–27).

His work has been widely collected and exhibited in several museums around the world: Fitzwilliam Museum, Classical Archaeology Museum and Kettle's Yard, Cambridge; the British Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; Wereldmuseum (formerly Tropenmuseum), Amsterdam; Penn Museum, Philadelphia; Brooklyn Museum, New York, among others.

Since 2011 Kourbaj's artwork has reflected the suffering of his fellow Syrians and the destruction of his cultural heritage. His Dark Water, Burning World is in the permanent collection of the Pergamon Museum and the British Museum. For the BBC's 'A History of the World in 100 Objects,' Neil MacGregor (the former director of the British Museum) chose it as the 101st object. In 2024, Kourbaj's work was displayed in concurrent solo exhibitions: Urgent Archive and You are not you and home is not home at Kettle's Yard and Heong Gallery (respectively) in Cambridge (2 March – 26 May 2024).

A presentation by Christine A. Hastorf about creating a graphic novel for children of Bolivia in three languages with John G. Swogger. 

This lecture is part of the series Women and Gender in the Phoenician Homeland and Diaspora. This program of public lectures takes place monthly on Thursdays at 9:30 AM Pacific, from October 2023 through May 2024. See the list of lectures and dates below.

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

This lecture is part of the series Women and Gender in the Phoenician Homeland and Diaspora. This program of public lectures takes place monthly on Thursdays at 9:30 AM Pacific, from October 2023 through May 2024. See the list of lectures and dates below.

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

This talk will take place in person at the ARF and on Zoom (you must have a Zoom account to attend). Register for online attendance here.
- Reception to follow -
 
Abstract: 

The Upper Paleolithic is linked with the spread of Homo sapiens throughout Europe, disappearance of Neanderthals, appearance of new technocomplexes, and climatic changes. Unraveling the association of humans with different artefacts and their environments during this time period have been key areas of interest for understanding human evolutionary history. This talk will discuss how interdisciplinary research has been leveraged to provide new insights by highlighting three different studies. The first provides the earliest evidence of Homo sapiens in central Europe at ~45,000 years ago and demonstrates early adaptability to cold temperatures. Then we will move forward to ~30,000 years ago to discuss the spread of burial practices as exemplified by an infant burial in Poland. These first two studies rely on the association of human remains with artefacts and other mammalian remains. The final study highlights how a non-destructive technique can be used to recover human DNA from a pendant, allowing us to learn about the individual who touched this pendant over 20,000 years ago. These studies will be placed in context with increased knowledge of human migration during these time periods and discuss questions that remain unanswered. 

This talk will take place in person at the ARF and on Zoom (you must have a Zoom account to attend). Register for online attendance here.

Abstract: 

Paleoethnobotanical investigations at multiple domestic structures in Arenal, Costa Rica, reveal the plant resources utilized by past peoples living in this volcanically active setting from 1500 BCE to 600 CE. Roughly 200 different genera of plants have been recovered and identified between the two sites (G-995 La Chiripa and G-164 Sitio Bolivar) from the preserved seeds, fruits, and wood charcoal including cacao, maize, beans, manioc, achiote, avocado, cashew, cherry, fig, guava, guanabana, jocote, mamey, nance, palms, ramon, sapodilla, and tobacco. These preserved plant remains represent the diverse assemblage of edible fruits, leaves, or vegetative material that the ancient inhabitants would have incorporated into their daily cuisine. The people of ancient Arenal were knowledgeable arboriculturalists who did not rely heavily on agriculture, but rather would have collected from a variety of trees and root crops for their subsistence needs. The macrobotanical results suggest that the ancient inhabitants employed mixed strategies for subsistence and may have preferred food resources that would have remained accessible during times of ecological stress.

This lecture is part of the series Women and Gender in the Phoenician Homeland and Diaspora. This program of public lectures takes place monthly on Thursdays at 9:30 AM Pacific, from October 2023 through May 2024. See the list of lectures and dates below.

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

The Nemea Center for Classical Archaeology is pleased to present an international conference in honor of the 100th anniversary of the first excavation at Nemea AND the 50th anniversary of UC Berkeley's involvement at the site: Nemea 100: From Blegen to Berkeley and Beyond! The event brings together speakers from the United States and Greece who have a history of interest and expertise in the archaeology of Nemea and its surrounding region. Presentations will highlight past, present, and future research.

About: Murujuga is the name given by its custodians to the Dampier Archipelago, in north-western Australia. The Murujuga Cultural Landscape has been nominated to the World Heritage List in 2023. This talk will focus on the collaborative research undertaken over the last decade by archaeologists and rock art specialists with the custodians of this land. This work has focused on contextualising what is thought to be a 50,000 year old artistic record of human habitation, and responses to extreme climate changes over that time, as this interior desert landscape transformed to a seascape with the sea level rise after the last Ice Age.

About the Speaker: Jo McDonald is the Director of the Canter for Rock Art Research and Management at the University of Western Australia, and has led several research projects documenting the art, excavating the living sites, finding underwater (drowned) sites and working with multidisciplinary teams to try and date the rock art.

The Nemea Center for Classical Archaeology is pleased to present an international conference in honor of the 100th anniversary of the first excavation at Nemea AND the 50th anniversary of UC Berkeley's involvement at the site: Nemea 100: From Blegen to Berkeley and Beyond! The event brings together speakers from the United States and Greece who have a history of interest and expertise in the archaeology of Nemea and its surrounding region. Presentations will highlight past, present, and future research.

This talk will take place in person at the ARF and on Zoom (you must have a Zoom account to attend). Register for online attendance here.

Abstract: 

Between the 15th and 19th centuries, at least 12.5 million Africans were abducted, enslaved, and transported to the Americas and Europe in the largest forced migration event known in human history. Although the transatlantic slave trade is well documented, archeologists and historians have struggled to identify the actual geographic origins of victims of the slave trade whose mortal remains found their final resting place in the African Diaspora. While isotopic evidence obtained from these human remains has the potential to identify individuals who were native to the African continent, only the development of African isotope landscapes (isoscapes) enables the assessments of their individual regional origins in Africa. My team recently developed a strontium isoscape for Angola, and now even for most of sub-Saharan Africa, using substantial on-the-ground sampling and a random forest modeling approach. These isoscapes allow us to re-evaluate published strontium isotope data obtained from archeological individuals in the African Diaspora, and to assess the probability of origin for individuals from large burial complexes containing human remains of formerly enslaved Africans discovered in Europe and the Atlantic. I will demonstrate how the combined use of radiogenic and stable isotope systems, as well as aDNA, has the potential to identify an enslaved individuals most likely origins and even the timing of capture and deportation. This allows us to return to them and the communities of their descendants at least some information of their regional roots and cultural heritage.

This talk will take place in person at the ARF and on Zoom (you must have a Zoom account to attend). Register for online attendance here.

Abstract: 

The purpose of this research is to trace food practices, landscape changes, and cuisine changes in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico for the last century (1919-2018) relating them to the processes of colonial racial capitalism and sovereignty. Since the mid-twentieth century, Puerto Rico went from being a mostly agricultural archipelago to an archipelago where there is barely any agriculture and that imports 85% of the food it consumes. This transformation was led by the development strategies that were initiated in 1947, under the political banner of bringing a better quality of life to the archipelago. However, there is a lack of specific knowledge of how agriculture was abandoned, and political narratives tend to blame individuals who did not want to continue farming. Most people are familiar with the result, which is the 85% importation of food, but not how these changesrelate to sociopolitical and economic decisions, broadscale inequities, and day-to-day cooking practices. Preliminary data from this dissertation illustrates how the abandonment of subsistence agriculture and development strategies such as industrialization by invitation could have been purposeful and necessary steps for establishing a secure market for U.S. food products in Puerto Rico. This is especially so since after World War II, U.S. agriculture experienced an increased growth in the production of surplus products due to Green Revolution technologies. While this was happening in the U.S. mainland, agriculture was being abandoned in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, and national identities and "traditional" dishes (cuisine), many of which are composed of imported ingredients, were becoming emblemized and institutionalized as part of "Puerto Rican culture." Thus, the central questions that will guide this research are: How do food practices and cuisine relate to the processes of colonial racial capitalism? How do food practices and cuisine relate to ideas and enactments of sovereignty? I will explore the material traces left of past food practices in archival records (censuses, importation and exportation records, and cookbooks) to understand agricultural landscape uses, food trade, and cooking practices. These food practices will be visualized in GIS maps, as well as graphs and tables. With cuisine enacted through these food practices, I will then analyze what is the role of cuisine in the perpetuation or breaking of broader political-economic systems with the concepts of colonial racial capitalism and sovereignty.

This lecture is part of the series Women and Gender in the Phoenician Homeland and Diaspora. This program of public lectures takes place monthly on Thursdays at 9:30 AM Pacific, from October 2023 through May 2024. See the list of lectures and dates below.

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

A temporary exhibit in the atrium of the Archaeological Research Facility describes the FoodStore project. The exhibit is accompanied by a lecture by Dr. Valentina Tumolo on March 13. On March 7, a reception at the ARF (4:00 pm) will celebrate the exhibit's launch. The reception on March 7 and the lecture on March 13 are both free and open to the public.

About: Storing food has always been a basic need for semi-nomadic and sedentary people, representing both a risk-management strategy and a source of social power. In archaeological contexts, the ways in which food is stored is associated with a combination of ecological, technological, and social factors. FoodStore is an ongoing project centred on the investigation of features for food storage in south-eastern Turkey and the Kurdistan region of Iraq in the late fifth, fourth, and third millennium BC, through a combination of traditional macro-archaeological methods and micro-archaeological techniques. The goal of the project is to identify how past technological knowledges interacted with different landscapes and climates, and under various social conditions, to create and preserve diverse types of storage features.

A temporary exhibit in the atrium of the Archaeological Research Facility describes the FoodStore project. The exhibit is accompanied by a lecture by Dr. Valentina Tumolo on March 13. On March 7, a reception at the ARF (4:00 pm) will celebrate the exhibit's launch. The reception on March 7 and the lecture on March 13 are both free and open to the public.

About: Storing food has always been a basic need for semi-nomadic and sedentary people, representing both a risk-management strategy and a source of social power. In archaeological contexts, the ways in which food is stored is associated with a combination of ecological, technological, and social factors. FoodStore is an ongoing project centred on the investigation of features for food storage in south-eastern Turkey and the Kurdistan region of Iraq in the late fifth, fourth, and third millennium BC, through a combination of traditional macro-archaeological methods and micro-archaeological techniques. The goal of the project is to identify how past technological knowledges interacted with different landscapes and climates, and under various social conditions, to create and preserve diverse types of storage features.

A temporary exhibit in the atrium of the Archaeological Research Facility describes the FoodStore project. The exhibit is accompanied by a lecture by Dr. Valentina Tumolo on March 13. On March 7, a reception at the ARF (4:00 pm) will celebrate the exhibit's launch. The reception on March 7 and the lecture on March 13 are both free and open to the public.

About: Storing food has always been a basic need for semi-nomadic and sedentary people, representing both a risk-management strategy and a source of social power. In archaeological contexts, the ways in which food is stored is associated with a combination of ecological, technological, and social factors. FoodStore is an ongoing project centred on the investigation of features for food storage in south-eastern Turkey and the Kurdistan region of Iraq in the late fifth, fourth, and third millennium BC, through a combination of traditional macro-archaeological methods and micro-archaeological techniques. The goal of the project is to identify how past technological knowledges interacted with different landscapes and climates, and under various social conditions, to create and preserve diverse types of storage features.