Upcoming Events

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 Taraco Archaeological Project has been focusing on early settled life in the Titicaca Basin of South America. These past two field seasons 2022 and 2023 we have focused on the earliest settlement evidence at the Formative sites along the Taraco Peninsula. This season we encountered some excellent early horizons, identified by the artifacts. We also returned to developing a more productive flotation system with some results regarding yields. While present in Chiripa, the group also harvested tubers and made quinoa beer.

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: "Visibilizing" the presence and participation of elite women in the history of Maya civilization, during one of its most prosperous periods, the Classic (250 A.D. - 1000 A.D.), allows us to overcome the gender bias that for decades has conditioned the construction of narratives about its past. On this occasion we present the case of the Ladies of Uhx Te' K'uh, two foreign princesses who occupied a relevant position in the court of Palenque. As we will see, to elucidate their role in history, through the analysis of their representations, can be decisive to better understand the complex socio-political situation of this regional capital during the Classic period.

Please join the AIA San Francisco Society for the first event of our spring lecture series. We are thrilled to host Dr. John Pollini (University of Southern California) for the Anita Krause Bader Lecture. Dr. Pollini will be giving a talk titled "Christian Destruction and Desecration of Images and Temples of Classical Antiquity." To receive a link to the virtual event, please register here.

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 National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) is the template for historic preservation and facilitator of cultural resource management (CRM) archaeology in the United States. Signed into law in 1966, the NHPA acknowledges that "The preservation of heritage is in the public interest so its vital legacy of cultural…benefits will be maintained and enriched for future generations of Americans." The NHPA paved a pathway for professional archaeologists to identify and evaluate the significance of archaeological sites so government agencies can better administer these precious resources. For better or worse, this law and its progeny have led to the identification of tens of thousands of sites across the country, which has greatly expanded archaeological knowledge in the United States. While we know more about the archaeological past than ever before, the NHPA has not been applied evenly across historic properties associated with all Americans. This talk discusses steps taken to increase the identification and proper evaluation of Black American heritage sites in the United States and U.S. territories through the NHPA. Recent research of the Black Heritage Resources Task Force demonstrated that while most State Historic Preservation Offices (SHPOs) are lacking in their efforts to document Black sites, there are several states and communities that are exemplars of positive work designed to include Black communities in the evaluation of their sites and have made strides towards documenting Black heritage in their jurisdictions.

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.

Abstract:

This talk will present one facet of my research in bioarchaeology which seeks to answer major questions about social and health transformations of the human past. The agricultural transition had major impacts for humanity which brought about negative impacts on past human populations and an increase in population size. This has repercussions for much of the world's population today, who live in poverty and insanitary crowded conditions. Using an approach that assesses case studies in diverse regions, we find that patterns of health change are regionally specific and can only be understood through highly contextualised interpretation. Our application of new methods show the intricate relationship between the parent-child nexus and their stories of 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.

Historians of the Classical Greek world are united in viewing the private and the public spheres as wholly separate, whether seen from the perspective of the family or of political or economic history. The three papers presented in this workshop advance a set of arguments that are in tension with this orthodoxy, examining the profound ways in which household activities and private property both contributed to the social and economic order of the polis and had the potential to undermine it.

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: This talk presents ongoing research that centers on the design, construction, sustainable use, and experimental variables in archaeological feature visibility of a broadly used food technology, earthen ovens. Known as the horno in the US Southwest, this colonial introduction has been the focus of the work, experimenting with construction techniques and using them to cook a variety of indigenous and introduced foods. Collaboratively built hornos were touchstones for exploring how cultural and historical tradition intersects with contemporary practice via 3D clay fabrication techniques and through the creative lens of installation, land art, and social practice. A small scale Tribal School project is providing a physical connection to food sovereignty histories. Undergraduate and graduate students from across the university have worked with each other, faculty from three departments, members of the UAIC Tribal Historic Preservation Office, Tribal Schoolteachers, and faculty and staff from CSU campuses to explore how the friction between empire and indigeneity can create both anxious and productive outcomes. Our coalition also participated in hands-on experiences building and cooking, as well as the geophysical examination of archaeological features, among other learning modalities, to think about how colonial food practices shape(ed) contemporary ways of making, cooking, growing, and community building.

A collaboration between the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), the Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) of Munich and the State Museum of Egyptian Art (SMÄK)
(Event details)

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: Contrasting to traditional or historical-cultural studies, the archaeological study of sociocultural patterns of practices, under the rubric of the archaeology of everyday life, allows us to investigate the creation of identities and specific gender roles. This framework includes domestic and maintenance activities, understood as tasks carried out fundamentally by women. These practices are essentially food preparation, craftwork -mainly textile- and caring for the family and the community members. Despite their importance, the study of these dynamics and their spatiality have been neglected, mainly due to the androcentric basis of traditional research. However, this proposal offers a good example of how gender and feminist Archaeology can change and amplify the understanding of the Iron Age. In this framework, the aim of this paper is the archaeological study of the foodways of the Iberian Iron Age groups of Eastern Iberia. Through the study of three well-known urban settlements: El Puig d'Alcoi, La Serreta and El Cabeço de Mariola (Alicante, Spain), culinary practices and food preparation are analyzed in a broad chronological framework between the 5th and 1st centuries BC. The culinary pottery and workspaces are studied to discern variations of gender, temporality, identity, ideology, and power.

About the speaker: Alba Abad España is a second-year Ph.D. student at the University of Alicante (Spain) and concurrently at the University Complutense of Madrid (Spain). She specializes in Gender Archaeology focused on Iberian Culture (5th-1st centuries B.C.E.). Currently, Alba is a Fulbright grantee at the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, where she will be developing a theoretical archaeology framework to approach gender and power roles through the everyday life of these communities. 

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.

About: Historically, Fall is "Fire Weather" season in the East Bay. A century ago in September, 1923, Berkeley experienced its worst natural disaster to date when a wind-driven wildfire swept down out of the hills and incinerated in one afternoon some 600 buildings just north of the Berkeley campus, displacing thousands and leaving a ghostly hillside of smoking ruins and debris. Our two speakers will outline the story of that fire and its aftermath, particularly how the fire changed the architecture and construction of buildings in the re-constructed fire area and what evidence to understand the events of 1923 can be found today, a century later, on Berkeley's built landscape. Their presentation will include images and analysis of the fire, its aftermath, and reconstruction. Steven Finacom is a community historian and retired UC Berkeley staff member. Shelby Kendrick is a PhD. student in Architecture (History, Theory, and Society) at UC Berkeley. Both are involved in historic preservation activities in Berkeley. 

In this seminar, Professor Rubina Raja will present some of the results of the Danish-Italian excavations at the Forum of Julius Caesar in Rome. These excavations examined not only the Republican and Early Imperial phases of the forum, but also later phases, all the way to the demolition of what was then called the Alessandrino Quarter during the reign of Mussolini.

The 2023 Pritchett Lecture will be given by Professor Rubina Raja (Aarhus University). 

Unfortunately the October and November lectures in this series have been cancelled.
Please stay tuned for announcements rescheduling these talks.

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.

Abstract: My presentation comprises an exploration of Opovo Ugar-Bajbuk (in present-day Serbia) as a place that has been the focus of lives, events and projects during the 5th millennium BC and in the 20th and 21st centuries CE. The challenge in archaeology is always how to make the narratives of Now and Then connect. Some of my presentation will address this conundrum, in which the life-history of the Opovo Archaeological Project provides its anchor. How and why was the archaeological project at Opovo conceived in 1983? how did the investigation of Neolithic burned houses become its key sub-project? what events and projects after its last field season in 1989 diverted its path from the traditional life-path of an archaeological project? Archaeological projects do not die, they have afterlives that are as important as the active life of the project in the field. One such afterlife - a resurrection, in fact - is the archaeomagnetic research being carried out currently by a team from Kiel (Germany) and Panchevo (Serbia). Part of this talk is to explore how and when in the Opovo archaeological project, the prehistoric narrative - the interpretation of the data - has been written, disseminated, and integrated into other smaller and larger place histories of Neolithic Southeast Europe. The events of the project are created by people - I am just one of them - each of whom have a life-history themselves of changing interests, skills, and imaginations, all of which contribute to the knowledge that is embedded in the life-history of the Opovo Archaeological Project and its afterlives. Lest you think this talk will be overly particularistic, I believe that the details and complexities of the narratives told at this intimate scale will have as rich an affect as any microhistory of later time periods. And far richer than a narrative constructed at a broader more evolutionary scale in which Opovo figures as a tiny dot on the map of Southeast Europe.  

This lecture outlines the origins and developments of porcelain production in Japan, with a focus on its origins in the early 17th century to its full development in the 18th century.

This paper explores the use and development of the concept of the katoikountes, 'the residents', from its first attestations in royal correspondence with subject cities, through its addition to the common interstate political vocabulary, and to its 'internalization' by citizens of the Greek poleis of the second century BCE and beyond.