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Please join the AIA San Francisco Society to hear Dr. Vanessa Davies (Nile Valley Collective) deliver the Richard Lobban Family Endowed Lecture, "Care in Teaching and Research: Booker T. Washington's Lessons for Egyptology." To receive the Zoom link for the 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: In Yucatán, as in many regions around the world, a history exists of Indigenous land and heritage dispossession, which continue today. This presentation introduces a case in which archaeologists, in partnership with town leaders and residents, strive to counteract those tendencies. The current initiative of PACOY (the Proyecto Arqueológico Colaborativo del Oriente de Yucatán) involves research on past and present adaptations to climate change, with a focus on agriculture as practiced on commonly-held land (the town's ejido). Methods employed as part of this project include interviews with expert farmers, LiDAR and ground survey within the ejido, and environmental studies. The goal is to generate activities that promote ongoing control of the land, as well as the cultural heritage it represents.

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.

About: What type of object is a body? How do its parts relate to one another? Do our interior systems behave like an ecology? Like the parts of a machine? This talk will trace how Hippocratic Greek medical authors constructed the body as an object of inquiry and technical
intervention in the fifth century BCE and how the body became "organized" into a physiology of functional components called "organs" (the Greek word for tool) in the century that followed. Moreover, by tracing this intellectual history against the backdrop of the actual material implements from this era, it will illustrate how thinking about body parts as tools
depended on particular ancient Greek technologies, including medical devices, bellows, and pneumatic vessels.

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.

Over the past three decades, archaeology has experienced a paradigm shift with the integration of digital recording and publishing methodologies. We'll discuss whether we have remained true to the core principles of archaeological ethics in our pursuit of technological advancements. We'll unravel the journey from a digitally-focused archaeological approach to a more holistic practice. As we strategize for the upcoming 30 years, the emphasis is placed on the dual objectives of the discipline: ensuring the creation of a durable archaeological record that stands the test of time, while simultaneously harnessing the full potential of modern technology. This discussion serves as a clarion call, urging us to reflect, adapt, and innovate for a sustainable future in archaeology.

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: This paper uses legacy data to explore emerging forms of inequality and social difference on the Mediterranean island of Crete from the 7th through the 4th centuries BCE, a time of pronounced cultural change in the ancient Greek world. Through spatial and functional analysis of nearly 450 Cretan sites documented by intensive archaeological surveys, I clarify the political, economic, and social relationships that linked these rural settlements to each other and to urban centers. Although small survey sites in Greece are often interpreted as homogeneous farmsteads inhabited by free smallholders, they in fact exhibit important differences in their surface assemblages, hosted diverse activities, and comprised distinct social places in the landscape. The talk concludes with a case study of ceramic assemblages and architecture at rural settlements in the Mirabello region of East Crete. This work reveals varied forms of community organization, ranging from densely populated centers to linked systems of rural estates, as well as creative manipulation of material culture to send messages about individual and collective identity.

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.

This talk will share our experiences working with local and indigenous communities enabling them to adopt photography-based imaging including 3D and Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI). A project enabling the Passamaquoddy Tribe in Northeast Maine to document an at-risk petroglyph site will be featured. Central to this work is the creation of data that can be reused for scientific purposes by others, both now and in the future. Our open source "Digital Lab Notebook" records the process of scientific imaging, and a brief overview will be included.

Carla Schroer is co-founder and director of Cultural Heritage Imaging (CHI) a non-profit corporation that develops and implements imaging technologies for cultural, historic and artistic heritage and scientific research. Carla leads the training programs at CHI along with working on field capture projects with Reflectance Transformation Imaging and photogrammetry. She also leads CHI's software development activities.

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. 

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. 
This paper will discuss how teaching about ancient Egypt in a carceral environment proves to be highly effective in engaging incarcerated students in the study and understanding of ancient cultures, providing an educational tool to inspire and challenge their own ideas about the ancient past and the world of the Pharaohs. Patterns of reception and interpretation of textual and iconographical sources related to ancient Egyptian history, art and religion will be illustrated, based on the experience and data gained while teaching at San Quentin State Prison in California for the Mount Tamalpais College (formerly known as Prison University Project). Issues of pedagogy and strategies for learning according to principles of diversity, equity and inclusion in prison education will be discussed as well, with a focus on the central role that religion plays in prison environments and how the ancient Egyptian religion and the concept of Maat ("what is right") have been received, discussed and interpreted by the students of San Quentin State Prison.

The current Director of Research, Dr. Carole Fritz, and artist/prehistorian, Dr. Gilles Tosello, will present an illustrated lecture on the current research directions at the Chauvet/Pont d'Arc cave (Ardèche, France), where dozens of drawings and engravings dating to between approximately 36-25,000 years ago were discovered in late 1994. Both scholars have been involved in the research at this site (as well as at other significant Upper Paleolithic period cave art sites) since programmed research began there in 1998. Both are affiliated with the University of Toulouse and its Center for Research and Study of Prehistoric Art (CREAP), a Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) unit of which Carole Fritz is the team director. They have carried out pioneering documentary research and multimedia presentations on the Marsoulas cave in the French Midi-Pyrénées, as well as innovative studies on the ways in which Paleolithic images were made. It has been through new techniques to understand the image-making processes and past "artistic techniques" that they are able to make inferences about the creative processes of these anatomically modern Humans (Homo sapiens sapiens), the production of images through time, and how these help us to better understand possible linkages between individuals and groups. Gilles Tosello has been directly responsible for many of the Chauvet images that were replicated for the Visitor Site for the cave in Pont d'Arc (Ardèche, France).

This workshop presents efforts in Japan to develop food and ecoliteracy outreach programs through a full-year practical course of vegetable-garden-based education at the college level. 

Join us on Friday August 25th for a reception and presentation by artist and prehistorian/archaeologist, Dr. Gilles Tosello (Université de Toulouse, Centre de Research et Etude Art Préhistorique). Dr. Tosello will speak about his work developing replicas of the art of Chauvet and Cosquer Caves, France. 

This program of public lectures will take place monthly on Thursdays at 9:30 AM Pacific, from September 2022 through June 2023. See the list of lectures and dates below.

This program of public lectures will take place monthly on Thursdays at 9:30 AM Pacific, from September 2022 through June 2023. See the list of lectures and dates below.

This conference focuses on the role that the historical Eurasian exchange networks now commonly referred to as the Silk Road(s) played in the transformation of science, medicine, and technology. Taking a broad and multidisciplinary approach, the conference brings together specialists from diverse fields including history, archaeology, art history, anthropology, and philology to highlight a...

This conference focuses on the role that the historical Eurasian exchange networks now commonly referred to as the Silk Road(s) played in the transformation of science, medicine, and technology. Taking a broad and multidisciplinary approach, the conference brings together specialists from diverse fields including history, archaeology, art history, anthropology, and philology to highlight a...

*** 2023 Annual Tang Lecture in Silk Road Studies ***

The history of the book and the Silk Roads is a history of the exchange of ideas, materials, and technologies along a network of trade routes linking Europe and Asia. This lecture looks at the connected book histories of eastern Eurasia to reveal networks of human relationships—as well as technological and material entanglements—that knit...

This talk will take place in person at the ARF and on Zoom. Registration is required for Zoom attendees. Register here: https://bit.ly/ARFtalks-2022

In this talk, I will summarize some of the issues of what has been called "slow science" and why some of this is relevant to the practices of archaeology. This is not new in and for archaeology, but greater understandings of what the implications might be are worth discussing. In particular, I will reference this in relation to current global research on rock art especially given that such research is often intertwined with indigenous archaeologies, where the pace and goals of research are often different.

Until the second half of the 4th century Bactria and the neighboring territories had continued to enjoy relative stability and prosperity, in continuity with the Kushan empire. During the next two centuries a quick succession of loosely-knit polities (Chionites, Kidarites, Hephtalites), ultimately stemming from the "Hun" migrations, ushered in a time of disorders at home, and tribute-extracting…