Graduate Student

Jordan Brown, AJ White and Felicia DePeña

In 2019, Stahl Foundation funding supported my dissertation fieldwork in southwestern Queretaro, Mexico. In Queretaro, research efforts largely focused on amassing a body of research materials associated with land reform. In particular, Stahl Foundation funding supported trips to manuscript depositories which resulted in the recovery of a significant amount of digital surrogates of archival material from local and state depositories.

The Historical Archaeology Sanatorium Project focuses on tuberculosis sanatoria in California during the early twentieth century. This project investigates issues related to disability, stigma, health, identity, and archaeologies of institutions in order to understand social aspects of health and disease. The Weimar Joint Counties Sanatorium was originally a government operated tuberculosis hospital for patients who were unable to pay for treatment elsewhere.

My dissertation uses Performance Theory as a tool to examine the three major innovations to mortuary practices which take place at the beginning of the Mycenaean period: the creation of new tomb types, the use of these tombs for multiple burials, and the transition from intramural to extramural cemeteries. In particular, I use the work of performance theorists such as Schechner, Schneider, Austin, Butler, and Taylor, to explore how these developments altered the Mycenaeans’ experience of and relationship to death, as well as the wider cultural and social impacts of these innovations.

In November 2019, I conducted research at the British Museum with the support of the Stahl Endowment of the Archaeological Research Facility. As part of my dissertation work, I examined, copied, photographed, and deciphered cuneiform tablets from the first millennium BCE Mesopotamia. My dissertation focuses on Babylonian astronomy and practices of telling time by the stars on one hand and producing astronomical knowledge on the other hand.

With Stahl funding, multi-sited collaborative research in the greater Palenque region in Chiapas, Mexico, continued. This grant supported the first season of excavations in a ritual structure at Palenque by Lisa Johnson.

I harvested modern littleneck clams from Tomales Bay and developed several predictive formulae in order to assess harvesting profiles and changes in population size from fragmented clam remains represented in the archaeological record from Tomales Bay.

Excavated sporadically for over thirty years, Ōgata in Kashiwara City and Mori in Katano City are the largest-scale Kofun Period ironworking sites in Osaka Prefecture, Japan. Large numbers of forging slags have been unearthed from both sites, which alongside partially preserved hearth features, provide the bulk of evidence for ironworking. Following methods developed by French archaeometallurgists, novel analyses of these forge slags correlate different slag materials with different forging activities.

During the summer of 2019, I conducted a raw material survey to ground truth previous work that had identified various flint outcrops in the region as the sources for flint at Kharaneh IV and to collect said flint for experimental flintknapping. With a small team, we collected over 300lbs of flint and worked to reproduce the stone tool technologies while in Jordan. Both high and low quality flint was brought back to Berkeley for future experimentation with novice flintknappers. This experiment is designed to help identify skilled vs unskilled flintknappers in the archaeological record.

Between July and September of 2019, I conducted dissertation research supported by a grant from the Stahl Endowment of the Archaeological Research Facility investigating how the inhabitants of 1st-century CE Pompeii (Italy) prepared their daily meals and what factors influenced their choice of cooking techniques.