Academic department of Anthropology
The 2019 field season built upon discoveries from 2017 and 2018, continuing shovel probe excavation in the vicinity of the former enslaved persons’ village to the west of the Great House. Once again, the most recent field effort was guided by historical maps digitized from documents on file at the Danish National Archives, historical photos, the known location of extant building remains in the location of the former slave village.
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.
There has been little large scale study of the biological signatures of growth, aging, and disease patterns in Medieval Italian skeletal remains from peasant communities, or how these signatures of everyday life intersect with aspects of social identity such as gender or status.
In preparation for the upcoming 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, Japan has sought to strengthen representation and scholarship about the Ainu, the Indigenous people of Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands. Part of these arrangements includes the construction of a new Ainu museum, which will draw on collections of Ainu material culture internationally.
Making My Way Down the Acequia is a hand-made magazine (zine) made by the high-school interns of the Berkeley-Abiquiú Collaborative Archaeology (BACA) project with production assistance by myself and artist Brea Weinreb. The interns brought their own knowledge about their family histories and the high desert landscape together with archaeological skills while collaborating on the 2017 season of archaeological fieldwork surveying el Pueblo de Abiquiú’s historic acequia irrigation ditches.
The 2018 Stahl Endowment provided generous funding for the investigation of archaeological materials from the West Berkeley Shell Mound (CA-ALA-307) curated in the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology (PAHMA). As one of the largest shell mounds in the San Francisco Bay Area, it was excavated in the 1950s by Robert Heizer employing a coarse-grained methodology (shovel broadcast). Our work is focusing on 33 bulk sediment samples from two Units (E-6, I-5) collected at 1 foot intervals from the surface to the bottom of the excavation.
Photograph: Archaeological fieldwork in the River Street Neighborhood, Boise, Idaho (2015)
