ABSTRACT:  For the dead, and for the wretched who lived to give testimony to the Armenian Genocide, the Jazira region of northeastern Syria was hell on earth, its arid expanse and biblical rivers bloated with bodies and bones—the victims of Ottoman deportations and massacres. But for archaeology, which Laurent Olivier has dubbed the “consummate once-upon-a-time discipline”, the Jazira has been more akin to an Eden, brimming with vestiges of the deep past. This talk explores the practice of archaeology in this necrogeography. I disclose and diagnose how, for nearly a century, archaeology has remained virtually silent on the mass graves of the Jazira. Analysis centers on the mound of Tell Fekheriye, where several teams have uncovered and disregarded skeletal remains from the 1915-1916 massacres ever since the University of Chicago launched excavations in 1940. Among the world’s first mass grave exhumations, the Chicago project produced a collection of photographs, long buried in the archive. As archaeologists ignored the dark record of modernity in northern Syria, there emerged a parallel engagement with traces that I call survivor archaeology, a vernacular practice undertaken by genocide survivors and descendants to reckon with the memory of atrocity through the excavation, collecting, memorialization, and circulation of bones.

BIO: Trained as an archaeologist, Dr. Katchadourian's research spans the fields of archaeology, social anthropology, and critical heritage studies, with a particular focus on Armenia, the South Caucasus, and neighboring regions. Her work explore problems of empire, materiality, the archaeology of modernity, Soviet socialism and its aftermath, and the politics of heritage. Her research and teaching are temporally expansive, extending from the deep past to the present, and attentive to the ways in which the materiality of the past shapes contemporary politics, economics, and ethics. She pursue these concerns using the methods of archaeology, ethnography, spatial analysis, and archival research.

The Andean Working Group presents "Beyond the Horizon: Pericentric Complexity in the Chavín Phenomenon at Atalla, Peru" by Dr. Michelle Young, Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University.

Registration is required for in-person and virtual participation.

Register at tinyurl.com/AWGYoung

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This event is co-sponsored by the UCLA Latin American Institute and the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.

The statue-stelae of Early Iron Age Daunia (north Apulia, Italy), a group of stone slabs, are each incised to represent the garb and accoutrements of a person. They detail the clothing and adornment worn by men and women in full regalia, plus, through additional figurative images drawn on the robes, show ritual practices, everyday activities, and scenes of local legend. As such, they offer an unparalleled window into the lives of a proto-historic people, providing a rich source of self-representation for what is otherwise a fairly poorly understood society. Grounded in the scholarship of post-colonial and gender archaeology, this book pays full respect to the agency of indigenous communities and the important role of women. It considers the stelae not through a Hellenic lens, but in the Italo-Adriatic context to which they belong. This is the first time an in-depth, holistic study of the Daunian stelae has been undertaken, and the first presentation of the material in English. 

RSVP here

6pm Lecture
7pm Reception 

Parking Information

Camilla Norman is an archaeologist based at the University of Sydney whose particular interest is the Early Iron Age central Mediterranean. She was for many years the Project Officer of the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens and has held post-doctoral positions in Italy (The British School in Rome) and England (The Institute of Cultural Studies, London University).  She has worked on sites throughout central and southern Italy, mainland Greece, Jordon and Australia, as an excavator, illustrator and finds specialist. 

ABSTRACT: In 2023, the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology debuted its new graduate certificate in Cultural Heritage Research, Stewardship, and Restitution as part of the Waystation Initiative, which organizes and facilitates ethical returns of international archaeological and ethnological objects to the nation or community of origin. In this presentation, Lucha Martinez de Luna, Maryan Ragheb, and Mary Anastasi share the results from their first year working with Waystation. By combining provenance and art historical research with material analysis, they were able to compile object histories for various cultural objects from ancient China to reconstruct the life history of these objects. In the future, these and other cultural heritage artifacts will be returned to Shandong University in China, accompanied by provenance information obtained through our work with the Waystation. .

BIOS: Mary Anastasi is a PhD candidate in the Classics department at UCLA. Her research interests include philosophy, rhetoric, Imperial Greek literature, and epistolography, and she regularly teaches courses in Classics and Ancient Greek. Mary completed the Waystation certificate in the spring of 2024. 

Lucha Martinez de Luna is an a PhD candidate in archaeology at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology focused on Mesoamerican and Contemporary Archaeology. She has participated in archaeological projects in the Southwestern U.S., the American West, and central and southern Mexico and curator of archaeological and historical museum collections. As the La Providencia Archaeological Project director and a visiting professor at the University of Science and Arts in Chiapas, Mexico, Lucha also leads the Chicano/a/x Murals of Colorado Project.

Maryan Ragheb is a PhD candidate in archaeology at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology who works in ancient Egypt. Her dissertation addresses people’s interactions with their material culture during social change in ancient Egypt, focusing on body ornamentation production and practices. Maryan worked on different archaeological projects in Egypt and Ethiopia. For the Waystation Certificate Program, she worked on jade neolithic objects from China.