Pizza Talk

Pizza Talk: "Towards an Archaeology of Extensive Pastoralism in the Great Artesian Basin in Australia"

Speaker: Dr. Timothy Murray, Charles La Trobe Professor of Archaeology, La Trobe University

In this talk, Dr. Murray will briefly outline the essence of a new interdisciplinary research project exploring the historical archaeology of extensive pastoralism in Australia, with a particular focus on the Western Division of New South Wales.

Pizza Talk: "Digital Buddhism: 3D Modeling and Photogrammetry in the Study of Chinese Buddhist Architecture"

Speaker: Dr. Di Luo, Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Global Asia, New York University Shanghai

Buddhist architecture in China since the 11th century has often featured miniature pagodas and pavilions in the interior. These downsized "buildings," appearing in ceiling domes and murals and sometimes functioning as altars, bookcases, and reliquaries, assumed the role of the "holy of holies" of the space.

Pizza Talk: "Rediscovering Masis Blur: A Neolithic Settlement in the Ararat Plain, Armenia"

Speaker: Kristine Martirosyan-Olshansky, Ph.D. Candidate, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA

This talk is a summary of field research conducted by Cotsen/UCLA doctoral student Kristine Martirosyan-Olshansky at Masis Blur, Armenia, over the course of three seasons from 2012-2014. Excavations at Masis Blur have unearthed Neolithic habitation layers (ca. 6200 – 5400 cal.BC) belonging to the Shulaveri-Shomutepe culture, with a rich material culture and several important new discoveries.

Pizza Talk: "An American Icon in Plastic: The Technical Analysis, Study, and Treatment of a First Edition 1959 Barbie"

Speakers: Morgan Burgess and Marci Burton, M.A. Students, Conservation of Archaeological and Ethnographic Materials, UCLA

This study focuses on a privately owned, autographed, first edition (c. 1959) BarbieTM doll made from poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC) plastic. Contrary to “sticky-leg syndrome”, where plasticizer migrates from the PVC and deposits to the surface as a tacky liquid, this doll exhibits a bloom of a fugitive, waxy, white solid on the legs from the mid-thighs to the ankles.

Pizza Talk: "The Shimmer of Bodies: Aztec Luxury in Context"

Speaker: Dr. Patrick Hajovsky, Associate Professor, Art History, Southwestern University

Taking a critical perspective, I argue that Aztec "luxury" objects worn or held on the body linked valor and value to tonalli, the heat-life energy that manifests personality and fate, and yollotl, the heart, source of blood and center of human life. The Aztecs explored the equivalences and differences between luxury materials--lapidary, gold, feather--through synesthetic metaphors that tied visual art to Nahuatl poetry.