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. 

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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.

ABSTRACT: Archaeological models of human activity in the Peruvian eastern Andes prior to c. 1000 cal BP are enormously variable, ranging from near-total absence through selective or seasonal use to extensive local development and inter-regional exchange. Much of this disagreement is founded in competing evaluations of the environmental marginality of cloud forests and other eastern Andean environments for human occupation. As direct archaeological evidence of human activity from this place and time are scarce, evaluation of models has been difficult, relying largely on theory and indirect evidence from neighboring regions. In this talk, I present the results of the CARECH project, a multi-site archaeological survey and excavation initiative which offers insights into more than 4,000 years of human adaptation to, and modification of, eastern Andean environments, from Middle Holocene (c. 5,500 cal BP) foragers through the development of sedentary agriculturalism. Based on these results, the cloud forest appears to have been highly suitable for past human groups, who may also have modified the landscape to better suit their needs. In addition, I will discuss upcoming work in the cloud forests of southern Peru, designed to assess the role of the eastern Andes in facilitating highland-lowland interactions.

BIO: Lauren Pratt is a postdoctoral scholar at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. She received her doctoral degree from the University of Michigan in August 2024, with a dissertation titled "Human Ecology of the Early Prehistory of the Eastern Andes, Peru." She employs a variety of approaches, including human-behavioral ecology and niche construction, to understand human-environment interactions in the cloud forests and adjacent environmental settings at the intersection of South America's two defining landscapes: the Andes mountains and Amazon rainforest.