ABSTRACT: Religious practice on the Athenian Acropolis in the Archaic period is perhaps best known through the dedications that were buried on the summit after the site was sacked by the Persians in the early 5th century BCE. These dedications include marble statues of young maidens—called korai—as well as inscribed statue bases that record the names of dedicators and, sometimes, their motivations. In this paper, Debby Sneed presents the results of her co-authored study on one religious dedication and discusses what it means for our understanding of religious devotion and disability in Archaic Athens.

BIO: Debby is a UCLA alumna; she graduated with her PhD in Archaeology in 2018. Currently she is an assistant professor of Classics at California State University, Long Beach. She also serves as the Field Supervisor of the Athenian Agora excavations and summer program for the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Her research primarily focuses on disability in ancient Greece. She has published three articles so far on the topic, including one on disability and infanticide in ancient Greece, another on ramps as accessibility features in ancient Greek healing sanctuaries, and one entitled Ancient Greek and Roman Crip Lit. She has an article forthcoming that is co-authored with Mason Shrader, a graduate student at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology in the Ancient World, which argues for the ethics of accessibility on archaeological excavations. In today's talk, she will present an article co-authored with Erin Lawrence-Roseman, a graduate student at Berkeley, that will be published in Art Bulletin later this year, focused on disability and ancient Greek sculpture.

ABSTRACT: This presentation investigates urbanism and settlement patterns through multiple lines of remote sensing data in Northern Sudan. The site of Jebel Barkal, located 400 km from Khartoum, near the Nile, is known for its elite palaces, temples, and pyramids. The site served as the royal capital of Kush from the 8th century BCE and remained a major urban and religious center throughout the Meroitic Period. Recently a Meroitic settlement was identified, known as the “East Mound.” Since 2018 the Jebel Barkal Archaeological Project, in collaboration with the National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums of Sudan, has been excavating and surveying areas of the East Mound. This talk will present preliminary results of a new project aimed at analyzing LiDAR and thermal imagery data. The LiDAR and the thermal imagery extend beyond the East Mound into the modern dense and lush agricultural fields adjacent to the Nile. The data will allow us to more accurately map the settlement’s spatial extent and situate it within its broader landscape context. Objectives also include identifying any previously undocumented features such as architecture, activity areas, and paleochannels. This work contributes to our understanding of how major Kushite cities grow, evolve, and respond to environmental factors throughout their life histories. Lastly, this project ruminates on the impact of archaeological inquiry in Sudan, which is currently experiencing a civil war after years of political unrest, while centering Sudanese voices and local archaeologists.

BIO: Kate Rose is an anthropological archaeologist, specializing in landscape analysis and ancient urbanism in the Near East and North Africa. Her PhD dissertation at Harvard University is a comparative spatial analysis of Kushite royal cemeteries in Northern Sudan. As a researcher with the ERC DiverseNile Project at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany from 2022 to 2024, she investigated landscape changes during the Bronze Age borderspace of the Attab to Ferka region. She has also held numerous lectureships and teaching positions at Harvard University and Boston University, and is interested in the intersection of pedagogy and fieldwork. She has served in various leadership positions on projects in Sudan, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, and Spain. She is currently the Director of Programs at the Institute for Field Research, and a Fellow with the Center for Ancient Middle Eastern Landscapes at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicago.

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: Southern Peru's Urquillos Valley hosts a series of Inka sites that exist in various states of integration with homes, farms, and the Peruvian tourist economy. Local Indigenous communities' ongoing use of these Inka sites frequently puts them at odds with the Peruvian government's Ministry of Culture, which often seeks to transform locally-managed "ruins" into state-run "archaeological sites." Examining three sites within the valley—Inkaq Mallquin, Apiypanki, and Choquekasantuy—reveals that different points in this transformative process can be linked to differences in plant communities living on those sites. Contemporary plants on heritage sites are both proxies for and drivers of archaeology-associated social, economic, and physical changes to the valley's Inka sites. In this talk, I study how botanical ecologies are employed by competing groups in struggles for control over land and heritage in the Urquillos Valley, and propose that a form of ecological imperialism is involved in creating proper archaeological sites as envisioned by Peru's Ministry of Culture.

BIO: Gabriel Silva Collins is a third-year PhD student at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. He received a BA in Anthropology from Williams College, and completed his MA in Archaeology at UCLA last spring. Gabriel's mixed archaeological and ethnographic research has focused on the relationships between precolonial Peruvian archaeological sites and the people who now live in, on, and around them. His dissertation work will continue these themes while examining a group of understudied sites near Cochabamba, Bolivia.