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.

ABSTRACT: Highland landscapes present both conceptual and practical challenges for archaeology and archaeologists, and remain both understudied and undertheorized. In this talk, I will discuss those issues and how they have informed fieldwork that I and my collaborators (Hannah Lau and Jeyhun Eminli) have been conducting in the Talış Mountains in recent years. This highland zone, which is part of the Alborz range, is a unique ecosystem at the southern limits of the Caspian Sea. I will highlight results of fieldwork from our 2024 season of SHARP (the Southeastern Highlands Archaeological Research Project) in the Yardımlı district of Azerbaijan, where we have begun to expose a surprisingly landscape of large-scale stone-built architecture dating to the late 1st millennium BCE, providing entirely new datapoints for our understanding of post-Achaemenid developments in this region.

BIO: Lara Fabian is an assistant professor of Iranian archaeology in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA whose work focuses on Iran and the Caucasus, and broader Southwest Asia, in the Iron Age and later. Her current book project considers the material imprint of empire in its afterlife through an examination of the post-Achaemenid world. Her scholarship is informed by historiographic and reception studies on the development of thought about antiquity and the question of Iran in the Russian Empire, Soviet Union, and post-Soviet Eurasia. As part of this wider research, she has co-directed collaborative Azerbaijani-American fieldwork in Azerbaijan since 2016. Before coming to UCLA, she worked on the “Beyond the Silk Road” ERC project at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg.

ABSTACT: Statuary reuse was an episodic practice in ancient Egypt. Reuse of a statue could range from actions not obvious in the archaeological record, such as moving a statue to a secondary location by a different owner, to the transformation of a statue by modifying its inscriptions, reworking its features, or even the destruction of a larger statue to craft several smaller ones. However, depending on the extent to which the object was modified and its overall preservation, it remains difficult to systematically study, particularly over time and space. This presentation will focus on approaches to identifying the actions associated with statuary reuse in order to better analyze the object’s life history through the modifications it underwent. Through this, I aim to contribute to the understanding of the intent(s), context(s), and reception(s) of statuary reuse in ancient Egypt, as well as the technical strategies employed by the ancient craftspeople who altered these objects for their later uses.

BIO: Kylie is an Egyptology PhD candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her BA in anthropology from the University of Arizona and her MA in Egyptology from Indiana University Bloomington. She is currently a researcher and graphic designer for the UCLA Coffins Project, which investigates coffin reuse in ancient Egypt during the Third Intermediate Period. Her dissertation research focuses on the documentation and contextualization of ancient Egyptian statuary reuse, including documenting statues via high-resolution photography, photogrammetry, RTI (reflectance transformation imaging), and traditional art historical methods in order to analyze the statues for signs of recarving, reinscribing, and other indicators of object reuse.

ABSTRACT: Between January and March 2022, astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) performed the first archaeological work in space, the Sampling Quadrangle Assemblages Research Experiment (SQuARE). The crew of the ISS defined six sample locations (“squares”) around the ISS and documented them through daily photography over a 60-day period. Walsh will present an overview of the SQuARE payload and results from two of the six squares.

BIO: Justin Walsh is professor of art history, archaeology, and space studies at Chapman University and Ad Astra Fellow in Space Habitats and Space Anthropology at USC. Since 2015, he has been co-PI of the International Space Station Archaeological Project (ISSAP), the first investigation of the material culture of a human habitat in space. ISSAP won awards for its work in 2023 from the Archaeological Institute of America and the American Anthropological Association. In 2024, Walsh was included in the Explorers Club 50, which recognizes “explorers changing the world and extending the meaning of exploration.”