Abstract: During the 19th century, archaeologists in Abydos, Egypt, uncovered hundreds of small, relatively simple graves surrounding the funerary complexes of the first kings of Egypt in the 4th millennium BCE. Ever since these burials were discovered, scholars have debated whether the individuals within these subsidiary burials were sacrificed to accompany their ruler into the afterlife, or were simply buried close to their royal tomb after dying naturally. Previous scholarship has largely focused on aspects of the burials as well as the political and social context of the time period, rather than assessing the human remains within the graves. This lecture will present evidence from the human remains themselves, which complicates our understanding of First Dynasty funerary practices, as well as our interpretations of state-sanctioned violence and power in the past.

Bio: Roselyn A. Campbell is an archaeologist, bioarchaeologist, and Egyptologist. She earned her PhD at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, and an MA in Anthropology from the University of Montana. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Biological Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside, and the Assistant Director of the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. Her research focuses primarily analyzing trauma in human remains to gain an understanding of violence as a tool of power in the past, but she also researches the history of cancers in human remains and health and Egyptian funerary archaeology

ABSTRACT: In Iron Age Celtic temperate Europe (450/400 BCE to late 1st c. BCE), opaque red glass was used in the decoration of gold, copper alloy, and iron prestige goods such as helmets, swords, fibulae, chariots, and horse equipment. Opaque red glass was difficult to produce and to work into a final product; craftspeople needed intimate knowledge of the ingredients necessary to create and color a gem-like and easily workable red glass, the correct firing temperature and furnace conditions for melting, and various techniques for application to a metal surface. In this talk, I will address the technical know-how to create opaque red glass and its many associated products discovered through the analysis of glass samples from the late Iron Age and early Roman provincial period settlement of Mont Beuvray in France and an ongoing experimental project to recreate opaque red glass.

BIO: Rachel Wood is a PhD candidate in the Archaeology IDP at UCLA. Her research focuses on the value and social networks created through the trade, production, and consumption of opaque red glass in late Iron Age and early Roman provincial western and central Europe.

ABSTRACT: Over the past twenty years, archaeologists have come to realize that far from being a cultural backwater, the northern lowlands of the Yucatan Peninsula were integral to the development of the ancient Maya civilization. Communities constructed humongous platform mounds around the edges of the hilly Puuc Region as early as 800 BCE, at the same time that some intrepid settlers established the first farming villages within the Puuc Region itself. These earliest Puuc agricultural communities followed similar site plans that included central platform mounds and, surprisingly, full-scale ancient Mesoamerican ballcourts. Investigations at the two early ballcourt sites of Xanab Chak and Paso del Macho over the past five years have uncovered amazing ritual offerings including a series of jade pendants and the only known Preclassic Period ceramic figurine from northern Yucatan. This talk will focus on what these very recent findings tell us about the importance of even the smallest communities in the north, and how they will necessitate even further alterations to our understanding of the origins of the ancient Maya civilization.

ABSTRACT: In recent years, the focus of Egyptological scholarship has slowly moved away from narratives focused solely on royal monuments and texts to interrogate how kings and kingship fit into broader ancient Egyptian society. My current book project seeks to better understand where, when, why, and how non-royal Egyptians in specifically the Middle Kingdom period (ca. 2030 - 1650 BCE) engaged with kingship.

In this talk, I will go over my initial motivation for working on this topic and the ways in which my thinking has evolved, shifting from focusing on binary absence vs. presence of kingship in non-royal lives to more carefully considering the ways in which kingship was engaged with by those outside of the royal court. Rather than impose strict categorizations, my approach instead highlights the variability of engagement with kingship in the non-royal sphere, including for instance encounters hinging on the durability of architecture or the experience of occasion.

BIO: Luiza Osorio G Silva is Assistant Professor of Art History, Archaeology, and Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is currently the Assistant Director of the Mastaba of Akhmerutnisut Documentation Project (MAD-P) in Giza, Egypt. Her research interests include ancient Egyptian kingship, monumentality, and the audiences and contexts for art and architecture.