Severin Fowles
Associate Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the American Studies Department
Barnard College, Columbia University

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The European invasion of the Americas unleashed a period of heightened global exchange as technologies, religions, political structures, foodways, languages, diseases, mineral resources, labor and more began to circulate with unprecedented velocity and scale. For the colonized, many of these cultural movements happened forcibly, at the tip of a spear, but there were also moments of Indigenous appropriation and creative reinvention of European traditions. This was particularly true with respect to image production and modes of graphic representation, as Indigenous communities sought out new visual cultures to assist them in understanding and intervening in colonial worlds. In this presentation, I consider what might be called the mestizo aesthetics that arose within colonial New Mexico following the arrival of Spanish settlers in 1598. Theoretically, my focus is on the power of images as technologies of action and intercession, no less than of representation. Historically, I pay special attention to image production among the Indigenous communities referred to by the Spanish as “barbarians”—groups like the Apache and Comanche who were themselves the fast-moving, intercultural choreographers of social life at the edge of empire.

Severin Fowles is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the American Studies Department at Barnard College, Columbia University. For the past 25 years he has directed excavations and surveys in northern New Mexico, examining the history of Archaic hunter-gatherers through to the hippies of the 1960s. He is the author ofAn Archaeology of Doings: Secularism and the Study of Pueblo Religion(SAR) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Southwest Archaeology(Oxford University Press). His current research has been designed in collaboration with Picuris Pueblo and is focused on the tribe's ancestral landscapes and farming practices.

Dr. Alison Carter
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Oregon
Wednesday March 3rd, 12:00pm

The Angkor civilization was the major regional power in Southeast Asia from the 9-15th centuries CE. However, despite more than a century of archaeological research within Angkor’s capital, little is known about the lives of non-elites. This presentation discusses recent research on Angkor’s population at two scales. First, I present recent work by the Greater Angkor Project that has focused on understanding Angkor’s residential occupation through the investigation of habitation mounds within Angkor’s temple enclosures. Then, I present new collaborative research on the diachronic demographic growth of Greater Angkor, including updated population estimates, which highlight Angkor’s place as one of the world’s largest preindustrial settlements.

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Dr. Chris Rodning
Professor, Department of Anthropology, Tulane University
Wednesday February 17th, 12:00pm (PT)

During the sixteenth century AD, several Spanish conquistadors led expeditions that traversed large areas of what is now the southeastern U.S., the province of the Americas known to Iberians as La Florida, and an area of Native North America home to groups of people associated with manifestations of the Mississippian cultural tradition, and the ancestors of historic and modern Catawba, Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and other Indigenous peoples. One of the most prolonged early encounters and entanglements between Indigenous people and Iberian colonists in the northern borderlands of La Florida was centered at the Berry site, located along the eastern edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains in western North Carolina. This site represents the location of a major settlement within the Native American province and polity of Joara, and the location of the Spanish colonial outpost of Fort San Juan and its related town of Cuenca, which was founded in late 1566 but was abandoned in early 1568. Archaeological excavations at the Berry site have identified remnants of Native American occupation before the Spanish entradas led by Hernando de Soto (1539-1543) and Juan Pardo (1566-1568), the archaeological footprints of Fort San Juan and structures nearby that housed Pardo and his men, and remnants of structures and features that likely postdate the Indigenous conquest of Fort San Juan, including wood-and-earth structures and an earthen mound. This talk considers documentary evidence from the Soto and Pardo expeditions, with particular emphasis on the Pardo entradas between 1566 and 1568, as well as archaeological finds at the Berry site. My interpretive focus, and I hope the focus of some comment and conversation, will be the architectural history of the built environment at the site, and what we can learn from it about the nature and culture of "first contacts" and interactions among Indigenous peoples and Iberian colonists in the Native American South.

Register for this Cotsen Virtual Pizza Talk here! You will receive instructions on viewing the talk after registering. 

Anna Funke
Conservator, Warren Lasch Conservation Center, Clemson University
February 3rd, Wednesday 12:00pm (PT)

The Warren Lasch Conservation Center has been working on the H.L. Hunley submarine since it was raised from Charleston Harbor in 2000. Renown for being the first successful combat submarine, it was designed to break the blockade of Charleston, in the later years of the Civil  War. The archaeological work on the submarine has provided fascinating insights into the military, social and technological history of the time. Now that the excavations are largely completed, the project is primarily focused on the complex conservation process to prepare the submarine for broader public display. This talk will  give an overview of the history of the submarine itself as well as the interdisciplinary project that has been built up around it.

Register for this Cotsen Virtual Pizza Talk here! You will receive instructions on viewing the talk after registering.