Kristine Martirosyan-Olshansky, Postdoctoral Scholar, CIoA, UCLA
Alan Farahani, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, UNLV
September 16, 2020, 1:00pm - 2:00pm PST
Virtual Pizza Talk Series

This talk is a summary of research conducted at the archaeological site of Masis Blur, an early farming community located in the Ararat plain of Armenia and occupied continuously for nearly a millennium from ca. 6200 cal. BC – 5200 cal. BC. While much is known about how communities in west Asia adopted a farming way of life, much less is known about the Caucasus. The Masis Blur Archaeological Project explores the rhythms of everyday life at the Neolithic village in this understudied region using high resolution techniques to recover, record, and analyse the material remains of day-to-day activities. The talk highlights recent fieldwork and preliminary results from Masis Blur with specific focus on enhanced photographic techniques (photogrammetry), archaeological plant remains , animal husbandry, obsidian procurement, and a few key discoveries such as calcified basket remains, evidence of thatched roofs, and pigment processing workshops  which, to date, are singular for the region.

Kristine Martirosyan-Olshansky is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology where she is directing the Research Program for Armenian Archaeology and Ethnography. She earned her PhD in Archaeology from UCLA in 2018 and she has been directing the Masis Blur Archaeological Research Project since 2012. As an anthropological archaeologist she uses geochemical characterization of materials to study past human behavior. In particular, she looks at how early farming communities of the Southern Caucasus made use of the available natural resources and how these behaviors influenced the spread of technological innovation and social change.

Alan Farahani is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.  He is an anthropological archaeologist whose research focuses on how ancient agriculture was embedded in and influenced the social, political, and cultural practices of people in the past. His methodological expertise is paleoethnobotany, or the analysis of archaeological plant remains, as well as in the use of contemporary computational tools such as Python and R to effectively manage archaeological data. He has conducted fieldwork throughout the world, and has been working on the Masis Blur project since 2018.

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

Caroline Arbuckle MacCleod, Ph.D. Fellow, University of British Columbia
Wednesday July 22, 2020 – 1:00pm

In ancient Egypt, the wooden coffin was considered one of the fundamental elements of a burial for wealthier individuals. It was a magical vessel that protected the deceased, and ensured that the owner could be transformed into a divine being in the afterlife. Due to the importance of these objects, potent magical talismans and symbols were placed around and in the coffin, and were often included in the decoration. Magical spells and rituals were also performed throughout the burial ceremony. In this talk, a new layer of ritual and magic is considered, hidden within the invisible joints of wooden coffins. In these areas, secret spells and magical red paint were added during construction. This may suggest the presence of educated carpenter priests, trained in the rituals needed to prepare the wood, as the first step in the creation of these potent vessels for the dead.

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Please note, the talks will start at 1:00pm PT during the summer.

SPEAKER:
Rosemary A. Joyce
Professor and Chair of Anthropology
University of California, Berkeley

This talk builds on feminist scholarship criticizing a tacit distinction between household labor (as intimate, domestic, and ruled only by naturalized relations of sex and age) and extra-domestic labor to help advance understanding of gender and labor in societies of ancient Central America. Household production, the role of specific products of women's labor as standards of value and media of exchange, and the role of indigenous ontologies in which material animacy and animating spirits occupied central places in exchanges we might otherwise think of as economic will be considered.

Full abstract:

As renewed interest in inequality sparks a turn to the archaeologically documented past as a source of data for generalizing models explaining the roots of the contemporary economic reality, it is worth pausing to question how pasts that were shaped under far different social conditions can be treated as equivalent to the contemporary world of nation states and global economies. In this paper, I examine three sources of incommensurability that should be taken into account in any attempt to think from the past of economic relations to the present. The first of these examines how labor is conceived of, counted, and understood in these different situations. As feminist scholars of the contemporary economy have long noted, large areas of economic activity by women are routinely excluded in modern analyses. Such household maintenance work rests on a tacit distinction between household labor (as intimate, domestic, and ruled only by naturalized relations of sex and age) and extra-domestic labor. For the societies of ancient Central America, such a division simply did not exist. Not only did a large part of the organization of agricultural labor build on household relations; women's specialist craft production, in particular, was critical to economic relations. This leads to the second aspect of incommensurability that I consider: the identification and mobilization of standards of value and exchange. In these societies, cloth produced by women working in domestic spaces was one of the enduring standards of value, specifically important in tribute payments that established and perpetuated political hierarchies. Cloth's use in this fashion cannot be disentangled from the social relations in which it was embedded. Nor can the social relations which gave value to other key media used to measure value in economic exchanges be equated, even when the same social agents, women, have key roles in production, for example, in the cultivation of cacao, a second standard of value. By considering these two media, and the way that they relate to women's economic activities extending from domestic space to cosmopolitan marketplaces, I identify a third contradiction to conceptualizing the ancestral Central American economy in terms drawn from the current situation: the important of ideologies of material animacy and the role of animating spirits in exchanges we might otherwise think of as economic.

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

SPEAKER:
Dr. Willeke Wendrich
Professor, Dept. of Near Eastern Language and Cultures
Director, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology
UCLA

After five years of work in Ethiopia the UCLA Shire Archaeological Project has established close collaborations with four Ethiopian universities, national, regional and local offices and the population living around the site of Mai Adrasha. In December 2019 this culminated in a workshop to discuss the future of the archaeological site of Mai Adrasha. I will discuss the results of the excavations and survey in the tension field of different ideas and interests in both the past and the future.

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