Speaker: Dr. Alan Sullivan, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Cincinnati

Archaeological investigations of the effects of anthropogenic fire on the livelihoods of small-scale societies, particularly those of the prehispanic northern Southwest, are embryonic in scope and disciplinary impact. When burning is mentioned in the literature, the emphasis is on its effectiveness in clearing or deforesting areas for corn farming. In this presentation, I introduce an alternative model that focuses on how woodland-dwelling agricultural populations could be supported by systematic, lowintensity, understory burning that promoted the growth of ruderals -- nutritious plants such as amaranth and chenopodium -- that colonize and thrive in anthropogenic fireniches. With paleoeconomic and settlement data from the Upper Basin (northern Arizona), I propose that considerable numbers of people can be supported by firebased ruderal agriculture in areas that are environmentally hostile to corn farming. Consequently, as archaeologists shift their agro-ecological paradigms from obligate to facultative, they will come to appreciate that ruderals, whose remains dominate archaeobotanical and pollen assemblages recovered from a variety of archaeological and sedimentary contexts in the Western Anasazi region, can no longer be considered inadvertent byproducts of corn farming (“weeds”) but were actively cultivated plants. With these understandings, I suggest that the production of ruderals in anthropogenic pyro-landscapes was a sustainable and ecologically-sound practice that both increased food-supply security and insulated economically-autonomous populations from longterm climatic variability and short-term environmental unpredictability.

Speaker: Dr. Geoffrey Summers, Research Associate, University of Chicago Oriental Institute

Mauritius, a small island nation in the Western Indian Ocean, was uninhabited until the arrival of the Dutch in the 16th century. After the Dutch left it was ruled first by the French and then by the British until independence in 1968. The ethnically and culturally diverse population is descended from slaves, indentured labourers, traders and colonial planters. Archaeology and anthropology are relatively new disciplines. This talk presents an overview of potentials, prospects, and new results of archaeological research in the Key and the Star of the Indian Ocean. 

Speaker: Dr. Pierre Lemmonier, Centre National de Rechereche Scientifique

Technologie culturelle designates the strain in the anthropology of objects and techniques first developed in France in the early 1970s. This approach gives a prominent place to the physical actions of people making and doing things, to the way things are made and physically used, and to technological processes. This talk deals with contemporary methods and results in the field.

After a series of trials, errors, and dead-ends – notably the difficulty of combining Leroi-Gourhan’s methodological propositions with Marxism and structuralism – technologues, and later scholars in “material culture studies” have produced hundreds of useful and remarkable studies of the “effects” of objects and techniques on social life, and analysis of the “style-related” inscriptions in objects (in materials, form, decoration) of identity, power, gender, etc.

For decades, however, when it came to materiality, scholar had simply no idea of the kind of material item – materials, gestures, actions on matter, mechanical principles, physical characteristics, etc. – that might “say” something about a social organization, sets of cultural practices, or representations. In other words, Mauss’ program on techniques: Why and how this way of making, producing, physically using things, here and now? The question of what people do with objects, including “merely” building or reinforcing social relations through the use of artefacts, was left aside.

Recently, a series of scholars showed that some objects, their physical properties, and their material implementation are wordless expressions of fundamental aspects of a way of living and thinking. Those objects and practices are even sometimes the only means of rendering visible pillars of social order that are otherwise blurred, if not hidden. Mauss’ program is at last implemented. But those studies also deal with a very general issue in anthropology: that of understanding the specific ways in which the spheres of our social existence, that we scholars arbitrarily compartmentalize, interact.

It has now been shown how particular objects, in their very materiality and physical use, help the members of a society perceive and share the life they live collectively; how they conceive their unique world of rules and unspoken social givens, their unique system of ideas and ways of doing things, their unique material world, as well as how they conceive itsjustifications. Among other such objects, the talk will focus on Ankave mortuary drums and ceremonies.

Speaker: Dr. Mark Aldenderfer, UC Merced

From where and when did people first move into and live permanently the High Himalayas? What role did climate change have in the early peopling of the High Himalayas and in subsequent population movements? These questions are explored in three regions of Nepal: Upper Mustang, the Khumbu, and the Rasuwa valley. Archaeological, paleoclimatic, ethnographic, and historical data are combined to provide a comparative assessment of how the inhabitants of these regions coped with climate variability. Insights derived from this research have relevance to the challenges faced by these peoples today in a context of accelerated global warming.

Mark Aldenderfer is Professor of Anthropology in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts at the University of California, Merced. His research focuses the comparative analysis of high altitude cultural and biological adaptations from an archaeological perspective. He has worked on the three high elevation plateaus of the planet—Ethiopian, Andean, and Tibetan—over the course of his career and currently works in the High Himalayas of Nepal. He has edited or written more than 10 books, including Montane Foragers (1998), and has published numerous articles and book chapters in journals including Science,PNAS, Journal of Archaeological Science, Latin American Antiquity, and others. He currently serves on the Advisory Board for the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association. He is the editor ofCurrent Anthropology, is an associate editor for anthropology of Science Advances, co-edited Latin American Antiquity, and serves on a number of editorial boards.

Co-sponsored with:  Program on Central Asia, Anthropology, Geography,