The Andean Working Group presents "Abundant Waters: An Archaeology of El Niño and the Desert Farmers of Coastal Peru" by Ari Caramanica, Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University.

Registration is required for in-person and virtual participation. Register at http://tinyurl.com/AWGCaramanica

This event is co-sponsored by the UCLA Latin American Institute and the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.

ABSTRACT:  For the dead, and for the wretched who lived to give testimony to the Armenian Genocide, the Jazira region of northeastern Syria was hell on earth, its arid expanse and biblical rivers bloated with bodies and bones—the victims of Ottoman deportations and massacres. But for archaeology, which Laurent Olivier has dubbed the “consummate once-upon-a-time discipline”, the Jazira has been more akin to an Eden, brimming with vestiges of the deep past. This talk explores the practice of archaeology in this necrogeography. I disclose and diagnose how, for nearly a century, archaeology has remained virtually silent on the mass graves of the Jazira. Analysis centers on the mound of Tell Fekheriye, where several teams have uncovered and disregarded skeletal remains from the 1915-1916 massacres ever since the University of Chicago launched excavations in 1940. Among the world’s first mass grave exhumations, the Chicago project produced a collection of photographs, long buried in the archive. As archaeologists ignored the dark record of modernity in northern Syria, there emerged a parallel engagement with traces that I call survivor archaeology, a vernacular practice undertaken by genocide survivors and descendants to reckon with the memory of atrocity through the excavation, collecting, memorialization, and circulation of bones.

BIO: Trained as an archaeologist, Dr. Katchadourian's research spans the fields of archaeology, social anthropology, and critical heritage studies, with a particular focus on Armenia, the South Caucasus, and neighboring regions. Her work explore problems of empire, materiality, the archaeology of modernity, Soviet socialism and its aftermath, and the politics of heritage. Her research and teaching are temporally expansive, extending from the deep past to the present, and attentive to the ways in which the materiality of the past shapes contemporary politics, economics, and ethics. She pursue these concerns using the methods of archaeology, ethnography, spatial analysis, and archival research.

Andean Working Group is pleased to announce Dr. Vladimir Gil Ramón's talk titled "Andean Environmental Conflicts, Risks, Disaster, and Development in the Anthropocene." Dr. Gil Ramón is a faculty member in the Department of Social Sciences and Environmental Development Master's Program at PUCP (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú). His research explores relationships between mining industries, the nation-state, and environmental risk, with publications including the 2020 book Fighting for Andean Resources. This AWG talk is an event rescheduled from its original Spring 2024 date.

If you would like to attend this event, please register at the following link: https://tinyurl.com/yc85rb6w