Excavations at Tell Umm el-Marra (perhaps ancient Tuba) in northern Syria revealed a large Early Bronze Age elite mortuary complex raised up in the center of the community. In this complex, tombs with human remains and objects of gold, silver, and lapis lazuli were accompanied by the burials of high-prestige animals (donkey x wild ass hybrids, known as kungas).  Unique in the archaeology of third-millennium BC Syria, the Umm el-Marra necropolis allows for the reconstruction of elite funerary practices in detail and illuminates the importance of ancestor veneration, social memory, and animal agency in the development of Syria’s first urban civilization.

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6pm Lecture
7pm Reception 

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Glenn M. Schwartz is Whiting Professor of Archaeology, Department of Near Eastern Studies, Johns Hopkins University.  He is a Near Eastern archaeologist who has directed excavations in Syria and Iraq and conducts research on the emergence and early trajectory of complex societies.  Schwartz received his PhD from Yale University in 1982. 

Schwartz’s field project at Tell Umm el-Marra, western Syria, included a focus on an elite necropolis from the Early Bronze Age with well-preserved tombs and evidence of ritual and sacrificial installations.  His previous excavation project was based at Tell al-Raqa'i in northeastern Syria, investigating the character of a small village in the period of urban formation. Schwartz’s most recent fieldwork project has been based at the second-millennium BC urban Bronze Age site of Kurd Qaburstan south of Erbil in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. Among his publications are The Archaeology of Syria: From Complex Hunter-Gatherers to Urban Societies, ca. 16,000-300 BC (Cambridge University Press, 2003), coauthored with Peter Akkermans, Rural Archaeology in Early Urban Northern Mesopotamia: Excavations at Tell al-Raqa’i (Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2015), and After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies(University of Arizona Press, 2006), coedited with John Nichols.

ABSTACT: Statuary reuse was an episodic practice in ancient Egypt. Reuse of a statue could range from actions not obvious in the archaeological record, such as moving a statue to a secondary location by a different owner, to the transformation of a statue by modifying its inscriptions, reworking its features, or even the destruction of a larger statue to craft several smaller ones. However, depending on the extent to which the object was modified and its overall preservation, it remains difficult to systematically study, particularly over time and space. This presentation will focus on approaches to identifying the actions associated with statuary reuse in order to better analyze the object’s life history through the modifications it underwent. Through this, I aim to contribute to the understanding of the intent(s), context(s), and reception(s) of statuary reuse in ancient Egypt, as well as the technical strategies employed by the ancient craftspeople who altered these objects for their later uses.

BIO: Kylie is an Egyptology PhD candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her BA in anthropology from the University of Arizona and her MA in Egyptology from Indiana University Bloomington. She is currently a researcher and graphic designer for the UCLA Coffins Project, which investigates coffin reuse in ancient Egypt during the Third Intermediate Period. Her dissertation research focuses on the documentation and contextualization of ancient Egyptian statuary reuse, including documenting statues via high-resolution photography, photogrammetry, RTI (reflectance transformation imaging), and traditional art historical methods in order to analyze the statues for signs of recarving, reinscribing, and other indicators of object reuse.

The UCLA Waystation Initiative presents "Transforming from Yi 夷 to Xia 夏: A Bioanthropological Perspective on Cultural Transition" by Professor Hui Fang, Shandong University.

This is a online event. To receive the Zoom link please contact waystation@ioa.ucla.edu. 

Co-sponsored by UCLA Center for Chinese Studies and the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology

In the 14th-century, Afro-Eurasia was struck by a devastating pandemic of bubonic plague, now often called the Black Death, that killed an estimated 30-60% of some populations. Dr. DeWitte will discuss her bioarchaeological research, focusing on the skeletal remains of people who died before, during, and after the Black Death in London, England. This work aims to clarify the biosocial factors that shaped vulnerability to historical plague mortality and deepen the scope of understanding of the social and health interactions that shape epidemic disease experiences and outcomes. Analysis of demographic trends before and after the Black Death in London has revealed evidence of declines in life expectancies and, by inference, health for people before the Black Death, but improvements in health afterwards. Examination of patterns of skeletal indicators of stress reveal differences between males and females, which might reflect variation in sensitivity to stressors or differences in dietary resources in the aftermath of the Black Death. Dr. DeWitte will also highlight future directions in medieval plague bioarchaeology.

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6pm Lecture
7pm Reception 

Parking Information

Sharon DeWitte (PhD. 2006, Pennsylvania State University) is a Professor in the Institute of Behavioral Science and Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is a biological anthropologist who specializes in the reconstruction of demography and health using human skeletal remains ethically excavated and curated from archaeological sites. She is particularly interested in infectious diseases and famine conditions in the past, and focuses on determining how factors such as sex, gender, social status, health, developmental stress, nutritional status, and geographic origin affected risks of mortality during such crises. Her research primarily focuses on mortality patterns during medieval plague epidemics in Europe and Central Asia. She is also generally interested in expanding the tools available to bioarchaeologists to examine health in the past in ways that put them in dialogue with scholars studying living people.