On February 5, 2024, the Fowler returned a group of objects to His Majesty, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, the 16th Asante King (Asantehene). On July 23, 2024, 20 historical treasures were returned to the Warumungu community in Tennant Creek, in the northern Territory of Australia. Join Silvia Forni, the Shirley & Ralph Shapiro Director of the Fowler Museum, and Erica P. Jones, senior curator of African arts and manager of curatorial affairs, for a conversation about the processes that enabled these returns and what museums gain when they let go of certain objects.

RSVP here

6pm Lecture
7pm Reception

Dr. Silvia Forni joined the Fowler Museum as Shirley and Ralph Shapiro Director in December 2022. At the Fowler she is leading a team of dedicated scholars and museum professionals deeply invested in celebrating underrepresented artists and art histories and curating exhibitions and programs with and for the global communities of greater Los Angeles.  Before moving to LA she served as Senior Curator of Global Africa and Deputy Vice President of the Department of Art & Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. She is also associated with the Department of Anthropology of the University of Toronto as Associate Professor. She is the author of numerous essays and book chapters. Among her recent publications is the volume Making History: Visual Art & Blackness in Canada, co-edited with Julie Crooks and Dominique Fontaine (2023), Art, Honor, and Ridicule: Fante Asafo Flags from Southern Ghana (2017), co-authored with Doran H. Ross (Awarded the R.L. Shep Ethnic Textile Book Award from the textile Society of America in 2018) and Africa in the Market. 20th Century art from the Amrad African Art Collection. (2015) edited with Christopher B. Steiner (Awarded the Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publication Award from the Art Council of the African Studies Association in 2017).  

Dr. Erica P. Jones is the Senior Curator of African Arts and Manager of Curatorial Affairs at the Fowler Museum at UCLA. She received a Ph.D. in art history, with a focus in the arts of Africa, from the University of California, Los Angeles. Since joining the Fowler Museum in 2015, she has curated many exhibitions. A selection include The House Was Too Small: Yoruba Sacred Arts from Africa and Beyond (2023, co-curator), Gosette Lubondo: Imaginary Trip (2022, co-curator), Photo Cameroon: Studio Portraiture 1970-90s (2021, co-curator), Inheritance: Recent Video Art from Africa (2019), On Display in the Walled City: The Nigerian Pavilion at the British Empire Exhibition 1924-1925 (2019), and Meleko Mokgosi: Bread, Butter, and Power (2018). Jones is a key member in the Fowler’s Mellon grant funded initiative “Collaborative Interdisciplinary Research on African Collections at the Fowler Museum.” She is currently on the board of African Arts Journal, serves as a co-chair of the steering committee for the Collaboration, Collections, and Restitution Best Practices for North American Museums Holding African Objects Working Group, and in 2024 led the Fowler Museum’s repatriation of seven looted objects to the Asante Kingdom in Ghana. Her publishing has been concentrated on colonial-era collecting, provenance, and the arts and museums of the Cameroon Grassfields. She is the author of the book accompanying the exhibition Bread, Butter, and Power. 

Archaeologies of Forced Migration:
Approaches, Case Studies, and Prospects

Cotsen Advanced Seminar, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA
October 24–26, 2024

Organized by

Aaron A. Burke, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures
Li Min, Anthropology/East Asian Languages and Cultures

The symposium will be held over three days from the evening of Oct. 24th through Oct. 26th. Attendees are encouraged, though not required, to register for the event if they would attend any part of it, in order that we can maintain a record of attendees and communicate promptly in the event of any program changes. Please use the QR code or this link to do so.

The program has been made possible with generous support from UCLA’s Dean of Humanities, the Global Antiquity initiative, the Kershaw Chair of Ancient Eastern Mediterranean Studies, and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures.

Cotsen Advanced Seminar - Forced Migration (2024-10).pdf

 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.

RSVP here

6pm Lecture
7pm Reception 

Parking Information

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.