Speaker: Deidre Whitmore, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology

The Digital Archaeology Lab (DAL) aims to support the technological needs of the Cotsen faculty, students and staff by providing facilities, advice, and training. This talk will provide an overview of the facilities including the equipment that is available and how to access it (both in-person and remotely), and the consulting services offered by the lab manager. The topics and dates for the first workshops and training sessions will be announced and the audience will have a chance to request additional topics. For more information about the DAL visit www.ioa.ucla.edu/labs/dal.

Speakers: Dr. James Snead, California State University, Northridge; Austin Ringelstein, National Park Service

Archaeologists working within they landscape paradigm have increasingly begun directing attention toward the subject of movement. Recent  work has underlined the centrality of "motion" to the human experience, creating a body of  theoretical and empirical literature that has wide application. This presentation will discuss new fieldwork on Yap, in the Eastern Caroline islands of Micronesia. Famous among anthropologists for "stone money" (or rai), the remarkable built environment of Yap also includes hundreds of kilometers of stone paths. Documentation of these features, including physical mapping as well as the collection of ethnographic information, is being conducted in collaboration with the Historic Preservation Department of Yap State. More than mere routes of convenience, the paths have been called "roads of social responsibility" and are fundamental organizational elements of Yapese society. Their study, supported by the Cotsen Institute, provides a distinctive case study for landscape archaeology.

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. Barbara Horejs, Director of the Institute for Oriental and European Archaeology, Austrian Academy of Sciences

The excavations of Çukuriçi Höyük at the Aegean coast of Turkey revealed intensive metallurgical activities dating to the Early Bronze Age I period in early 3rd millennium BC. Beyond a high number of metal artefacts, the complete chaîne opératoire of metal production can also be reconstructed based on raw materials, slags, crucibles, a variety of tools and half-finished products. These finds and metallurgical remains have been analysed by using various analytical methods to describe the "geochemical fingerprint" of the metals used, mainly arsenical copper. The data will be discussed in relation to the known copper ore deposits in Turkey and the Aegean in order to identify the provenance of the metals. The second focus of this paper is set on the intensity of metal production at Çukuriçi Höyük and its further socio-cultural interpretation. The evidence of around 50 metal workshops embedded within several settlement districts give clear hints for the impact of this specialized production to the local community. Further archaeological indicators like faunal remains and textile technology will be discussed in relation to the potential division of labour, specialization and off-site activities, supported by aspects of spatial analyses of Çukuriçi Höyük settlements IV and III (2900–2750 calBC). 

Fig.: Visualization of the EBA 1 settlement at Çukuriçi Höyük based on excavation results and geophysical surveys (©ERC Prehistoric Anatolia/7 reasons).