Speaker: Dr. René Vellanoweth, Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology, California State University, Los Angeles

In 1835, as part of broader efforts to missionize California Indians, the native people of San Nicolas Island were removed and sent to live on the mainland. This essentially marked the end of a 10,000-year history of native occupation and sealed the fate of all Nicoleño on the island except for one person who lived alone for 18 years. Known as the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island, baptized and named Juana Maria upon her death, and made famous as the young heroine, Karana, in Scott O’Dell’s (1960) classic children’s novel, “Island of the Blue Dolphins,” her story has captured the imaginations of people the world over. But who was Juana Maria? What happen to her family members on the fateful day in 1835? What did she do for 18 years alone on the island? How did she survive physically as well as psychologically? In this presentation I will attempt to answer some of these questions by placing the Lone Woman’s story within its archaeological and historical contexts. 

Speakers: Rosa Tamborrino and Paolo Piumatti, Politecnico di Torino

Our visiting scholars from the Politecnico di Torino, will outline the first steps in a new UCLA-Polito collaboration.

The first International large scale UNESCO campaign for preserving world cultural heritage was provoked by a looming catastrophe: the loss of the Nubian Temples under the Nile flood due to the High Aswan Dam. Although the monuments were rescued, the context of the cultural heritage was lost. Nubian temples were moved to higher grounds, other regions and abroad, meanwhile the Nile landscape was changing forever.

This lecture will introduce the ongoing joint research project developed by POLITO and UCLA with the aim to recreate the historical landscape before the change in the Sixties through the research of sources and the use of digital tools and digital humanities methods. The focus of the visualization project is the change to the landscape and the temples, by highlighting the transfer and the relocation, the dismantling and the re-assembly, and finally the new context of these monuments.

The speakers will introduce research themes and purposes, and will show some outcomes of a class on this subject taught to POLITO master students in the past semester.

Speaker: Dr. Alan Farahani, Postdoctoral Scholar, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology

This talk is a summary of the research conducted by Postdoctoral Scholar Alan Farahani at the UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology over the past two years. His research has been focused on the long-term social and environmental consequences of agricultural production throughout the world using the method of paleoethnobotany, which is the study of archaeological plant remains to understand past human cultures. The talk highlights recent fieldwork and preliminary results from Dhiban, Jordan, from Ifugao, the Philippines, and Iraqi Kurdistan, the combination of all of these projects investigating the effects of empire, colonialism, and urbanization on agriculture spanning over six millennia of agricultural practice.

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.