The UCLA Waystation Initiative and the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology invite you to a Waystation Workshop at UCLA on Saturday March 9, 2024. As part of a weekend of celebratory events marking the 50th anniversary of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, this workshop will bring together Mesoamerican specialists to engage in foreword-thinking dialogue about the restitution and protection of the region’s tangible cultural heritage.

The Waystation Initiative is a groundbreaking endeavor that organizes and facilitates the voluntary return of international archaeological and ethnographic objects to the nation or community of origin. Waystation Workshops are community engagement opportunities that offer collaborative learning and training. Through workshops, specialists present research that focuses on threats to and the protection of the world’s tangible cultural heritage.

Our March 2024 workshop will consider the history and future of repatriation and restitution of tangible cultural heritage to Mexico. The regional focus of this Waystation Workshop emerged as part of an effort to assist with the voluntary return of objects from the Museum of the Cherokee People. We have invited specialists in Mexican and Central American archeology and anthropology to assist with identifying the objects and to discuss topics relating to repatriations to those regions.

The event will begin the morning of March 9 and will include 4-5 speakers presenting perspectives on cultural heritage repatriation, decolonizing collections, provenance research, working with descendant communities and governments, and related topics. The event will be hybrid, in person and via Zoom.

Email waystation@ioa.ucla.edu for more information. 

Register here

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Speakers and Topics

Christian de Brer – Director of Conservation, Fowler Museum at UCLA
Materiality, Provenance and Restoration of Ancient West Mexican Ceramics and Next Steps for Museum-based Collections

Edith Ortiz Diaz - Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Learning and Sharing: The Museum of Tuxtepec, Oaxaca

Victoria Lyall - Frederick and Jan Mayer Curator, Art of the Ancient Americas, Denver Art Museum
The Memory of Water: The Museum Space as a Bridge between Contemporary Indigenous Communities and the Latinx Diaspora

Blanca Maldonado - Centro de Estudios Arqueológicos, El Colegio de Michoacán, A.C.
Methods for Identifying the Origin of Archaeological or Anthropological Objects

Jesse Lerner - Professor of Media Studies, Pitzer College
Sandra Rozental - Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico
Film Screening: La Piedra Ausente (The Absent Stone)

Andrew Turner – Senior Research Specialist, Getty Research Institute
The Pre-Hispanic Art Provenance Initiative: Analysis and Mobilization of the Stendahl Art Galleries Records

Recent studies in comparative-historical linguistics and genetics have provided valuable insights into the origins and flourishing of the Sino-Tibetan language family, one of the largest in the world. Evidence suggests that this linguistic group emerged and thrived approximately 8000-5000 years ago in the Yellow River valley, north China. Notably, the divergence of proto-Sino Tibetan languages occurred around 5900 years ago. These significant linguistic shifts coincided with archaeological findings that point to the development of the Yangshao culture and its expansion towards the Tibetan Plateau, in both westward and southwestward directions. The Yangshao culture, renowned for its centripetal settlement layouts, large public buildings, highly developed painted pottery, and the use of amphorae for producing and consuming alcoholic beverages, fostered a culture of communal ritual feasts. These communal feasting activities played a crucial role in establishing diverse social relations and reinforcing cultural identity through the production, processing, and sharing of food and alcoholic beverages. This practice emphasized collaboration and connections among related groups during the expansion of proto Sino-Tibetan populations into new territories, occurring amidst a period of climatic fluctuations. 

Li Liu is the Sir Robert Ho Tung Professor in Chinese Archaeology Stanford University. She joined the Stanford faculty in 2010. Previously, she taught archaeology at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia for 14 years and was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Humanities in Australia. She has a BA in History (Archaeology Major) from Northwest University in China, an MA in Anthropology from Temple University in Philadelphia, and a PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University. Her research interests include the archaeology of early China (Neolithic and Bronze Age), ritual practice in ancient China, cultural interaction between China and other parts of the Old World, domestication of plants and animals in China, development of complex societies and state formation, settlement archaeology, and urbanism. 

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the UCLA Waystation Initiative, Cyrus Tang Foundation, UCLA Center for Chinese Studies, and the UCLA Richard C. Rudolph East Asian Library. 

ABSTRACT: Over the past twenty years, archaeologists have come to realize that far from being a cultural backwater, the northern lowlands of the Yucatan Peninsula were integral to the development of the ancient Maya civilization. Communities constructed humongous platform mounds around the edges of the hilly Puuc Region as early as 800 BCE, at the same time that some intrepid settlers established the first farming villages within the Puuc Region itself. These earliest Puuc agricultural communities followed similar site plans that included central platform mounds and, surprisingly, full-scale ancient Mesoamerican ballcourts. Investigations at the two early ballcourt sites of Xanab Chak and Paso del Macho over the past five years have uncovered amazing ritual offerings including a series of jade pendants and the only known Preclassic Period ceramic figurine from northern Yucatan. This talk will focus on what these very recent findings tell us about the importance of even the smallest communities in the north, and how they will necessitate even further alterations to our understanding of the origins of the ancient Maya civilization.

ABSTRACT: In recent years, the focus of Egyptological scholarship has slowly moved away from narratives focused solely on royal monuments and texts to interrogate how kings and kingship fit into broader ancient Egyptian society. My current book project seeks to better understand where, when, why, and how non-royal Egyptians in specifically the Middle Kingdom period (ca. 2030 - 1650 BCE) engaged with kingship.

In this talk, I will go over my initial motivation for working on this topic and the ways in which my thinking has evolved, shifting from focusing on binary absence vs. presence of kingship in non-royal lives to more carefully considering the ways in which kingship was engaged with by those outside of the royal court. Rather than impose strict categorizations, my approach instead highlights the variability of engagement with kingship in the non-royal sphere, including for instance encounters hinging on the durability of architecture or the experience of occasion.

BIO: Luiza Osorio G Silva is Assistant Professor of Art History, Archaeology, and Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is currently the Assistant Director of the Mastaba of Akhmerutnisut Documentation Project (MAD-P) in Giza, Egypt. Her research interests include ancient Egyptian kingship, monumentality, and the audiences and contexts for art and architecture.