Lecture

Sunday, Febuary 26, 2012- Dr. Richard Wilshusen: The American Neolithic: A Portal to New Understandings about Agricultural Revolutions, Hard Baskets, and Population Booms

Submitted by AaronVATheis
on Mon, 09/12/2011 - 14:02

Sunday, Febuary 26, 2012 2:00 PM, Tattered Cover Downtown

Dr. Richard Wilshusen
State Archaeologist and Deputy State Historic Preservation Officer at History Colorado
 

The American Neolithic: A Portal to New Understandings about Agricultural Revolutions, Hard Baskets, and Population Booms

The archaeological record of the Southwest has provided us with unparalleled insights into the biological and cultural effects of the adoption of farming. Yet we have rarely utilized our knowledge of the Southwest to inform Neolithic research in other parts of the globe, such as Europe, the Middle East, or Asia. Because the adoption of agriculture and the rise of social complexity in the Americas occur thousands of years later than elsewhere, there is a sense that the “Neolithic” in a region such as the Southwest has little to teach researchers working in earlier contexts.  I will argue that nothing could be farther from the truth and will discuss some of the surprises of the last decade of research. Come find out how soft baskets became hard, how prehistoric populations increased at higher rates than we ever thought possible, and why people chose a life way that offered less meat and more work.

Brief biography

Richard Wilshusenis the State Archaeologist and Deputy State Historic Preservation Officer at History Colorado. Dr. Wilshusen has worked as an archaeologist in the American Southwest for over 30 years and is known for his work on population change and settlement shifts in the early Pueblo period, as well as research on the dramatic changes in early Navajo communities between A.D. 1540 and 1750. He is the coeditor (with Mark Varien) of Seeking the Center Place: Archaeology and Ancient Communities in the Mesa Verde Region (2002) and coauthor of “Chaco’s Beginnings” (with Ruth Van Dyke) in The Archaeology of Chaco Canyon: An Eleventh-Century Pueblo Regional Center (2006) and “Evaluating the Emergence of Early Villages in the North American Southwest in Light of the Proposed Neolithic Demographic Transition” (with Elizabeth Perry) in The Neolithic Demographic Transition and Its Consequences (2008). He is the senior editor of The Crucible of Pueblos: the Early Pueblo Period in the Northern Southwest, which will be published by UCLA later this Spring.

 
 
Tags: 
History Colorado
Dr. Richard Wilshusen
Agriculture
Southwest
Neolithic
Colorado
Lecture
Archaeology

March 18 2012 Sinclair Bell: Fans, Fame and the Roman Circus

Submitted by AaronVATheis
on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 15:57

 

March 18 2012-2:00
 
Dr. Sinclair Bell
 
Fans, Fame and the Roman Circus

In the first century CE, the funeral for Felix, a charioteer of the Red team, made headlines in the acta diurna—so Pliny reports—when one of his fans immolated himself on his favorite’s funeral pyre. While an extreme example, fan behavior in ancient Rome is not unknown. Yet where charioteers assumed a highly-visible presence in Roman society and have been much studied, the fans whom they inspired remain largely overlooked and poorly understood. This paper draws upon a wide range of literary, artistic and archaeological evidence in reconstructing and reclaiming the interactive experience of the sport’s various kinds of followers. The evidence of material culture—including funerary monuments, game boards and smaller articles (fingerings, game tokens)—is shown to have particular value in offsetting the largely hostile view of fans that emerges from the literary record. Contemporary perspectives drawn from the sociology of sport are also brought to bear. The central aim of the paper is to demonstrate how the study of the sports fan, who sat at the fault line between staged spectacles and everyday life, can enlighten us in new ways about the centrality of the Circus to Roman culture.

Sinclair Bell is with the School of Art at Northern Illinois University, and holds his degrees from the University of Edinburgh and the University of Cologne, Oxford University, and Wake Forest University.  His areas of specialization are Etruscan and Roman Art and Archaeology, sport and spectacle in the ancient world, and materials culture studies.  His most current publication (in preparation) is “The Roman Circus: A Cultural History”, and he is the recipient of a DAI/AIA Study in Berlin Fellowship.

 

 
Tags: 
Romans
Chariots
Circus
Classics
Archaeology
Lecture
History
Archaeological Institute of America
Denver Chapter

April 1, 2011-Dr. Brian Billman: Saving the Past by Investing in the Future: Archaeological Preservation on the North Coast of Peru Through Community Action

Submitted by AaronVATheis
on Wed, 08/03/2011 - 18:33

 

April 1, 2012, 2:00
 
Dr. Brian Billman
 
Associate Professor, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
President and co-founder MOCHE, Inc
 
Saving the Past by Investing in the Future:
Archaeological Preservation on the North Coast of Peru Through Community Action
 
Peru is one of the richest archaeological regions in the world.  Despite the importance of these ancient sites and the wealth generated through tourism, the archaeological heritage of Peru is being destroyed at an unprecedented rate.  Dr. Billman will discuss how MOCHE, Inc., a nonprofit organization, is working to protect the 10 most endangered archaeological sites on the north coast of Peru within the next five years. 
 
Dr. Billman writes:  To solve the intertwined problems of looting, poverty, and lack of heritage education, we form partnerships with poor communities in Peru.  We provide communities with heritage education programs and funding for development projects, such as schools, health clinics, potable water and sewage treatment systems, roads, and parks.  In exchange for our assistance, communities agree to create and defend archaeological reserves.  We fund these community partnerships by offering archaeological tours, field schools, and volunteer programs in Peru.  Through these programs we unite communities in Peru with socially committed people in the US.  In our view, the best way to save archaeological sites is by investing in the future of communities.

 

 
Tags: 
Peru
Moche
Dr. Brian Billman
Lecture

October 23, 2011-Nancy T. de Grummond: Etruscan Human Sacrifice in Myth and Ritual

Submitted by AaronVATheis
on Tue, 08/02/2011 - 22:00

October 23, 2011, 2:00 

2011 AIA Norton Lecturer

Nancy T. de Grummond,  Florida State University at Tallahassee

Etruscan Human Sacrifice in Myth and Ritual

Scholars have been reluctant to believe that the Etruscans practiced human sacrifice.  There are many specific references in written sources and in representations of human sacrifice that have at one time or another been dismissed as not sufficient for determining if the Etruscans did in fact engage in this practice. Recent excavations in the monumental sacred area on the Pian di Civita at Tarquinia by the University of Milan (directed by M. Bonghi Jovino and G. Bagnasco Gianni) have proven once and for all that human sacrifice was indeed practiced by the Etruscans, through the discovery of a number of burials in this non-funerary context, of infants, children and adults. Some individuals were demonstrably “marginal” in society, as diseased, foreign or of lower social status. One child, an 8-year old, was decapitated and his feet placed at the base of and underneath a wall, evidently as a foundation deposit.  A stone altar, a sacred building, and a ritual deposit of symbols of secular power (an axe, a shield and a lituus trumpet) were all part of the archaeological context in which the killings took place.

 
There are many representations in Etruscan mythic art that clearly depict human sacrifice.  While the myths may show a kind of surrogate for actual killing, they nevertheless may reflect actual rituals and beliefs associated with such killing. This presentation assembles literary, archaeological and iconographical evidence to be studied anew with an open mind in order to determine what is most likely to have represented real sacrificial practice as opposed to fictional, exaggerated, symbolic, or mythological matter.   
 
Tags: 
Etruscan
Human Sacrifice
Classics
Archaeology
Lecture

November 6, 2011-Dr. M. Dores Cruz: Sites, Ancestors and Trees: Landscapes of Historical Archaeology in Southern Mozambique

Submitted by AaronVATheis
on Tue, 08/02/2011 - 22:00

November 6, 2011, 2:00

Dr. M. Dores Cruz, University of Denver

Sites, ancestors and trees: landscapes of historical archaeology in Southern Mozambique

Despite a conceptual distinction between nature and culture, anthropologists have long debated that people derive cultural meanings from natural elements. More recently, the dialectic of nature-culture became intrinsic to studies of landscapes and archaeological monuments in which nature provides a fundamental concept for understanding cultural forms.  In this paper I explore the significance of nature as integrated into local narratives of past events performed by elders in the Manjacaze district (Southern Mozambique). Natural elements, particularly trees and tree groves, are endowed with cultural and historical significance, participating in interpretations and memorialization of local ancestors, in an association between archaeological sites, rituals and narratives of events that took place within contexts of colonial expansion. This analysis draws on a multidisciplinary approach that examines narratives embedded in representations of landscapes, in which elements of nature are accorded special significance in the interpretation of the past and of archaeological sites. 

 
Tags: 
Archaeology
Mozambique
Dr. M. Dores Cruz
Lecture
Archaeological Institute of America Denver Chapter
Feedback