FEaTUrES

Returning to a Great Excavation of the Past: A New Joint Project in Armenia

CONTENTS
Mundane Extremes in Tarapac Ran Boytner, Ioanna Kakoulli, Maria Cecilia Lozada, and Mauricio Uribe

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Gregory E. Areshian and Aram A. Kalantarian

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Cotsen Staff Chile Trip Preethi Thomas

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Investigating a Forgotten Port: The Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project Aaron A. Burke and Katherine S. Burke Life and Death at Domuztepe in the Sixth Millenium BC Elizabeth Carter

DEparTmENTS
Institute News
2 5 10 16 18 20 22 Student News Institute Events Faculty News Alumnus Profile Staff News New Programs Donor Journal

Reflections on Research
26 28 30 32 33 35 36 38 39 41 43 44 46 48 Christian De Brer Ernestine S. Elster Rowan Flad Kelly Fong Anthony Graesch Cecelia Klein Sarah Morris & John Papadopoulos Vanessa Muros Ellen Pearlstein Aime Plourde Monica Smith Lyssa Stapleton Thomas Wake Willeke Wendrich

Back Matter
82 86 87 90 94 95 97 Commentary Between the Lines Cotsen Publications Faculty Profiles Achievements Donor List Public Programs in Review

Student News

New Class of Archaeology Graduate Students

Compiled by Evgenia Grigorova

The Archaeology Program welcomed six new students in the fall of 2007. We look forward to following their successes and wish them well in the program. Esmeralda Agolli is a Fulbright student from Albania. She received her B.A. in history and geography from University Aleksandr Xhuvani in Elbasan, Albania. During her undergraduate studies, she spent a year as a visiting student at the University of East Anglia School of Art Studies and Museology. After her graduation she was hired as Research Assistant at the International Center for Albanian Archaeology and during the last five years she has gained considerable field experience. At UCLA she will expand her knowledge of archaeological method and theory and investigate the Late Bronze and Iron Age communities of the Balkan and Aegean regions. Her academic advisor is John Papadopoulos (Professor of Classics). Anne Austin hails from Dearborn, MI. She finished her bachelors degree through the archaeology program at Harvard University in 2006. At Harvard, Anne focused her fieldwork on a Neolithic site in Jordan. At UCLA, Anne will be working with Willeke Backdirt | 2

Wendrich (Associate Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures) and Gail Kennedy (Professor of Anthropology) to study bioarchaeology in ancient Egypt. Anne is specifically interested in using bioarchaeology to better understand the social differences in human health and nutrition. She also plans to explore public outreach in archaeology in order to find new methods to educate and disseminate academic knowledge. When shes not digging or studying, Anne spends her spare time fencing, eating sushi, and discovering hidden gems around Los Angeles. Sonali Gupta-Agarwal received her B.A. in history and M.A. in history with focus on archaeology from Hansraj College, University of Delhi, India. She also earned a law degree and practiced criminal and antiquarian law for four years. While Sonali has worked on ceramic assemblages in both India and Egypt, her primary research interest is the Greco-Roman period in Egypt. While at UCLA, she will focus on the dynamics of trade both within Egypt and across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, using pottery as an indicator of this economic interplay. She is also keen to understand socio-ethnic identifications expressed in pottery using cognitive and ethnoarchaeological approaches and to further her interest in the study of residue analysis. She will be studying under the direction of Willeke Wendrich (Associate Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures).

Anke Hein is an international student from Germany. She received her M.A. at the University of Heidelberg, majoring in classical Chinese with East Asian art history and European prehistoric archaeology as minors. Her M.A. thesis focused on excavated Chinese texts, which she approached from the philological as well as social point of view, looking at mechanics and problems of textual transmission and concepts of originality and forgery. During the year following graduation, she was a visiting student at the Archaeological Institute at Peking University and had the chance to take a closer look at material from Southwestern China, which raises questions of mechanisms of cultural contact, cultural transfer, and migration. While taking part in excavations in rural China she also gained insights into social structures in modern rural areas and the ways they might be influenced by archaeologists working in the particular region. While at UCLA, Anke will strive to further integrate these different methodological, theoretical and practical aspects of archaeological work. Her immediate research interest remains with China, especially with its border regions, which she will study under the supervision of Lothar von Falkenhausen (Professor of Art History and Associate Director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology).

News Brief
Joseph Lehner received his B.S. in anthropology and Certificate in Archaeology at the University of Wisconsin Madison. He was also a student at the American University in Cairo where he studied ancient Egyptian language and culture. For his graduate studies at UCLA, Joseph will focus on Anatolia (modern Turkey) and the Near East, where he will concentrate on the development of ancient technologies, specifically early metallurgy. Currently he is working on the metals at Kerkenes Da, an Iron-Age frontier capital in central Anatolia. His M.A. research will examine ore acquisition networks during the Anatolian Iron Age with a method using trace elements and isotopic ratios. His academic advisor is Elizabeth Carter (Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures). Holly Warner grew up in southern California, but moved to the United Kingdom to attend university. While at the University of Bristol, she studied archaeology with an emphasis in prehistoric Europe. For her undergraduate thesis, Holly studied the Late NeolithicEarly Bronze Age transition in Messenia (southwestern Greece). She has conducted fieldwork in the UK and Turkey, and more recently in California. For the two years prior to enrolling at UCLA, Holly worked at a cultural resource management (CRM) firm in Redlands, CA. While at UCLA, she will pursue several interests, including ancient ecological degradation, the politics of archaeology in Eastern Europe, and archaeological theory in the wake of postprocessualism. Evgenia Grigorova is Program Representative at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.

Trowel Award given to Ernestine S. Elster

By Helle Girey
The prestigious Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Trowel Award was presented to Dr. Ernestine S. Elster in 2007 by Director Charles Stanish and Mr. Lloyd Cotsen at a special reception held in the Fowler Museums atrium. The Trowel is the highest award given to the members of our faculty and staff. Over the years Ernestine has been a constant intellectual and collegial presence in the changing environment of the Institute. She received her Ph.D. from the Interdepartmental Archaeology Program at UCLA in 1977, specializing in Prehistoric European archaeology with the late Professor Marija Gimbutas as her chair. She was the first Director of Publications at the Institute, from 1974-1993, and has continued as a Research Associate since 1994. Her publications include the excavation reports on Achillion and Sitagroi, the latter coauthored with Professor Lord Colin Renfrew. Without taking a break, Ernestine tackled the formidable job of preparing the manuscript of Scaloria Cave, which was excavated in 1978-1979 by Gimbutas. The publications will be in collaboration with colleagues in Italy, England, and Hungary. She is an inspiration of what an archaeologist can accomplish, and an example to our field of commitment in bringing excavated work to completion, even after 30 years.

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Student News

Second Conservation Class Matriculates

Compiled by Cheryl Quinto

The UCLA/Getty Program in Archaeological and Ethnographic Conservation enrolled five new conservation graduate students as the second class of this new Masters program. We welcome them to the Cotsen Institute and look forward to sharing their successes in the program. Lauren Anne Horelick is originally from Baltimore, MD where she showed an early interest in art. She earned her B.F.A. in sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1998 and it was there that Lauren was introduced to the field of conservation. After college, Lauren worked for a company that specialized in architectural restoration, sparking her interest in the conservation of large-scale, monumental ancient sculpture. She returned to school and earned a B.A. in art conservation in 2007 at the University of Delaware. She completed internships with the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Winterthur Museum, the Hurricane Katrina project, and a nineteenth-century photograph conservation project. Upon completion of her degree in art conservation, Lauren worked as a technician in the object conservation lab at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Laurens academic interests include the conservation of ritual objects, archaeological metals, and the preventive care of ancient monumental sculptures. In particular, she is interested in the treatment of rituBackdirt | 4

al objects and new conservation philosophies that incorporate indigenous knowledge and intellectual property rights. In her spare time, Lauren enjoys building pinhole cameras and musical instruments. Jiafang Liang is from the Peoples Republic of China. She earned her B.S. degree at Northwest University majoring in conservation of historical heritage. After graduation, Jiafang worked as a conservator at the Shaanxi Archaeological Institutes Chinese-German Cooperation Metal Workshop where she participated in the documentation, repair, and conservation of a variety of metal objects. Jiafangs academic interests focus on metal object conservation, on-site conservation, and ancient craft research. Siska Genbrugge grew up in a small town near Ghent, Belgium. She attended the abbey school of Zevenkerken where she studied Latin and Greek because of her interest in ancient cultures and philosophy. After graduation from high school, Siska attended the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) where she studied art history. Her education at the KUL broadened her perspective about art and it is where she ac-

quired basic knowledge in conservation practices and techniques. During her third year of studies, Siska lived for nine months in Paris and studied at Paris IV-Sorbonne with the Erasmus exchange program. In Paris she made the first sketches of her Masters thesis in which she analyzed articles about Flemish artists in an 18th century Dictionnaire portatif des BeauxArts written by Jacques Lacombe. After graduation from KUL, Siska attended the University of Amsterdam to study restoration and conservation. As part of her studies, she interned at the Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam where she participated in the reconstruction of the mural and ceiling paintings of the gallery of honor, where the Nightwatch of Rembrandt will hang after the renovation, and the museum staircase hall. Siska is excited to begin her M.A. degree in conservation and to have the opportunity to explore and learn about American culture. Suzanne Morris is originally from Louisville, Kentucky and received her B.F.A. with a concentration in painting from Miami of Ohio University. Suzanne has been working in the field of conservation for the past four years: as an intern at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, as an assistant at the private wall paintings conservation firm of Rainer and Zebala Partners, and at Aneta Zebalas Paintings Conservation Studio. Most recently, she completed a

Institute Events
year contract as a conservation assistant in the Department of Decorative Arts and Sculpture at The J. Paul Getty Museum, working on the newly installed Fran and Ray Stark Collection. Suzanne is drawn to conservation because she believes it broadens her personal appreciation for art, allows her to continue working with artists materials, and gives the satisfaction of contributing to the preservation of our cultural heritage. Linda Lin first encountered the idea of art conservation in a novel loosely based on an art forger active during WWII. Having long had an interest in art, she was intrigued by the vivid descriptions of traditional materials and art making methods. Lindas interest led her to enroll in Studio Art Centers International (SACI) in Florence to get first-hand experience in art conservation. While at SACI, Linda worked on European paintings and decorative objects, as well as archeological objects, and restored an eighteenth century fresco cycle in a chapel damaged by the flood of 1966. After returning to the United States, Linda interned at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, where she assisted conservators managing the vast collection of ethnographic objects. Linda is a graduate of the University of California, Irvine with a degree in comparative literature. Cheryl Quinto is Program Assistant for the UCLA/Getty Program in Archaeological and Ethnographic Conservation.

Cotsen Institute Event Celebrates Peru By Shauna K.

Mecartea
To celebrate the rich culture and heritage of Peru, the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology hosted Peru: Reviving the Past & Celebrating the Present on Monday, February 26, 2007. The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, Culture XPlorers, Department of Anthropology, Latin American Center, and Prom Peru sponsored the event that attracted about 200 people from the campus and Los Angeles community. This is the first of many planned annual celebrations for different countries to involve our academic, local and global communities in archaeology and anthropology. The event exposed guests to documentaries, cultural and archaeological lectures, Peruvian textiles, music, dance and food. The first speaker, Nilda Callaaupa, Founder and Director of the Center for Traditional Textiles of Cuzco (CTTC), discussed the past, present and future of weaving in Peru while highlighting the Culture XPlorers Weavers Awards, a yearly event that honors indigenous weavers and their textiles. She also demonstrated traditional Incan textile weaving techniques. Jim Kane, Founder and President of Culture XPlorers, discussed the collaboration between CTTC and Culture XPlorers, a travel company that offers sustainable and educational adventure trips. He also showed a short documentary film that highlighted recent efforts to revive the millennia-old Peruvian textile tradition. Charles Stanish (Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Cotsen Institute) and Christopher B. Donnan (Professor of Anthropology) gave lectures discussing the great civilizations of highland Peru and Moche art masterpieces, respectively. Following the presentations, Raices Peruanas (Peruvian Roots) performed traditional dances and played live music and a reception was held in the Fowler Amphitheater with an offering of Peruvian-inspired food and drinks. Ayeda Quispe, recent CX Weavers Award winner, demonstrated intricate weaving styles and sold modern textiles at her station. The finely crafted reproduction of a 500-year-old textile worn by the Inca mummy The Ice Maiden of Arequipa was also displayed at the CTTC booth. A small exhibit of modern Peruvian objects and textiles loaned by members of the Institute was installed for attendees to learn more about Peruvian material culture from the north coast and the highlands. Backdirt | 5

Institute Events

Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Open House

By Helle Girey

The past year has seen many positive changes in the various labs at the Institute and it is a pleasure to report on the Open House on May 5, 2007. The doors again opened to curious school children from the Yellow Bus Program sponsored by Charlie Steinmetz, archaeology faculty from surrounding universities with their students, interested lay people, and Institute supporters. In the Lenart Auditorium, five 30 minute talks were given by our faculty on their ongoing research: Professor Charles Stanish (The Wonders of Ancient Peru), Professor John Papadopoulos (Three years of UCLA Excavations at the Prehistoric Burial Tumulus of Lofknd in Albania), Professor Willeke Wendrich (UCLA in Egypt: a Myriad of Stories Told by Sand), Cotsen Visiting Scholar Dr. Ceri Ashley (Archaeology in East Africa from First Humans to Modern Times), and Cotsen Institute Research Associate Dr. Ran Boytner (Extreme Archaeology in Chile: The Tarapac Valley Archaeological Project). There were a number of hands-on activities throughout the Institute for both young and adult visitors. The Childrens Corner had various projects involving Maya and Egyptian hieroglyphs, folk art from Mexico, coloring pages of old kings and nobles, and hot chocolate was served to all the young visitors (reserved for only the nobility in Central America in the past). The Ceramic Analysis Research Group created a table for visitors to try their hand at making pottery, a tactile sensation that brings us closer to the peoBackdirt | 6

ple that created masterpieces from clay so many ages ago. The Virtual Reality Laboratory gave presentations of the Basilica Maxentius, the Roman Forum, and the temple of Karnak (Egypt). It is a thrill to feel oneself walking through these old streets and buildings! Lastly, videos on archaeological sites were shown in one of the classrooms so that weary visitors could sit and rest between visits to different activity areas and laboratories. All of the research labs were also open to the public, with faculty and graduate students there to answer questions throughout the afternoon. The East Asian Laboratory showed off the work of the graduate students, including Chinese Jades from the Neolithic to Han period, a general survey of Southern Korean sites, Kazakstan archaeology, and Buddhist images from East India. The South Asian Laboratory featured student presentations from Sri Lanka, Karnataka, Bikar, and Nepal and faculty research from India. The Anatolian Laboratory presented skeletal remains from excavations at Domuztepe, southern Turkey. This Death Pit included bones with evidence of blunt force trauma, cut marks and burning, and cut marks from decapitation on cervical vertebrae. There was enough evidence to bring about a lively discussion about what took place at that spot in the sixth millennium B.C. Moving down the hallway, the Channel Islands Laboratory demonstrated the diversity of their research projects by exhibiting shell axes from Florida, shell beads from Santa Cruz Island, and var-

ious artifacts from the Pacific Northwest coast. The Moche Archive was another popular spot for many visitors, as the ceramic fine line drawings and figurines came to life from the excavators storytelling. Moche pottery specialists are not only able to identify different individuals represented on the vessels, but also different artists by their unique styles. Ancient pottery was also the focus of the Egyptian Laboratory, where it was possible to examine cross-sections of ceramics under a microscope. There were also ethnoarchaeological demonstrations, including reproductions of Eastern Desert Ware pottery and a video of basketmaking from North Africa. Lastly, the Chilean Research Laboratory presented ceramic drawings from both recent excavations and site survey in northern Chile, in addition to survey records and new field maps from the project. Moving to much earlier time periods, the European Laboratory had a display of Upper Paleolithic flint tools from Solvieux, SW France. These were neatly displayed by their type and possible use and a small table had un-provenienced stone tools from Paleolithic time onwards for people to handle. A flint knapping video by Bruce Bradley made stone tool production seem so simple! The Mediterranean Laboratory presented photographs and illustrations from Scaloria Cave, a famous Neolithic site in Italy, where UCLA and Italian archaeologists conducted excavations over 30 years ago. The results of these projects are being compiled into an edited volume and will be published by the Cotsen Institute. Three other laboratories presented visitors with some of the technical aspects of archaeological analysis and interpretation. Most visitors are fascinated by the skeletal remains of animals that lived thousands of years ago and what archaeologists can learn through their study in the Zooarchaeology Lab. In the Paleoethnobotany Lab, it was possible to examine 1000 year old maize plants and to learn how seeds are collected and identified in

the field and lab. Finally, in the Conservation Laboratory they demonstrated techniques for noninvasive examination of archaeological and ethnographic objects, displayed a copper alloy diadem from the Tarapac Valley in Chile, and showed the preparation of ceramic thin sections for analysis. The Rock Art Archive was also open so that visitors could see the collections and also the techniques used to digitally enhance and catalogue rock art. The archive displayed the results of years of research in Little Lake, California and other active projects. Lastly, the Cotsen Institute Publications Unit was open to the public so that they could browse the many new and classic titles on display. The afternoon ended with tired, but stimulated people leaving the A-level of Fowler, promising to return the following year to see what other wondrous things are being studied by the archaeologists at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. Helle Girey is Director of Public Programs at the Cotsen Institute.

Photos  Upper Left: Shauna Mecartea and Julia Sanchez supervising Maya-inspired arts and crafts in the Childrens Corner. Upper Right: Monica Smith and Liz Brite presenting an exhibit on archaeology in central Asia. Lower Left: Liz Mullane explaining a model of site stratigraphy to a school group. Middle Right: Virginia Popper and Mac Marston showing off the Paleoethnobotany Laboratory to visitors. Lower Right: Jim Sackett and his granddaughter in the European Lab.

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Institute Events

Rock Art Archive Preserves Baja California Photo Collection

By Gordon Hull
In October 1997, Harry Crosby, the noted historian, photographer and explorer of the Great Murals of Baja California, donated to the UCLA Rock Art Archive his entire set of photographs of these cave paintings. The collection, which Harry began in 1960, consists of eight binders containing a total of approximately 4500 35 mm and 120 mm slides. The project of archiving these photographs started immediately. Initially each photograph was placed in archival plastic sheets, each sheet being labeled with the original box name in which the photographs came, the archival binder number in which they are stored and the current sheet number. Because of the magnitude of the job and the fact that only volunteers and students would be available to work on the project, a workbook containing a facsimile of each archival slide sheet was established. Each slide was given an identification number (ID) providing the binder number, the sheet number and the slide number within individual sites. In addition to the individual slide ID, each workbook sheet also had a place for its process status

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and the identity of the volunteer or student who worked on the slide plus notes and comments. All 4500 slides were tracked in this way. Before any further work was done the entire slide set was examined for duplicates, resulting in the identification of 1614 unique slides. The second step was to scan each slide using a high quality scanner and then write the scanned images on CD-ROM in order to facilitate backup and eventual editing. Scanning was done by a total of five volunteers or students over several years. The third step was to edit each image in Adobe Photoshop. Student workers, who were UCLA art history or design majors with extensive knowledge of Photoshop, performed this difficult and time consuming task. Since the student workers were in demand for other archive projects, the work took more than five years to complete. Four different students worked on this task during this time. The next step consisted of capturing the edited images in a photographic database manager. The data are displayed in a thumbnail format, and with each thumbnail is the Baja California region name, assigned site name and the file name of the image. A space for a CD or DVD number is also present to locate the image. The last step included the writing of a high resolution image of each slide on a CD-ROM or DVD and then directing the database to point to this media. The end product consisted of the data base CD-ROM and either 25 CD-ROMs or 4 DVDs. This task was completed at the end of the spring quarter of 2007, almost 10 years after receiving the original slide set.

In August 2007, a copy of this data set was mailed to the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico (INAH) in Mexico City, Mexico, and a copy was hand-delivered to Harry Crosby in La Jolla, California. This unique collection of photographs provides a comprehensive record of rock art sites that are little known to the outside world. No matter what happens to these sites in the future these photographs will provide a lasting record of the variety, size and color of these intriguing paintings. Perhaps this photographic record will eventually provide scholars with a means to determine who made these works of art and why they did it. This collection also complements the work done in Baja California by Clem Meighan and that of M. Shard and V. L. Pontoni. The records of their investigations are also contained in the Rock Art Archive. Gordon Hull is a volunteer computer analyst for the Rock Art Archive at the Cotsen Institute.

Photos: Opposite page, top: Example of one of the murals in Baja California with Harry Crosby in the foreground. Photograph by Earl Stanley Gardner Opposite page, bottom: Gordon Hull and Katie Mead turning over the DVD set to Harry Crosby. Photograph by Audrey Kopp. This page: Gordon Hull displaying the contents of the DVDs to Harry Crosby. Photograph by Audrey Kopp

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Faculty News

Introducing Kathryn McDonnell

We had expected to find a pre-Roman religious structure, because there is a large polygonal wall re-used as part of the structure of the medieval church. But in fact, this summer, after cleaning the 41-meter profile of the bulldozer cut and beginning to excavate in promising areas, it looks like we have a Roman villa, probably from the Early Imperial period. We did our first field season this past year, and we plan to continue coming back for the next few years. UCLA undergraduates and graduate students will be participating this year. I look forward to the students reactions to the overwhelming hospitality we receive from the people of Torano. Its one of the joys of working in Italy. You are interested in the archaeology of the non-elite members of Roman society, especially slaves, and also the archaeology of gender. In addition to discussing why this interests you, are there special methodological challenges to this kind of work? The prevailing wisdom for a long time was that you can only recover elites from the archaeological record, which I just dont see as true. If you have a site like Pompeii, the people who lived in Pompeii at the moment of the eruption werent just the elites. In fact, Id think youd find very good evidence for non-elites because the non-elites didnt have the capacity to get out of town, and they didnt have the capacity to come back to retrieve their belongings like some people did. But investigating non-elites, such as slaves in the Roman world, presents special challenges. If you study historical American slavery, you have access to slave narratives and to the experiences of former slaves, such as the writings of Frederick Douglass, for example. You can look at Jeffersons own logbooks at Monticello to get a sense of what he was spending on slave supplies. We dont have those kinds of documentary or autobiographical sources from the Roman world. Sometimes we have slaves as characters in Roman literature, but they typically appear in comedies, like those of Plautus.

By Eric Gardner
An interview with one of the Institutes newest faculty members. Kathryn McDonnell has been Assistant Professor of Roman Material Culture at the UCLA Department of Classics since the summer of 2007. Previously she taught in the Department of Classics at Cornell University. EG: How did you rst become interested in archaeology and classical civilization? KM: Some of it goes back to getting copy of an illustrated childrens version of the Iliad and the Odyssey when I was 8. It was a neighbors hand-me-down and I loved it. So I was interested in mythology as a little kid, and living in New York City I had the advantage of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I attended high school very close to the Met, so I was able to wander the classical and Egyptian galleries on a regular basis. As an undergraduate at Williams, I took a Greek history class with Professor John Stambaugh. Under his influence, I started taking Latin and then I went to Italy to the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies for a semester in my junior year. That semester in Rome confirmed my interest in both the classical world and Italy. Even before that semester, though, I was always interested in sites and physical things, never exclusively in literature. Experiencing places like the Pantheon first hand really affected me and made me think about the interaction of individuals with their landscape. Tell us about the excavation you are co-directing in San Martino Torano di Borgorose, Italy.

This is in some ways a rescue excavation. Restoration work was being done at a church in a small town, and when the land next to it was bulldozed to let in construction equipment, the remains of structures that pre-date the church were naturally uncovered. We were able to create a collaborative agreement with the town, the church, and the Soprintendenza di Lazio, particularly Dottoressa Giovanna Alvino, to allow us to excavate. The arrangement has been very beneficial to us because we have the support of the priest, Don Mario, and of the local government. Backdirt | 10

The prevailing wisdom for a long time was that you can only recover elites from the archaeological record, which I just dont see as true.

How is the study of classical antiquity relevant today?

I really enjoy teaching about the Roman world in film, because it is really in film where we project our ideas about ourselves onto the past.
For the study of gender in the Roman world it is a little easier, because there were elite women. I am currently working on a book about Roman tombs, and one thing I have been looking at is who gets included in tombs, how do they describe themselves, how do they describe their relationships with other people? That project has led to some interesting results, at least for understanding how gender and social relationships functioned within a Roman cemetery. What Im hoping to do for slavery is to understand how it worked within the house in an urban environment. Are there areas that are clearly service areas? Generally we think yes. What happens when we look closely at what has been found within those areas? This project really grew out of my own experience living and working in Charleston, SC for two years. Its clear that in an urban environment, like Charleston or Pompeii, that the types of interactions and space we traditionally associate in our minds with the lives of the enslaved and slave owners do not function in the way they might on a rural plantation. I think that there has been a tradition in scholarship of the ancient world to imagine oneself as the elite. Certainly if you look at Cambridge in the nineteenth century, the scholars were from an elite class, and they imagined themselves as members of the elite class in the societies they studied. Why would you want to be anyone other than Tacitus? So I think one of the advantages of looking at non-elites is that most of us, either scholars or students, arent, in our own society, elites. Im still trying to sort out what aspects of the evidence available in historical archaeology are useful. What it has helped me see is that it is easy, when you work in the Roman world, to succumb to an elite viewpoint. But when I read historical archaeology, especially when I have slaves own accounts of their lives or documentary evidence, it helps me to back away from the Roman elite, to not look at everything as if I were Tacitus, but instead to try and think of myself as one of Tacitus slaves. And thats where I think that the historical archaeology helps me the most, in trying to back away from the elite perspective.

I think it provides us with an interesting way to think about our own world. I taught Caesars Civil War at same time as the 2004 elections. It was interesting to talk with my students about how Pompey and Caesar were jockeying for position over each other, and the way in which it devolves into civil war, and then to ask them to think about how the presidential candidates were positioning themselves in the media. In addition to my own love of ancient Greece and Rome, I think it offers us a perspective on our own world, a way to look at these issues in another society and think about them again. In a lot of ways, Roman views were very similar to our own, but in other ways theyre very different and alien. I really enjoy teaching about the Roman world in film, because it is really in film where we project our ideas about ourselves onto the past. In Gladiator, Marcus Aurelius mutters about a republic in reality, he couldnt have cared less about a republic! So what is that about? Why does the motif of the Roman Republic appear in the film, if it isnt historically accurate? It is about Americas own issues with itself. Are we an empire? I would say in many ways we are. Can we ever return to the kind of republic that Jefferson or Adams thought of? That is the question that the film is posing in the guise of Marcus Aurelius and Maximus. Eric Gardner is Publications Coordinator at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.

Snapshot
Jill Silton, a long-time volunteer at the Cotsen Institute, traveled to the Tibetan Autonomous Region and provinces of Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan, and Yunnan in China during the summer of 2006. While there she took a series of beautiful photographs documenting the Tibetan landscape and culture. Last year Jill undertook the task of professionally mounting and framing 44 of these photos, which now line a hallway at the Cotsen Institute for all to see. Visitors to the Institute should not miss the opportunity to check out this impressive display!

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Faculty News

New UCLA Archaeologist Explores the American Southwest

By Shauna K. Mecartea
UCLA and the Los Angeles archaeology community have an exciting new link to archaeology of the American Southwest: Greg Schachner. Joining the faculty in fall 2007 as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Greg brings his expertise to the core faculty of the Cotsen Institute after receiving his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Arizona State University last year. Moving to Los Angeles excites Greg because of longtime local connections to the Southwest through the work of archaeologists associated with UCLA and other local universities, including the late James Hill, a former Professor of Anthropology at UCLA, and the presence of Southwest-focused museums in the area, such as the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and the Southwest Museum. Theres a connection between Los Angeles and Southwest archaeology that can be re-energized, Greg said. Greg, who received his B.A. in Archaeology from the University of Virginia in 1995 and M.A. in Anthropology from ASU in 1999, had not always been interested in archaeology. I was not one of those kids who wanted to be an archaeologist from the time they were five: I was actually a Chemistry major through most of college, said Greg, noting that it was not until he took an archaeology class as an elective his sophomore year that he gained interest in the field. Late the following year Greg switched majors to anthropology: I was kind of a hairball in college; I think I scared a lot of the chemistry professors, but I fit right in in anthropology, Greg joked. Archaeology of the American Southwest immediately attracted Greg. Taking classes with Stephen Plog, a prominent Southwest archaeologist and professor at the University of Virginia, influenced his interest in the region during his undergraduate career. Grega Connecticut nativetook advantage of ASUs well known field school programs to gain field experience. I went to field school in the Southwest in 1995 and thats sort of what hooked me. I think for a lot of archaeologists thats really what gets them: its fieldwork, Greg said, noting that until he went to eastern Arizona to work on a site called Rattlesnake Point, a Pueblo IV period village (ca. A.D. 1300s), he had never been west of Atlanta, Georgia. After graduating from the University of Virginia one semester early, Greg returned to the Southwest and worked on a contract project at the Grewe site, south of Phoenix, Arizona. This Preclassic village adjacent to Casa Grande Ruins National Monument was one of the first Hohokam villages excavated by professional archaeologists. The earlier excavations were supervised by archaeologists from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in the 1930san early connection between Los Angeles and Southwest archaeology. Greg

 reg Schachner giving members of the Directors Council a special guided tour at a G recent trip to Chaco Canyon. Photo by Matt Wilhelm.

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 reg Schachner and Meghann Walker, a recent ASU graduate, working at Los Gigantes, G a post-Chaco great house in western New Mexico. Photo by Keith Kintigh

also worked at Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, Colorado, with several scholars who sparked his interest in the Pueblo I period (A.D. 750900), the period prior to the rise of Chaco Canyon when large villages in the northern Southwest became more common. Once at ASU, Greg began working on a Masters thesis using data from the Dolores Archaeological Program, which was one of the largest contract projects undertaken in the U.S. in the 1970s and early 1980s. His research focused on the origins of leadership in some of the earliest big villages in hopes of understanding how emergent leaders manipulated craft production, feasting, and ritual. Greg noted that some of the changes in ritual and architecture that occurred in these early villages foreshadowed Chacos origins. Greg also worked on several outside projects while at ASU, including stints with the National Park Service in New Mexico and various contract companies in the Phoenix area. He also worked for the Hopi tribe for two years with T. J. Ferguson, from the University of Arizona, helping to write a monograph with the Hopi on their affiliation with the Hohokam in southern Arizona. Gregs work included interviewing Hopi elders about their traditional history, accompanying elders to various museums to study artifacts from Hohokam sites, and leading trips to rock art and archaeological sites.

It was an opportunity that came up through T. J. I had an interest in working with native groups and it was a great opportunity to work on a long-term project with the Hopi, Greg remembers. For his dissertation, Greg worked on a project co-directed with his advisor, Keith Kintigh, in the El Morro Valley of western New Mexico. In the post-Chaco period (A.D. 1200s), the El Morro Valley became a demographic center in the Zuni region after being relatively unpopulated. Greg was interested in how new local communities formed in the context of contemporary migrations in the Southwest. The project included excavations at Los Gigantes, a community in the El Morro Valley where a great house and residential pueblos were compared to other post-Chaco communities, and on full coverage survey of parts of the valley. The research focused on where the inhabitants of these communities were migrating from, whether the new communities were socially diverse, and how the historic context enabled social change. Gregs dissertation, Population Circulation and the Transformation of Ancient Cibola Communities, discussed the El Morro Valley as a whole through various analyses, including studies of ceramic exchange, settlement patterns, and chronological data. Greg remains intrigued by mobility and sedentism. When discussing the idea that mobility is a prominent theme in Southwestern archaeology, Greg said: Its also a big theme for native people in the Southwest. Many of the areas that are occupied by Pueblo people today were lived in when the Spaniards showed up 400 years ago. But that sedentism, that deep sedentism that people now have is in part a function of the colonial period, when people were forced to stay in one place. Pueblo peoples traditional histories often discuss mobility and migration, and their connection to a wider landscape. At UCLA Greg has taught undergraduate courses including Southwestern Archaeology and Introduction to Archaeology and is currently planning a collaborative field project with state, federal, and private landowners, as well as native people, in the area east of Petrified Forest National Park. This research will include survey, mapping, and limited excavation and focus on the Pueblo I (A.D. 700-900) and Pueblo IV (A.D. 1275-1450) periods. During the 2008 season, he will map two large Pueblo IV period villages in the area that are ancestral to the Hopi and Zuni. Greg is excited to be part of the UCLA and Cotsen Institute community: Archaeology is organized differently at UCLA than it is almost everywhere else. I think its one of the few universities in the US at least where you have archaeologists from all of these different home disciplines getting together on a regular basis; theres a dynamism thats just not present at other places. Shauna Mecartea is Executive Editor and Media Relations Ofcer at the Cotsen Institute.

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Faculty News

Reflections of a Visiting Scholar

Interview by Eric Gardner
An Interview with Ceri Ashley, an East African Archaeologist who served as the Cotsen Visiting Scholar for the 2006-2007 academic year. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Archaeology of University College London. EG: What experiences during your stay as the Visiting Scholar at the Institute were most valuable to you? CA: My year at the Cotsen was a wonderful experience made especially so by the warm and friendly welcome I received from everyone. I particularly enjoyed being part of such a vibrant and diverse archaeological community, and the chance it gave me to see how archaeology works in a North American university. Highlights included teaching an undergraduate/graduate class, seeing some of America through conference visits and lectures, as well as enjoying LA! You were familiar with Merrick Posnanskys (Professor Emeritus of History and former Director of the UCLA Institute of Archaeology) work before you came to the Institute. How has his scholarship inuenced your own research and East African archaeology in general? Before coming to the Institute I had of course read Merricks work, and we had also met at a Society of Africanist Archaeology Conference in Norway. So when I saw this position advertised, I immediately leapt at the chance to work more closely with Merrick. Merricks work across Africa and in historical archaeology is of course well known, but for me the impact of his work in Uganda has been of enormous personal importance, and has directly influenced and directed my own work in the Great Lakes region of eastern Africa. Working on collections in the Uganda Museum, I was constantly reminded of his role as one of the early curators of the museum and the impact he had as an active field researcher when the discipline was still in its infancy in much of Africa. Furthermore, he did not restrict himself regionally or chronologically (e.g. conducting some of the first historical archaeology in the wider region), resulting in an amazing breadth of data that essentially laid the foundation stones for archaeology in Uganda. This includes the first radiocarbon date for the whole Great Lakes region. Importantly, Merricks work also represents some of the earliest attempts at regional synthesis, drawing meaningful connections between the dispersed pockets of research in the wider region. When it came to my doctoral research on the shores of Lake Victoria, time and again, I found that Merrick had got there before me, excavating the key sites, developing local chronologies, or theorizing about patterns of social organization and activity! Backdirt | 14

Having recently started working on a project in Ghana (where Merrick also spent many years), I have begun to appreciate his continental influence, and have certainly benefited from my association with Merrick and UCLA! What was it like to work with him at the Cotsen? Although Merrick and I have collaborated on a publication in the past (I helped revise his 1967 excavation report on the archaeology of Lolui Island in Lake Victoria for publication in 2005), we didnt work together on any specific projects while I was at the Cotsen. However, in a less formal sense, I benefited hugely from his encyclopedic knowledge of all things African (including some fascinating stories about the growth of the discipline and the sometimes eccentric characters involved). Time and again I returned to Merrick for help with specific information, job applications, references and research guidance. Throughout this he was always generous with his time, offering valued advice, comment and insight. Do you envision any collaboration with Professor Posnansky in the future? I am really excited by Merricks recent return to Ugandan archaeology, both in terms of new research and the active role he is playing in promoting the teaching of archaeology in Uganda, as well as the re-development of the Uganda Museum. I therefore really hope we collaborate again in the future. Or at the very least, Im sure I will once again benefit from Merricks pioneering efforts in raising the profile of archaeology! Tell us about your current research/plans for the future Ive just started a three year British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, where I did my Ph.D. The project is looking at patterns of migration activity in eastern and southern Africa in the historic/modern period. The intention is to use a range of sources (archaeology, ethnoarchaeology, oral history, and linguistics) to examine the different scales of migration, as well as the effects these different episodes might have on the material culture and spatial organization we see in the archaeological record. In particular, I am really looking forward to starting ethnoarchaeological research with modern economic migrants and refugees to see how their social patterns change in an alien and stressful environment.

Photo Captions (opposite page): Above: Cover of a 1960s heritage brochure for Uganda with an image of the Luzira Head, a Ugandan artifact that both Merrick and Ceri have discussed in their work. Below: From left, Peter Robertshaw (CSUSB), Merrick Posnansky, and Ceri Ashley, three generations of archaeologists working in Uganda. Photo taken at the 2008 meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Response by Professor Emeritus of History Merrick Posnansky

I thoroughly enjoyed having Dr. Ceri Ashley work at UCLA. For more than three months during her stay I was, however, away in Uganda but my work there owed much to my cooperation with her. I had last conducted field research in East Africabefore 1967, my last major dig being in 1964 at Lolui. Ceri brought me up to date with recent research and introduced me to contemporary currents and put me in touch with scholars who have worked there more recently. All of this was extremely valuable when I went back in October 2006. She also brought me into the 21st century, helping me with powerpoint presentations and the use of GPS. Ceri has made a definite difference to our discipline. Some recent researchers have been more interested in state formation and looking at sites on the upland grasslands of Uganda where earthwork sites are located. Ceri has refocused attention on the coastal lands backing Lake Victoria, where she has made significant discoveries relating to the beginning of agricultural societies and the interface between the Late Stone Age foraging populations and the early farming communities. I was particularly impressed by her skill and sensitivity in putting the very important terra-cotta head from Luzira, that has in some ways become the most famous emblem of Ugandas later archaeology, into both an aesthetic and social perspective. When we had last looked at the head in the 1960s it was in relation to a few other figurines, we tried to bring in the later religious history of Buganda, the area where the Luzira Head was found. Ceri successfully placed the head chronologically and culturally into the wider environmental and chronological context of her own work around Lake Victoria. It was very exciting to have Ceri at UCLA. She is a part of new generation of Africanist archaeologists who are in tune with theoretical arguments that have developed both in Europe and the United States in the last 10 years. In many ways I thought I had retired. Ceris new insights and infectious enthusiasm have brought me at least out of archaeological hibernation. She was always willing to share her expertise with regional Africanists as well as students. In the past few months I have had many letters from interested students who have heard about Ceri, who have been turned on by her teaching, and I personally hope that it will not be too long before UCLA can again teach about Africa and the wonderful discoveries in the search for early humanity, the prolific rock art, and the intriguing research on the biogenetic ancestry of the worlds earliest Homo sapiens, as well as early farming and metal-using societies around Lake Victoria. Ceris plans for the future reflect her stay at UCLA, where there is an amazing sense of cooperation in African scholarship working in many disciplines. Backdirt | 15

Alumni News

Q & A with a Distinguished Alumnus:

Interview with Robert Preucel by Shauna Mecartea
Robert Preucel received his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978, his M.A. in Social Science from the University of Chicago in 1979, a second M.A. in Archaeology in 1985 and his Ph.D. in Archaeology in 1988 from the Institute of Archaeology at UCLA. Currently, he is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, Gregory Annenberg Weingarten Curator of North America at the Penn Museum, and, most recently, Director of the Center for Native American Studies at Penn. Bob has had a long-standing fascination with archaeology and epistemology that is to say, he is intrigued with how we know what we think we know about the past (and the present). This interest underlies his new book, Archaeological Semiotics (Blackwell, 2006). Some of the questions he poses are the following: What are the relationships of semiotics to different varieties of archaeology? Is the linguistic model an appropriate model for the study of non-linguistic objects (e.g. sites, landscapes, monuments, artifacts)? Is it possible to construct a comprehensive or universal theory of material culture meanings? He concludes with a call for a pragmatic archaeology focusing on materiality in order to reinvigorate anthropological practice and to contribute to semiotic studies more generally. BD: How and why did you become interested in North American archaeology? RP: I became interested in North American archaeology as a high school student. I volunteered in the excavation of George Washingtons officers huts at Valley Forge, Penn., and then took a summer fieldwork class with John L. Cotter at Penn. We excavated the Walnut Street Jail, which was a famous colonial period debtors prison. Most of the students were historical archaeologists. I, however, was particularly fascinated by PaleoIndians and used to quiz Cotter about his early work at the Blackwater Draw site where Clovis materials were first found Backdirt | 16

in stratigraphic context. I subsequently matriculated at Penn where I majored in Anthropology. My advisor, John Witthoft, was a remarkable man, who never received his Ph.D. but who, nonetheless, was the most knowledgeable person about Native American peoples I have ever met. What attracted you to the Institute of Archaeologys graduate program? I was attracted to the Archaeology Program for two main reasons. First, I wanted to study with James N. Hill, then the director of the program. At the time, I was finishing up a Masters at Chicago and taking courses in Egyptology at the Oriental Institute. I was aware of the New Archaeology and wanted to learn more about it from one of its most famous practitioners. Second, I was interested in the program because of its interdisciplinary nature. It allowed me to continue my studies of Egyptology and Near Eastern archaeology even as I began to shift my focus to Southwestern archaeology. So I took classes in Middle Egyptian, Late Egyptian, and Coptic with John Callender and worked as a teaching assistant for Elizabeth Carter. This background has been very valuable and I have served on many dissertation committees at Harvard University and Penn on both Old and New World topics. Describe some outstanding memories of your graduate school experience whether it be eld or coursework. I had a wonderful time as a UCLA graduate student and I still keep in contact with many of my fellow graduates, including Mike Walsh, Nick Trierweiler, Christine Hastorf, Cathy Costin, Monica Smith, James Snead, Glenn Russell, Genevieve Head and more. I recall Ilene Swartz (graduate advisor from 1973 to 1991), who steered me through the Archaeology Program, and the wonderful members of the Friends of Archaeology, who awarded me research grants. I well remember the intellectual excitement surrounding the early days of the New Archaeology. There was a sense that archaeology, scientifically approached, had the potential to contribute to some of the great questions of anthropology. For example, the goals of Jim Hills Pajarito Archaeological Research Project (PARP) were nothing less than to describe and explain the systematic stages of human responses to stress. While these goals have since proved to be overly optimistic and the strict allegiance to positivism somewhat limiting, I am still drawn to the elegance of the idea of a unified science. Perhaps this explains my interest in semiotics.

Finally, I also have Jim to thank for introducing me to my wife, Leslie Atik, an undergraduate Spanish major who participated in the PARP project. What was the topic and title of your dissertation? My dissertation was entitled Seasonal Circulation and Dual Residence: A Case Study from the Pajarito Plateau, New Mexico. This project was a direct spin off of Jim Hills project since I used PARP survey data combined with my own excavation data. My goal was to investigate the antiquity and social significance of the practice of living at the lands, so characteristic of the Pueblo peoples in the historic period (and, indeed, subsistence agriculturalists worldwide). I found that as home villages grew in size, but became fewer in number due to competitive exclusion from the Coalition to Classic periods, the distances that people traveled to their fields increased and this, in turn, required the building of new field houses and farming communities. Often, these farming communities became new villages in their own right, like Moenkopi at Hopi. So this practice of dual residence was an integral factor in understanding settlement evolution. How do you think your path was shaped by your experiences at UCLA? My career path owes to lessons learned from many different people at UCLA. Let me mention just one: I learned from Jim and Tim Earle the importance of publishing early in ones career. Publications are our intellectual engagement with our field and it is these that are evaluated as we apply for jobs and promotions. My first publication was a version of my Masters thesis and it appeared in The Kiva, a Southwestern journal. Later, Tim and I coauthored an article entitled Processual Archaeology and the Radical Critique for Current Anthropology. I am convinced that these publications aided me in landing my Carbondale post-doc and my subsequent Harvard job. For this reason, I encourage all my graduate students to publish articles and book chapters even if this slows down their time to degree. What are your current projects? I am currently collaborating with the Pueblo of Cochiti, New Mexico, on a study of Kotyiti Pueblo, an ancestral Cochiti village occupied during the Pueblo Revolt period. Some of the questions we have addressed include the following: What does it mean to do archaeology with a Pueblo Indian community? How is the contemporary identity of Cochiti Pueblo linked to their ancestral community of Kotyiti? What are the appropriate uses for the information we are producing? I have trained eight Cochiti interns, ranging in age from high school to college. I have conducted oral history with three Cochiti elders. I have given numerous presentations to the Tribal Council, the Summer Language Program, and the Community Center.

In the past three years, I have broadened my work and focused on defining and interpreting the Revolt period settlement pattern. With T. J. Ferguson and Matt Liebmann, I have documented the Revolt period mesa villages and analyzed their formal variability using space syntax analysis. Our results suggest that there was a strong ideological component to the Revolt, which was made material in the Keres and Jemez districts of the Northern Rio Grande by the construction of dual plaza pueblos. Interestingly, we discovered that this architectural expression does not characterize the Hopi or Zuni districts where different settlement layouts pertained. Our results therefore highlight important variability in how Pueblo people used architecture to mediate their newfound freedom. Describe any future objectives. As the new Director of the Center for Native American Studies, I am committed to increasing the visibility of Native Americans on campus, educating the Penn community about topical concerns in Indian Country, and enhancing Penns efforts at Native American recruitment and retention. Penn currently has no Native faculty and the smallest number of self-identified Native students of any of our sister Ivy League schools. We are, however, building some positive momentum. Last year, our students hosted for the first time the All Ivy Native undergraduate conference. Some of our speakers included Suzan Harjo, Rosita Worl, Bunky Echo-Hawk, Joe Garcia, Beverly Singer, Mateo Romero, and Manu Meyer. I am also chair of the Museums Repatriation Committee, which is tasked with the responsibility of implementing the Native American Graves Repatriation and Protection Act (NAGPRA). One of my most remarkable repatriation-related experiences has been attending Tlingit potlatches. Over the last five years, at the invitation of the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, I, and my Museum colleagues, have hand carried clan hats to Southeast Alaska for use in Tlingit memorial potlatches. Our museum has a special connection with the Tlingit people because one of our early curators was Louis Shotridge, a Kaagwaantaan man from Klukwan. We have just received an IMLS Museums for America grant and are in the process of digitizing Shotridges letters, field notes, photos, and objects in order to make them accessible to a broader public. Id like to thank Shauna Mecartea and the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology for this opportunity to reminisce about my career and especially about my time at UCLA.

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Institute News

Staff Happenings at the Cotsen Institute

By Elizabeth Klarich
The Archaeology Program students are lucky to have Evgenia Grigorova as their new Program Representative and Cotsen Institute Fund Manager. Evgenia has been at UCLA for several years and began her current position in late March 2007. After a trip home to visit her family in the Ukraine, Evgenia spent the rest of the summer working with the new Archaeology Program chair, Monica L. Smith, to streamline the workings of the office. Evgenia is an advocate for the graduate students, helping in any way imaginable to make their lives easier and the UCLA bureaucracy seem a bit less daunting. Ran Boytner is the Director of International Research and spends his time developing, coordinating, and organizing the UCLA Archaeology Field Programs around the globe. Originally from Israel, Ran completed his Ph.D. in Anthropology at UCLA in 1998 and has been associated with the Cotsen Institute ever since. He started his present position in May 2007 and has worked with a number of project directors to develop a dozen field programs to be administered through UCLA. His enthusiasm for teaching is contagious and Ran is famous for getting students excited about archaeology, including through his own field project in Tarapac, Chile. Developing these programs has been quite an endeavor and Ran thanks the Cotsen Institute faculty and staff for their support and encouragement. Laura Lliguin is another new addition to the staff, beginning her position as Administrative Assistant in early 2007. She is originally from Los Angeles, completed her undergraduate degree at UC Riverside, and is managing to gracefully juggle coursework for her teaching credential with her work responsibilities. Cheryl Quinto, Program Assistant for the UCLA/Getty Conservation Program, is originally from the Chicago area and started her position in spring 2007. She really enjoys working in the conservation programit appeals to her At the Cotsen Institute, 2006-2007 was a year of major changes, including the addition of a number of new staff members to assist in the development and implementation of new Institute initiatives: Preethi Thomas, Department Manager, joined the Cotsen Institute in January 2007 and brings to the position 14 years of experience working at UCLA. As soon as she began at the Institute, Preethi was responsible for hiring five new staff members and encouraging the administration to increase the number of staff members here to accommodate the Institutes rapid growth. Originally from Chennai (formerly Madras), India, Preethi has traveled extensively; however, her first trip to the Southern Hemisphere was to visit a Cotsen Institute field program in Chile in July (see article). Elizabeth Klarich began as Assistant Director in April 2007 after a decade living in Santa Barbara, CA. She completed her Ph.D. in Anthropology at University of California, Santa Barbara in 2005 and was teaching there until her move to UCLA. Her area of archaeological research is the Lake Titicaca Basin of Peru, where she has worked with Cotsen Institute Director Charles Stanish since her undergraduate days at the University of Chicago. She is thrilled to be a part of UCLA and looks forward to pursuing additional funding for the Institute, working with students and faculty, and developing programs for the public and our donors. Eric Gardner began his position as Publications Coordinator in March 2007 after moving to Los Angeles from North Carolina in early 2007. He studied at University of North Carolina Asheville and decided it was time to go west, which of course included long commutes on the 10 freeway to get to UCLA. He immediately was thrown into a massive project, the production of Backdirt with Shauna Mecartea, which has grown over the last few years from a small pamphlet to a major, full-color magazine. Eric also has been an integral part of the Cotsen Web page redesign and lends an incredible eye for design to projects across the Institute. Backdirt | 18

Indiana Jones sideand feels her biggest accomplishment thus far has been assisting in the establishment of the Conservation IDP Bylaws and the creation of recharge funds to manage the programs lab equipment. Amber Cordts-Cole, Program Coordinator of the UCLA/Getty Conservation Program, is a native of Southern California and has been at the Institute since June 2005. It has been a busy time for the program and Amber has been pivotal in working out the logistical kinks of this new M.A. program, including finalizing grant negotiations with the Getty. She really enjoys working with graduate students and brings years of financial management experience to our administrative staff. Vanessa Muros has been Staff Research Associate for the UCLA/Getty Conservation Program since February 2005. This past year, she has helped the first batch of MA students through their third-year internships, in addition to publishing her own technical studies of metal threads and glass beads. Please see the feature article on Vanessa for more details. It has been a very busy year for Shauna Mecartea, Executive Editor & Media Relations Officer of Cotsen Institute Publications. Shauna is a Los Angeles native and UCLA alumna who began working at the Institute in August 2004. In May 2006, she took over as Acting Director of Publications and moved to her current position in July 2006. In addition to producing beautiful, well-reviewed academic publications, Shauna has also been an essential part of the branding and communications effort, developing digital initiatives, improving publicity and media relations, and inspiring the rest of the staff with her creativity and enthusiasm. She and Eric Gardner look forward to another productive and exciting year in the Publications Unit. Tom Wake, originally from Berkeley and a family tree full of biologists, has been directing the Zooarchaeology Laboratory since 1996. When he is not out on Sunset Blvd recovering road kill for his faunal analysis class, Tom can be found working on faunal contracts for the lab and his materials from Sitio Drago in Panama. He received a major grant from SENACYT-Panama to continue this project, which is also a UCLA Archaeology Field Program for training students.

In contrast to the majority of the staff, Helle Girey, Director of Public Programs, has been at the Institute for many years. We all constantly turn to Helle with questions of institutional history; she remembers every student, professor, staff member, and most visiting speakers who have participated in our events since she began in 1984. Helle is from Tallinn, Estonia, and has traveled the globe visiting field sites and working on archaeological projects. In her own words: It is a privilege and great fun to reflect back on almost a quarter of century of the ebb and flow of personalities and successes of the Institute. Most of our faculty were still students in 1984, and our present day graduate students were babes-in-arms. In the next 25 years I can only foresee success for the Institute as another generation of archaeologists takes the helm of leadership. Abhishek Goel, former Administrative Assistant and default Web guru, worked at the Institute from July 2006 until December 2007. While working, Abhishek also attended undergraduate courses full time at UCLA, majoring in computer science. Upon graduation, Abhishek left the Institute for a job at a software company much to the consternation of the faculty, students and staff. In addition to his regular responsibilities (such as the dreaded fiscal year closing), Abhishek was also our local photographer and videographer. As he prepared to leave UCLA and embark upon a career in the technology sector, he shared this reflection: ...if my crusty remains are discovered underground, clinging to a bulky old computer, I hope that the people that brush the dirt off my keyboard are from the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. In addition to Abhishek, this year we also lost two other longtime staff members at the Cotsen Institute. Carlos Inductivo, our former computer support technician for over 10 years, has moved to the California Nanosystem Institute, but can still be spotted at UCLA and keeps in touch with Cotsen Institute staff members. Virginia Popper, former Director of the Paleoethnobotany Lab, relocated to Cambridge, MA, but continues to mentor UCLA graduate students long distance. They are missed! Elizabeth Klarich is Assistant Director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.

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New Program

The UCLA Archaeology Field Program: A New Initiative at the Cotsen Institute
By Ran Boytner

The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA believes that archaeology can be a transforming force for the global community. To put that belief into practice, we embarked on a new initiative, launching the UCLA Archaeology Field Program. The program opening in the summer of 2008 will allow students to choose from a range of locations and projects where they can put archaeological methods and theory into practice. Participants will come to a better understanding of the discipline and of the world through immersion in archaeological practice and local culture. Covering a wide swath of ancient time periods, the field schools are directed by leading scholars and each offers 12 units of UCLA credit. Training students through field schools is not new. Many archaeologists and various projects use this format to teach students hands-on archaeological practices. These field schools, however, are always run as a stand alone project with minimal quality controls and scholars dealing with the full gamut of bureaucracy. Instead of focusing on teaching and research, such projects spend much energy on the administrative side, reducing capacity and focus on teaching. What the new UCLA Archaeology Field Program will change is the way such hands-on teaching is done. It will standardize activities on the ground to ensure the best quality of teaching and training. Also, this format will free scholars from most bureaucratic requirements so research can be the main focus on archaeological Backdirt | 20

activity. How can all of this be achieved? Every participating field school agreed to very specific and detailed activities that must take place during the field school. For example, every project will have to spend at least 3 hours teaching students about the modern history of the country in which they are working. In addition, ratios between students and staff will never be more than 1:7. While standardization of activities will ensure quality education, we must strike a balance that will accommodate the unique situation of each field school. Each project is able to create its own teaching and work schedule, accommodating the specific environment and cultural conditions in which it operates. At the same time, a program administration will provide all the administration services projects will need. Scholars will no longer need to engage UCLA administration directly, but the program staff thus far only myself will make sure that all of the scholars needs are met in a timely fashion and that flow of funds to and reports from the projects is done smoothly, coherently, and most important, rapidly. It is vital to understand that the UCLA Archaeology Field Program is not designed to be used exclusively as a vehicle to train the next generation of archaeologists. For almost all of the participating students, this will be a unique experience that will likely not be repeated in their lives. Therefore, it is important to vocalize and understand the program goals;

we aim at generating a philo-archaeological audience. Our hope is that a positive and enriching field experience will evolve into a lifelong support for the discipline of archaeology. Such support will be translated into personal appreciation and thus protection of cultural heritage, into support for pro-archaeology legislation in city, state and federal levels, and financial support of archaeological research through contributions to archaeological organizations. Because of the program scale, even partial success could be translated into massive infusion of support across the discipline and throughout the country. The UCLA Archaeology Field Program will open in 2008 with thirteen field schools in four continents. We plan to grow within five years to 22 field schools, eventually serving 200300 students annually. Our goal is to have projects in every continent and in as many countries as possible, providing students with a wide variety of options across the globe.

Ran Boytner is Director of International Programs at the Cotsen Institute. For more information about the UCLA Archaeology Field Program, visit: www.archaeology.ucla.edu

 Aaron Burke, Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Langu ages and Cultures
One moment of work stemming from the 2007 season s publication efforts stands out as a hallmark example of the significance of publishing Jacob Kaplans excavations. It concerns a collection of twent y Egyptian beer jugs excavated by Jacob Kapla n in Area A in 1958 but misidentified as flower pots. Our discov ery came as a surpri se when Edna Stern examined these vessel s to determine if they were Islamic sugar pots. This turned out not to be the case. Publication of a unique corpus at Beth-Shean in north ern Israel in 2006 reveals that these vessels are of a type produ ced by Egyptians residing in Canaan during New Kingdom imper ial control. Closer examination of their archaeological contex t at Jaffa and the life of this assemblage at Beth-Shean (ca. 14501300 B.C.) demonstrates that the Jaffa collection pre-dates the so-cal led Ramesses Gate of the thirteenth centur y B.C. Thus, this previo usly unpublished assemblage of vessels, for which the only parallels were recently published, demonstrates that the Egyptian conquest and occupation of Jaffa was indeed an early event during the Late Bronze Age, as suggested by the Egyptian story of The Capture of Jaffa. This study will be published in the introductory volume of The Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project.

Publishing Jacob Kaplans Excavations

Field Notes

eser ved Willeke Wendrich, Assoc iate Professor of Near Eas tern Languages and Cultures
During the last week of our 20 06 excavation season in the Fayum (Egypt) we discovered that the imp ortant Neolithic settlement of Kom K, excavated by Gertrude Caton-Tho mpson in 1925, and though t to be completely destroyed by ongoing cultiva tion since the 196 0s , stil l pre ser ved evidence of anc ient hearths along the edges of the site. In an atte mp t to safeguard the site from systematic dee p-plowing, we rented the land for a year. Returning in 20 07 and studyi ng the results of a magnetic sur vey, we realized that there was no tra ce of Caton-Thompsons larg e trenches, which, according to her map, sho uld have covered almost all of the site. Excava tion revealed that the plowin g had gone through her exc avated layers , but that she probably stoppe d excavating when she hit a 30 cm thick sand layer. Under thi s layer, how ever, we have found at lea st one more meter of undisturbed Neolithic stra tigraphy. Thanks to a grant fro m the National Geographic Soc iety we we re able to prove the import ance of the site, and hopefully the area will be protected by the Supreme Council of Antiquities so that we and future archae ologist can continue our wo rk. Publication of the exc iting results should come out later thi s year.

Excavated, ploughed and st

ill pr

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Donor Journal

Annual Summit in the American Southwest

a photo essay by Patty Civalleri, Directors Council Member

Above: panoramic view of Pueblo del Arroyo. Many rituals and ceremonies were held in this beautiful kiva. Besides religious ceremonies, kivas may have been used as a meeting place for the men of the clan to gather and discuss politics and the other important issues that faced their families and tribes on a daily basis.

Where to now? The question was: where in the American Southwest should the Directors Council members meet this year? The unanimous answer was a resounding Chaco Canyon! My husband Roger and I have been Directors Council members since 2001, and we have thoroughly enjoyed the travels and the friendships that have arisen from the educational experiences that the Cotsen Institute oers to us lay people. Human cultural history has always fascinated us and, of course, American history is particularly close to our hearts. Although the schedule was to y into New Mexico on Friday and return Sunday, only two days later, Roger and I decided to make a real trip out of it and visit the various locations and ruins that best represented the migratory path of the Ancient Puebloans. This was the rst thing we learned: we are to refer to the people as Ancient Puebloans, not the Anasazi. It seems that the term Anasazi is a contemporary Navajo word for The Ancient Ones or The Ones Before. And although we dont know what these ancient people actually called themselves, it makes more sense to use a non-cultural term to give them the individual respect that they have earned.

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We ew to Phoenix and rented a doozy of an RV to take us through the states of the Four-Corners for the next couple of weeks. We drove to all of those amazing places that you only read about: the Painted Desert, the Petried Forest, and a wondrously rock art-decorated river at the bottom of Chevelon Canyon. We stayed a couple of days to absorb the full experience of Canyon de Chelle from top of the canyon ridges, as well as 4-wheeling through the bottom of the canyon the day after a ash ood. Council members Harris & Margaret Bass moved into our RV when we arrived at Mesa Verde to join us for the rest of our foray into Americas native history. Mesa Verde is clearly one of the more spectacular sites in the entire Southwestern region, and I highly recommend that anyone curious about this part of history must plan several days to walk through this picturesque and well-preserved piece of our heritage. After 10 days of traveling, we were not yet exhausted, but ready to meet the rest of our group in the legendary and spiritual Chaco Canyon. Here we would come to understand

the migration pattern of these Puebloan ancestors. We all banded together at 9:00 am at the Chaco Canyon Visitors center and after many warm greetings and hugs, we proceeded to cover this canyon like sand in the Mojave. Although Pueblo Bonito is the largest of the Chaco ruins and the most written about, the canyon oers excellent hikes to the other great ruins of Chetro Ketl, Casa Rinconada with its Mother of the Great Kivas, Pueblo del Arroyo, Kin Kletso, and Peasco Blanco. For adventurous types, a great climb up the canyon wall (over Kin Kletso) followed by a rewarding hike along the ridge over Pueblo Bonito, then northward to the ruins of Pueblo Alto, will be well worth the eort. Where will we meet next year? Stay tuned, but its looking like well meet again in fabulous Mesa Verde! Be there!

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Chaco Canyon
Chaco Canyon was used for many centuries as the main meeting and ceremonial location for tribes that inhabited areas many miles away. From the air, it is easy to see the straight-arrow roads that radiate out from Chaco Canyon to the surrounding areas. Due to favorable climate conditions, the largest population inux occurred between AD 750 and AD 1120. These high-altitude canyons were rich in natural resources and food sources. The main water source ran through the center of the canyon, in easy reach of the front doors of the many villages that dot the canyon oor. Around AD 1200, a 300-year drought caused the abandonment of the Chaco Canyon area in search of more favorable conditions to the north. Today, Chaco is managed and maintained by the National Park Service, and is accessible from all directions via some interesting roads.

2
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3 Photos:
1 Pueblo Bonito, long considered to be the Heart of Chaco Canyon, still maintains its basic structural outlines. Some areas of this ceremonial ruin were originally built as high as ve stories, but today only shadows and whispers remain of the higher levels. Pueblo Bonito was planned, designed, and constructed by many generations of people over several centuries. Each generation stayed loyal to the original and unique D-shaped form and structure. Chaco Canyon was used for many centuries as the main meeting and ceremonial location for tribes that inhabited areas many miles away. From the air, it is easy to see the straight-arrow roads that radiate out from Chaco Canyon to the surrounding areas. 2 Pueblo Bonito: endless doorways and portals lead you through a maze of still-standing rooms and storage compartments. In all there was an astonishing 600 rooms in this lavish structure that heard many prayers of hope, thanks, and despair. This keyhole-shaped door is a trademark of the Ancient Puebloans that can be seen in many structures built as they migrated northward toward the Mesa Verde area. 3 The Kiva in the ruins of Casa Rinconada sits with quiet remembrances of ceremonies of long ago. A storm looms soon to drop a violent rush of water onto these well-weathered ruins, only to once again pass quickly to leave behind the same crystalline sky that the Ancients knew that covered their Puebloan homes. 4 I followed a hiking path that led between the canyon wall and a giant piece of the wall that is in its slow-motion fall away from the cli side. Climbing up between these boulders is so worth the eort. Upon arrival at the top, the beautiful site of the Kin Kletso ruins lay ten stories below me at the base of this cli. 5 Group photo of the Directors Council and members of the Cotsen Institue. Patty Civalleri is a member of the Cotsen Institute Directors Council.

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Reflections on Research
The Deterioration of the Chinchorro Mummies of Arica, Chile
By Christian de Brer
The mummies of the Chinchorro culture are of utmost importance to our world heritage. The Chinchorro people lived along the coast of present day northern Chile and southern Peru. They are believed to have been sedentary fishermen and gatherers that thrived on the abundant marine life. Significantly, the Chinchorro practiced elaborate mummification techniques that created the oldest artificially mummified humans known, reaching as far back as 5050 BC Equally impressive is the fact that these mummification practices lasted over 3,300 years with only some minor variations in technique. Many of the most remarkable Chinchorro mummies have been discovered in and around the town of Arica in Chile, where they are housed in the excellent Museo Arqueolgico San Miguel de Azapa. Recently, the human remains have been exhibiting deterioration products in the form of an opaque dark substance that is very disfiguring. This summer, I had the opportunity to spend three weeks at the museum examining the substance, the mummies, and the surrounding storage environment. The analysis of this material and the prevention of further damage became the focus of my masters thesis. Conservation of the mummies requires a holistic approach that involves investigation of both internal and external agents of deterioration. Initial examination showed that the dark substance is found exclusively on the skin of the mummies and is intensified by multiple layers or thicker layers of skin and soft tissue. The skin exudate appears to have once been a liquid, but is presently hard and glass-like. Research on parchment Backdirt | 26 (sheep and/or goat skin) from the Dead Sea Scrolls and soft tissue from the royal Egyptian mummies reveals a breakdown in the skin from collagen to gelatin, which is soluble in water. Also, the substance does not appear to originate from any other material used in the mummification process as it is also found on a naturally mummified Chinchorro mummy (unless an ointment or other preparation of the dead was used). FTIR analysis at the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) and GC/MS analysis at the Pasarow Mass Spectrometry Laboratory at UCLA are currently being utilized for comparing the exudate with the original skin, identifying the possible existence of gelatin, and determining the presence or absence of embalming materials or other substances used as part of a funerary ritual. Microscopically, salt crystals can be seen efflorescing throughout areas of the skin that were probably impregnated from the soil during burial. Forthcoming ion chromatography analysis at the GCI will be used to compare salts within the skin with salts from soil collected from Chinchorro sites. External agents can have a profound effect on not only the skin, but also on the many other organic materials that comprise the mummies. Contributing factors of deterioration of human remains include high and fluctuating relative humidity (RH) and temperature, improper lighting, pollutants, insect infestation and poor housing. Research suggests that the exudate could be a product of the putrefaction process of the skin from exposure to oxygen and water vapor in the surrounding environment. Soluble salts will also attract water vapor and can cause physical damage to the skin substrate. Tests in the storage facility of the museum revealed very high levels of relative humidity and generally poor control of the fluctuating outdoor environment. In July 2007 I installed data loggers in various areas of the museum to record RH and temperature periodically in order to understand the full extent of the problem. I also trained the staff at the museum in the use of the equipment, which is essential to creating a monitoring

program. At the GCI, samples are currently housed in chambers with fixed humidities to determine optimal parameters of RH for the Chinchorro mummies. High relative humidity can also lead to the growth of fungi and mold, which is currently being studied by microbiologists from the Universidad de Tarapac de Arica. Other external factors of concern include the high level of particulates, such as dust, accumulating on the surface of the skin, which also attracts water vapor, and the improper housing, which has prevented mechanical damage to the human remains, but does nothing to mitigate the environmental causes of deterioration. It might be determined that adequate housing requires oxygen-free cases to prevent the breakdown of collagen. A new hall of the museum is currently being constructed for the display and storage of all the Chinchorro mummies in the collection. It is the goal of my research to be able to better

Photo Captions: Left : A complete Chinchorro mummy in the storeroom of the Museo Arqueolgico San Miguel de Azapa. Top Right: The storeroom containing the best examples of the Chinchorro mummies. Bottom Right: Investigating Chinchorro artifacts found near a Chinchorro site.

understand the deterioration of the artificially mummified Chinchorro remains and to develop recommendations for housing and a museum environment that can be applied to all areas of the museum. Christian de Brer is a student of the UCLA/Getty Masters Program in the Conservation of Archaeological and Ethnographic Materials. He is currently working on his masters thesis and interning at the Getty Conservation Institute Field Projects department. Backdirt | 27

Grotta Scaloria and the UCLA Save Scaloria Project

By Ernestine S. Elster

Scaloria Cave was discovered in the 1930s during construction of an aqueduct to convey water from the Gargano Peninsula to the city of Manfredonia, near Foggia in the dry Tavoliere Plain of Apulia, southeast Italy (Figure 1). Unexpectedly, during digging on the Plain, a small opening appeared leading to an underground chamber. Subsequent exploration by local archaeologists revealed a large subterranean cavern littered with Neolithic pottery (Figure 2) and many burialsa cave cemetery! An extremely brief summary was published and decades later, in the 1960s, a team directed by prehistorian Professor Santo Tin of the University of Genoa (a leading member of our Save Scaloria team) explored the caves very difficult to reach second underground chamber. The excavators came upon an amazing site. Here was a soaring cavern, stalagmites and stalactites, a circular pool of clear water in the caverns center, pottery sherds, broken stone tools, and pots undisturbed for seven millennia since they had been placed below the stalactites to catch this solution and thus were cemented firmly in place (Figure 3). Reports of this lower chamber were published but no volume appeared which attempted to combine analysis of the materials from both chambers. The most recent exploration of the cave took place between 1978-1980, with a joint UCLA-University of Genoa excavation co-directed by UCLAs late Professor Marija Gimbutas and the same Dr. Santo Tin of Genoa. Its goal was to fully explore both chambers of Grotta Scaloria and prepare a sorely-needed detailed monograph. The cave had already gained notoriety as a place of cult and ritual (and illegal entry by tombaroli [Figure 4]) but a full report never appeared. Until the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology got involved in 2007, Scaloria represented an ageing excavation, abandoned after the study season of 1980. Convinced of the unique quality of the caveits ritual paraphernalia in the lower chamber and the mass burials in the upper chamber (Figure 5), plus its context in the Tavoliere Plain with the largest concentration of Neolithic villages in Italythe Cotsen Institute decided to save Scaloria and support its much-delayed publication. It is my pleasure to lead the Save Scaloria team supported by a pilot grant from the Cotsen Institute. Collaborators include Santo Tin, Eugenia Isetti, and Maryanne Tafuri in Italy, John Robb in England, Laszlo Bartosiewicz in Hungary, and numerous other scholars. Backdirt | 28

Figure 1: Map of the Tavoliere Province and Distribution of Sites

Our Advisory Board includes former 1978 and 1979 team members Dan Shimabuku and Linda Mount-Williams in addition to Giorgio and Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati, who served as unofficial facilitators at our first meeting with collaborators in Italy. In the fall of 2007 the Italian team members set about locating, assembling, re-studying, and analyzing the source materials, all of which are stored in the museums of Apulia. Their work prepares for a comprehensive archaeological monograph and an interactive Web site. Currently, you can look at a brief new Scaloria Web page as part of the Cotsen Institute Web site. Caves are natural places, and Scaloria is one of these, neither constructed by nor modified by human hands. Its significance was in the minds of those who chose to enter the darkness and use the space for their own practices. The activities performed in these mysterious chambers leave behind no written text, only the material record of these actions: the artifacts and burials, their contexts and associations. We are separated from these Neolithic villagers by millennia yet we seek to understand the practices which took place in these dark, secret chambers. Without written records, we have to read these artifacts and tease out the ancient experience which they represent. Our goal is to explore the caves relationship to the villagers of the nearby Neolithic settlements of the Tavoliere Plain, the first farmers and herders of the Italian peninsula, their culture, their landscape, and ultimately to bring Scaloria to the full attention of the archaeological community and to the interested public at large. Come join our company of scholars!
Captions

Figure 1 (opposite page). Map of the Italian Peninsula and the Scaloria region. Figure 2 (top left). Neolithic painted pottery from the upper chamber of Scaloria cave. Figure 3 (top right). The dark, lower chamber with the stalactites and stalagmites and a Neolithic pot placed to catch dripping stalactite solution. Figure 4 (right). Locked entry to the cave with the Tavoliere Plain in the background. Figure 5 (bottom left). Reddish-painted sherds associated with Upper Chamber burials. Figure 6 (bottom right). Ernestine S. Elster outside the cave looking west towards the framing mountains.

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New Research Exploring the Origins of Sanxingdui

By Rowan Flad

In 1986, our understanding of Bronze Age China was dramatically transformed by the discovery of two large pits containing hundreds of bronze, jade, and gold objects and elephant tusks at a site called Sanxingdui on the south bank of the Yazi River, just northwest of the city of Guanhan, in the Chengdu Plain of Sichuan (SSWKY 1999: Figure 1). These finds not only provided evidence of a previously unknown bronze tradition, they also indicated that Sanxingdui (ca. 1500-1100 B.C.), a site known and periodically investigated since the 1930s, was an important center of a previously unknown

complex society. This society practiced elaborate rituals involving complex and relatively unique symbolic systems, specialized production of labor-intensive prestige goods, controlled networks of resource acquisition, and its leadership had the ability to mobilize a reasonably large community of individuals to produce and maintain walls around the site and to sustain its ritual economy. I was pulled into the exciting world of prehistoric archaeology in the Chengdu Plain through a fortuitous confluence of events. During my Ph.D. research at UCLA, I participated in research in the

Figure 1. Locations of Guanghan, Pi Xian, and Chengdu in the Chengdu Plain, Sichuan.

eastern part of the Sichuan Basin at the early salt production site of Zhongba, and I frequently traveled to Chengdu to visit our collaborators there. In 2001, during one of these trips, I was lucky to be among the first to see accidental discoveries just made at a site now called Jinsha. We now know that Jinsha contains a vast array of interesting material, but among the first discoveries were artifacts very reminiscent of the Sanxingdui find, both in their form and their apparent ritual function, although somewhat later than Sanxingdui in date. Jinsha is now a world-class site museum and it is a beacon of the exciting potential of archaeology in the Chengdu region (Figure 2). Additional research during the past decade has identified at least nine walled sites in the Chengdu Plain that predate the walled settlement at Sanxingdui (Wang 2006), and these are now collectively referred to as sites of the Baodun Culture (ca. 2700-1500 B.C.). The walled sites comprise the majority of published Baodun sites, and it is assumed, based on the presence of Baodun remains in the lowest occupation levels at Sanxingdui, that Baodun culture was directly ancestral to the culture of Sanxingdui during the period contemporaneous with the ritual pits. Although preliminary excavations at many of these walled Baodun culture sites have illuminated some aspects of life in these settlements, very little is known about their patterns of settlement or the extent to which the walled sites were representative of the Baodun period. Similarly, regional settlement patterns for the periods contemporary with Sanxingdui and Jinsha have not been investigated previously. In 2005, together with archaeologists from the Chengdu City Institute of Archaeology, Peking University, Harvard University, UCLA, Washington University in St. Louis, and National Taiwan University, I helped start a research project to address these fundamental problems. The research project has focused its preliminary efforts on developing a suitable strategy for survey in the Chengdu Plain. Like much of southern China, the Chengdu Plain is dominated by wet-field

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Figure 2. The site museum of Jinsha in Chengdu, Sichuan.

rice-paddy agriculture. Ground visibility during the summer months is nearly zero and the rice paddies are not accessible for sub-surface testing. In the autumn and into the winter, after the rice has been harvested, these same fields are used for growing various vegetables, but visibility is slightly better, although uneven, and sub-surface testing is possible. In our first season, the research team tested several subsurface investigation

strategies near the Baodun Culture site of Gucheng in Pi Xian County (see Figure 1). A controlled test of shovel-test-pits (STPs), Luoyang spades, and three types of augers determined that open-bucket augers were the most appropriate tool for rapid, systematic coring over a large area in this region (Figure 3). The team has subsequently adopted a survey strategy that involves coring transects across a 300 km area around the site of Gucheng

and simultaneously conducting surface survey across the same area. The team is also working with a geophysicist and a geomorphologist to put the survey data into a more comprehensive context. The geophysics work complements the survey teams by exploring whether locations that contain early surface or subsurface remains also show evidence of subsurface magnetic anomalies that may represent features. We intend to use these data to identify the extent and nature of sites in the survey region. The geomorphology research is focused on reconstructing past environmental conditions and identifying evidence for landscape transformations that may have occurred over the past 4,000 years. Our first two seasons of preliminary work have shown that Baodun period sites do exist outside of the known walled sites. In addition, material remains from the Sanxingdui period and later periods are also relatively common. Most of these data come from the coring program. These data present difficult problems of interpretation and require that we think carefully about the relationships between material culture, settlements, landforms, and social organization. Over time we hope to shed more light on the origins of Baodun, Sanxingdui, and Jinsha, and the relations among these important sites. Rowan Flad is an Alumnus of the Interdepartmental Program in Archaeology at UCLA and is currently an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Harvard.
References: Wang Yi 2006 Prehistoric Walled Settlements in the Chengdu Plain. Journal of East Asian Archaeology 5(1-4):109-148. SSWKY [Sichuan Sheng Wenwu Kaogu Yanjisuo ] 1999 Sanxingdui jisikeng [The ritual pits of Sanxingdui]. Beijing : Wenwu chubanshe .

Figure 3. Zhou Zhiqing of the Chengdu City Institute of Archaeology recording data from an auger test hole.

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Putting the I in Interdisciplinary: How Can Collaborative Work with Ethnic Studies Contribute to Chinese American Historical Archaeology?
By Kelly Fong

As a California native, I know how important the Gold Rush was to the state, attracting scores of individuals from across the continent and world seeking to test their luck and strike it rich. As a scholar of Asian American history, I have learned that while the history of the early American West may acknowledge that many immigrants traveled there during this time period, it often does not fully recognize some of their contributions to the areas development. Regarding the Chinese, for example, history recognizes their participation in mining, building the Transcontinental Railroad through the Sierra Nevada, and establishing China-towns throughout the West, but not their cru-

cial role in developing Californias infrastructure. The Chinese built railroads throughout the state, constructed dams for regulating the states water supply, and, perhaps most importantly, transformed much of Californias renowned farming areas from boggy swamps into fertile fields. These details, while explored in Asian American Studies, largely rely on the documentary record. This presents potential problems because the documentary record is often infused with anti-Chinese sentiment, shaping the conditions and tone in which written records were created. This is where my own research fits in; by studying historic Chinese American populations archaeologically, we bring another line of evidence for studying the past that can augment and/or correct what we already know about historic populations. The archaeology of historic Chinese Americans is a new, developing field. While most sites are discovered under salvage conditions, they yield rich information about the everyday lives of these populations through their material culture. One of the most intriguing questions has been archaeologically investigating ethnic identity: whether or not a given population maintained its Chinese identity or adopted Euroamerican ways. This also has been central to my research. Drawing from an Ethnic Studies and Asian American Studies theoretical perspective, my masters research utiliz-

es a Chicago School of Sociology model of assimilation to understand these populations. Instead of using ratios to scientifically determine a particular ethnic identity, I believe it is more productive to consider why these assemblages contain artifacts of a particular ethnic group. For example, while it is possible the presence of Euroamerican goods in a Chinese American assemblage reflects personal choice, it is also important to think about conditions impacting access to products. For the Chinese, this includes potential use of white intermediary merchants, reliance on Chinese traveling merchants, and differential access to trade networks. We must also consider the role of adaptation, such that an object appearing to be of a particular ethnicity may have had different functions and/or meanings than its original manufactured use. This is particularly true for the High Lung Laundry, a turn of the nineteenth century Chinese laundry in Santa Barbara, California. The collection, most of which belongs to the Chinese Historical Society of Southern Californias archives, includes Chinese stoneware and porcelain vessels, Euroamerican bottles, especially bitters and champagne, Euroamerican ceramic tableware fragments, and numerous clothing-related artifacts such as clasps and buttons. Because the majority of artifacts are Euroamerican, due to the large number of clothing artifacts,

Left: This is what archaeologists have described as a ginger jar, a ceramic easily recognizable for its distinct green glaze. This example is a part of the High Lung Laundry collection from Santa Barbara, California. Right: These brown stoneware vessels served as shipping containers for food imported from China and are common among ceramics excavated at Chinese American sites. This vessel is from the High Lung Laundry collection.

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statistically investigating identity would indicate this Chinese American household adopted a Euroamerican identity. Likewise, because the majority of ceramics are Chinese and the majority of glass Euroamerican, one could statistically conclude this household continued consuming Chinese food while drinking Euroamerican liquids. How do we know this household, like many Chinese laundries outside core Chinatown areas, did not rely on traveling merchants to supply goods, supplementing it with what was locally available? Does the ratio of Euroamerican to Chinese goods really tell us about the laundry workers ethnic identity or does this line of investigation draw from racialized assumptions about the Chinese? This latter question is particularly important and is inherently tied to how we as archaeologists view race in the archaeological record. I believe we can benefit from Ethnic Studies theories on race that will help us more reflexively consider our own position in shaping how others view the pastand, by extension, descendant communities. Marginalized communities with histories impacted by a legacy of racism and discrimination should be represented as their material remains indicate, not by how stereotyped history dictates. Archaeology is in a position to help us better understand racialized populations. Kelly Fong is an archaeology student in UCLAs Interdepartmental Archaeology Program studying Chinese American historical archaeology. Her masters research is on a Chinese laundry in Santa Barbara, California, she and is working on dissertation project in the Sacramento River Delta area.

Household Archaeology on the Pacific Northwest Coast

By Anthony P. Graesch
Our understanding of the later evolution of North American indigenous societies, as well as the emergence of structures of Colonial dependency following European settlement, hinges on our ability to discover and model processes of cultural transformation that occurred prior to and during early phases of cultural encounters. To this end, household archaeological approaches have considerable potential. In the past few decades households have become theoretically significant units of analysis for investigating and modeling past human behavior. Households, which are of course social units, are difficult to identify in the archaeological past without a reliable material correlate. Given that houses are typically built by the collective labor of households, the excavation of houses provides an opportunity to compare the aggregate residue of activities anchored to a discrete place on the landscape and pursued by members of social groups whose identity is minimally based on co-residence. In short, houses and their contents are windows onto material dimensions of household behavior, offering a bottom-up perspective on cultural change through the lens of daily practices and inter-household social and economic relations. My household-level archaeological research at Welqmex [wel-kha-meth], a St:l (Coast Salish) village situated in the upper Fraser Valley of southwestern British Columbia, is designed to fill a void in the study of early Colonial encounters by pairing micro-analytic considerations of households with a macro-analytic study of the circumstances in which individual and group decisions are made. In the context of Colonial period interaction between European and St:l people on the Pacific Northwest Coast, this entails a consideration of the sociopolitical and economic implications of epidemics, the broader significance of new items of material culture, and the processes by which power-leveling social norms are suppressed so that indigenous leaders can elaborate political authority. In the broader Northwest Coast region of North America, many cultures (including the St:l) are known to have had hereditary leadership, slavery, extensive trade networks, craft specialists, competitive feasting, and elaborate multifamily dwellings. Previous historical and ethnographic research suggests that European arrival in the Northwest may be evaluated against a political backdrop of indigenous elite agendas, particularly those pertaining to the accrual of prestige and political influence within and among communities. Early BritishCanadian settlements were constituted by little more than two or three buildings that functioned as trading posts operated by the Hudsons Bay Company (HBC), a mercantile organization that played a major role in the northern Pacific and interior fur trades. Nevertheless, these outposts became focal points of inter-cultural interaction and can be regarded as important new resource loci in an indigenous landscape where ownership and access rights to resources were highly formalized prior to and at the time of European arrival. Welqmex was a large Colonial period (A.D. 1782-1880) community situated on a small island only 200 meters downriver from one such trading post. St:l oral narratives suggest that, prior to abandonment, Welqmex was occupied by at least one elite warrior who was involved in several battles with Laich kwil-tach communities from Vancouver Island and home to one or more highstatus, slave-owning families. The population of slaves on the island is reputed to have grown so large that separate slave houses needed to be constructed. As Backdirt | 33

such, the village site is ideal for examining variability in household size, labor organization, and wealth before and after European arrival in the Fraser River Valley. Recent archaeological investigations (2003-2005) at Welqmex revealed the remains of ten semi-subterranean houses (or sqml ) and one aboveground cedar plank longhouse (or siltexwwtxw). Radiocarbon dates indicate that at least six of these structures were occupied in the Colonial period, five of them constructed after European outposts were established in the Fraser Valley. Surface and subsurface investigations have thus far revealed considerable variability in the size, elaboration, and contents of Welqmex houses. Some structures were rather small, featuring little more than 50 square meters of interior living space. Others, such as House 1, featured over 170 square meters of living space and are among the largest structures documented in the Fraser Valley. Furthermore, large houses tend to be associated with higher densities of valued trade goods and a greater diversity of food remains, suggesting that their occupants maintained privileged access to regional trade networks and enjoyed the products of a large resident membership base. These data are largely consistent with my expectations for village expansion in the Colonial period following the nearby construction of HBC Fort Hope (1848). Welqmex was ideally located for monitoring and controlling trade between downriver communities and Europeans at HBC Fort Hope, and I expect high-status St:l households to have used this position to expand their wealth and power bases prior to the Colonial period (A.D. 1880-present). In collaboration with Canadian and First Nations scholars, the next phase of research at Welqmex (Summer 2008) will entail the partial excavation of four untested sqml and extensive subsurface sampling in the cedar plank longhouse. This will be followed by the excavation of Late period (A.D. 1400-1782) and Colonial period structures at Welqmex and other nearby village sites. We aim to examine how postsmallpox epidemic shifts in social demography, infusions of new sources of wealth into local economies, and increased risk of violence affected the organization of Colonial period St:l households and communities. Anthony Graesch is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center on Everyday Lives of Families at UCLA and a Cotsen Institute Research Associate.
Right: A student taking notes in a trench at the Fraser Valley project, site of one of this summers Archaeology Field Programs.

Archaeology Field Program

By Ran Boytner
The Archaeology Field Program of the Cotsen Institute allows students to choose from a range of locations and projects where they can put archaeological methods and theory into practice. Participants come to a better understanding of the discipline and of the world through immersion in archaeological practice and local culture. Covering a wide swath of ancient time periods, the field schools are directed by leading scholars and each offer 12 UCLA credit units. Participating in field research is one of the hallmarks of good archaeological training. Archaeology is done principally in the field, where a wide range of data are carefully documented, removed from its original context, and then collected. For the summer of 2008, the UCLA Field Program is offering an extensive lineup of 12 field programs, expanding from Argentina in the south to Canada in the north, and from Catalina Island in the west to Albania in the east. Each of the field schools offer research opportunities for students to get their hands dirty and learn, practice, and exercise field archaeology, conservation and museum studies. For more information about this exciting new program, turn to page 20 in this issue of Backdirt. To see a complete list of locations for this year or to register for a project, please visit www.archaeology.ucla.edu.

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Recovering Gender
By Cecelia F. Klein

These days the word gender is commonly used in scholarly circles to refer not to an individuals biological sex, as based on genital and chromosomal markers, but to the way people think about their place in the sexual order. Gender is thus, at one level, a cognitive construct tied to a persons sense of self, and to the way s/he/it is perceived by others (gender identity). This poses an enormous problem for scholars trying to understand human thought and behavior of past peoples. If gender is always cultural and need not correspond to any particular biological markers, how are archaeologists and historians to recover it? In recent years I have been wrestling with this problem in an effort to better understand how the ancient Aztecs thought about and used gender. Although trained as an art historian, my approach has been interdisciplinary. I have argued, largely on ethnohistorical and ethnographic grounds, that the Aztecs envisioned a cognitive state or condition in which a person, regardless of his/her biological markers, was considered to be neither entirely male nor entirely female. This mutability of gender identity played an important role in Aztec rituals conducted in conjunction with season changes, liminal periods that elevated peoples anxiety levels until the new season had been firmly established. Men partially dressed as womenthereby becoming neither fully male nor fully femaleare reported as having played important roles in many of these rituals. Recently I have focused in on one of these rituals, the annual sacrifice of an enemy captive chosen to represent the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca, Mirror that Smokes. The sacrifice took place during the month Toxcatl, Something Dry, which fell at the end of the dry season in early May, when it facilitated the safe transition to the rainy agricultural season. For this, a youth was chosen a year in advance based on his physical perfection. The Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagn provides a surprisingly long and loving description of this youths appearance that closely matches that of unmarried Aztec women. The chosen one, for example, had long hair that was allowed to fall loosely to his waist, in contrast to the typical hairdo of mature Aztec men, which was either cut short or tightly bound. For the rest of the year the androgynous impersonator was treated well, being given bouquets of flowers which symbolized female sexuality, and allowed to roam the city freely (albeit closely followed by his guards). While he roamed, he played

ceramic flutes that he had been taught to play for the occasion. In addition to living with four women provided by his captors, the victim also lived with a man, implying that he was bisexual. Finally, at the end of the year, the youth left the company of his consorts and guards to voluntarily ascend the steps of a small pyramid near present day Ixtapalapa (in Aztec times, Iztapalapan), where he was to die. Unfortunately, although archaeologist Richard Blanton located the ruins of a small pyramid that may have been the one used for the Toxcatl sacrifice, we still do not know for certain the location of the pyramid. What we are told, however, is that as the doomed youth climbed, he broke his flutes, scattering them over the stairs, and numerous ceramic flutes of Aztec manufacture have been found. Because flutes bore phallic connotations in Late Postclassic Central Mexico, I have suggested that these broken flutes symbolized the victims intensified feminization, or castration, a visual sign of his transformation into the deity. Much as late medieval and Renaissance European artists often chose to feminize Christ Crucified to express his transcendence of the worldly sexual binary, Aztec priests charged with staging the Toxcatl sacrifice used gender to etch a potent image in the memories of eyewitnesses. My comparison of the Toxcatl victim to the crucified Jesus is not without some historical justification, for there are hints that, following the Conquest, aspects of Toxcatl survived into the Colonial period and melded with certain newly introduced Catholic beliefs and rites. Today, the patron deity of Ixtapalapa is a sixteenth-century wood statue of the crucified Christ known as El Seor de la Cuevita (The Lord of the Little Cave). The statue is housed in a church said to have been built over a pre-Hispanic temple to Tezcatlipoca; its chapel at the rear of the church has been shaped and painted to resemble a cave. In his manifestation of Tepeyollotl, Mountain Heart, Tezcatlipoca was himself associated with caves. Today, at Iztapalapa, the end of the dry season in early May is marked by the Feast of the Holy Cross, or Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz, as the name of the Cross implies, is gendered female, but in some Mexican communities it is addressed as male (Santo Cruz) as well. This is rendered more telling by virtue of the evidence in Colonial sermons that sixteenth-century natives equated the Christian God with Tezcatlipoca. It would have been entirely logical, I suggest, for the indigenous population to have related the self-sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross to the past voluntary self-sacrifice of the Aztec Tezcatlipoca impersonators, and for artists in both cultures to have used gender, specifically the feminine, to signal these mens transcendence of earthly categories and concerns. Cecelia Klein is Professor of Art History at UCLA and a Cotsen Faculty Afliate.

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Excavations at the Early Iron Age Burial Tumulus of Lofknd in Albania: The Final Season (2007)

By Sarah P. Morris and John K. Papadopoulos

Figure 1. Child inhumation, Tomb 100, view from east (photograph by Rich MacDonald)

The summer of 2007 saw the final season of excavations at the Early Iron Age burial tumulus of Lofknd in Albania, a multi-year collaboration of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, the Institute of Archaeology of the Academy of Sciences in Tirana, and the International Center for Albanian Archaeology. The project is co-directed by Lorenc Bejko, Sarah Morris, and John Papadopoulos. By the end of the 2006 campaign, 92 tombs had been located and bedrock was reached in over three-quarters of the mound, but significant deposits remained, and most of the baulks were still standing. Amid numerous bets among team members, workmen, and co-directors as to the total number of tombs and final day of excavation, the tumulus yielded 100 graves exactly by July 11, with many more individual skeletons. All graves encountered in 2007 were inhumations, and included a number of children (Figure 1). With bedrock completely exposed (Figure 2), the remaining task was to rebuild the tumulus, whose visibility had first drawn us to its investigation (see the cover of Backdirt, Fall/ Winter 2004) and inspired our decision to restore the mound. Much of the 2007 season was devoted to the reconstruction of the tumulus to recreate its original appearance. We explored various options for restoring the mound, but in the end settled on the low-tech and inexpensive expedient of rebuilding the

Figure 2. View looking south of the bedrock underlying the tumulus completely exposed (photograph by Rich MacDonald).

baulks with mud-bricks made from the earth (backfill) of the tumulus to create a cruciform structure, surrounded by the remaining backdirt. Over time the sun-dried mud-brick will disintegrate and effectively become part of the tumulus, a kind of decayed skeleton holding together the structure of the mound. Operation Ziggurat produced 1,200 mud-bricks in 2006 and an additional 800 or so were made in 2007, each measuring 42 x 18 x 17 cm and weighing about 20 kg. The four workmen who made most of the bricks worked over some ten days using a double brick mould, in teams of two, after digging two rectangular pits at the site for mixing soil, water, and straw. The first team, two older and more experienced men, mixed the earth, straw and water by treading with their feet; the correct consistency was gauged by feel, with various components added as needed in the process of treading. Once the mixture was ready, they would pile it on a sheet of plastic ready for the second team. Two younger but also experienced men would throw the mixture into the mould, making sure that it was as compact as possible, smooth it off with wet hands, and then together they would lift the mould, carry it to the drying area, up-end it, and let the bricks dry. Every day or so, the bricks were turned to promote better drying, which took about four days under normal summer conditions. As there is no water on site, all the water was brought up in large plastic containers by donkey, and the straw used for binding the mud prepared each day from the wheat and barley chaff from the local fields. The entire process of making the mud-bricks was captured in a series of photographs taken by Richard MacDonald, along with video footage taken over several days (Figure 3). Once completely dry, the bricks were used to rebuild the baulks (Figure 4), followed by the laborious task of conveying the backdirt by wheelbarrow; a parting view of the restored tumulus at the end of the 2007 is presented in Figure 5. Our reconstruction of the Lofknd tumulus reuses all the original soil of the mound (minus the cultural and anthropological remains) for both the mud-bricks and the backfill, plus local additives (straw and water). The excavated soil of the tumulus, to-

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Figure 3. Making the mud-bricks: a) Baki Ymeri with double mould used to make all the bricks; b) putting the mixture into the mould; c) lifting the mould with the bricks to the drying area; d) turning the bricks to promote drying (photographs by Rich MacDonald).

Figure 4. Mud-bricks as built into a wall replicating the baulks (photograph by John Papadopoulos)

Figure 5. View of the reconstructed tumulus at the end of the 2007 season (photograph by Rich MacDonald)

gether with the stones found during the excavation, was thus recontextualized: no new or foreign material was introduced, except water and straw, and the only cost was labor and time. Once plant growth takes hold, including young trees to be set in during the appropriate season, the tumulus should not require future conservation or maintenance: the result is sustainable. The tumulus returns to its landscape and anyone traveling the main road between Fier and Tepelenthe main road between Albania and Greecewill continue to admire the small

but prominent mound that has taken the name of Lofknd, located in the Mallakastr Hills on the north side of the road between Patos and Ballsh. Sarah Morris is Steinmetz Professor of Classical Archaeology and Material Culture. John Papadopoulos is Professor and Chair of the Classics Department and Director of the Classical Laboratory. Backdirt | 37

Conservation Research Initiatives

Vanessa Muros

Figure 1. Copper alloy fibula with incised herringbone decoration excavated from Lofknd, Albania, in 2007.

Armed with a stereomicroscope and handheld portable xray fluorescence (XRF) unit, my conservation assistant, Alma Bardho, and I were ready to embark on a series of technical studies during the 2007 season of the Lofknd Archaeological Project in Albania. This past summer all the members of the project divided their time between completing the excavation of the tumulus and commencing a study season. The conservation team was also involved in the studies, and Alma and I began looking at several groups of objects in an effort to provide more information on the grave goods excavated from the tumulus and to help with the interpretation of the site. The UCLA/Getty Program in Archaeological and Ethnographic Conservation recently purchased a portable XRF unit to allow for the noninvasive elemental analysis of objects without the need for sampling. Since the XRF was portable, we decided to field test it at Lofknd and analyze several of the finds from previous seasons. The first project we started this summer focused on the analysis of metal finds from graves uncovered within the tumulus. The results of the XRF analysis will help us understand the alloy composition, and in turn the method of manufacture of the metallic grave goods recovered. A smaller study has also begun on the glass beads excavated from the tumulus to determine the elemental composition of the beads and, if possible, the materials used for the flux and colorants of the glass. The results of the XRF data collected this summer are currently being interpreted and the results will help guide the next stages of the analysis. A future project will also look at textile impressions and pseudomorphs of organic materials found on metal objects located within the graves to provide information on textile production and the types of organic materials used in their manufacture. Since the XRF proved to be such a useful tool for field analysis, the machine will next travel to Cyprus to be used in the preliminary investigations of a twelfth century Byzantine mural, located in a rock-cut painted cave. This project, launched by Ioanna Kakoulli, Assistant Professor in the Conservation Program, and CIOA Research Associate Christian Fischer, aims to investigate the potentials of noninvasive methods of examination for the characterization of pigments in wall paintings. Other techniques used to supplement the information obtained from the XRF will involve the use of spectral imaging and UV/ Backdirt | 38

Vis/IR spectrophotometry to identify the pigments and materials used to create the mural. Closer to home, faculty of the Conservation Program are conducting technical studies on objects within the collections of southern California museums. David Scott, Chair of the Conservation Program, is working with the San Diego Museum of Man in the study of grounds and pigments of several Egyptian Twenty-Fifth Dynasty and Saite period sarcophagi using microscopy and other analytical techniques. After the examination and analysis of the pigments is completed, these wooden artifacts will be treated with anoxic methods to combat insect infestation. Ellen Pearlstein, Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Conservation Program, is investigating the materials and technology of a feather blanket donated to the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum in 2004 without any documentation. Feather blankets are reasonably well documented from nineteenth century collections in northern California, and from archaeological contexts in Oregon, southern California, Arizona, and New Mexico. The vegetable fibers and types of feathers used differ from location to location. Preliminary findings show that the technique of construction also differs. All of these variables, along with associated botanical remains from the ACCM blanket, are being examined. The blanket is also being conserved to permit stable storage and display. With these last two projects, the analytical work conducted is being used to complement the conservation treatment and provide more information on the materials and technology used to create these amazing artifacts. We hope that through these projects and collaborations, we are able to contribute to the fields of archaeological, ethnographic and conservation research and aid in the future interpretation of these types of objects and materials. Vanessa Muros is Staff Research Associate at the UCLA/ Getty Program in Archaeological and Ethnographic Conservation.

Collaborative Conservation Education: the UCLA/Getty Program and the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum
By Ellen J. Pearlstein

Early in 2007, an innovative graduate course was developed where technical conservation faculty collaborated with Native American guest instructors to teach about tribal museums, object values, and conservation. Entitled Conservation and Ethnography, the course was founded on a partnership between the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum (ACCM) in Palm Springs and the UCLA/Getty Program in Ethnographic and Archaeological Conservation. The course, which was required for the six graduate conservation students in the program, included collaborations that resulted in cultural, technical, and analytical expertise being equally valued in formulating an approach to conservation. A revised approach to the conservation of indigenous cultural objects considers context and values, since conducting research and treatment may alter the object or its cultural meanings (Clavir 2002, Drumheller and Kaminitz 1994, Kaminitz et. al. 2005, Odegaard 2005). It is no longer possible to conserve cultural objects without considering multiple viewpoints. Consequently, three goals were set for the course: 1) to assure that cultural and technical information would influence the approaches; 2) that students complete interdisciplinary research and collaborative conservation treatments; and 3) to cultivate an interest in conservation in the tribal community. During two days spent at the ACCM, the class learned about tribal history, the relationship of the tribe to the ACCM, and about the museums goals to educate Cahuilla children and illustrate to outsiders the vigorous revitalization of the Cahuilla people afforded by casino revenue (Moraino Patencio, personal communication 2007). The Tribal Council considers the museum to play a significant role in maintaining tribal legacy. The class began with a plant gathering under the guidance of Santa Rosa Cahuilla Band member Donna Largo. Largo, a highly regarded weaver and teacher (Dozier 1998:122-5), has been instrumental in promoting a revitalization of Cahuilla basketry by teaching weaving in reservation schools and at workshops. Largo instructed us in the gathering methods for sumac (Rhus trilobata), deergrass (Muhlenbergia rigens), yucca (Agavaceae sp.) and juncus ( Juncus sp.). In addition to observing the plants in their habitat, the class learned points about the harvest that are sig-

nificant to Largo as a weaver. Following this admittedly off-season gathering, we followed traditional processing steps on plants previously collected by Largo and learned the construction of a coiled basketry start. The social aspects of gathering and weaving, including humorous stories about meeting technical challenges, and awe and admiration for weaving excellence, were all part of the process. Students followed up by carrying out close technical analyses of macro- and microscopic features of each of these fibers at laboratories at the Getty Villa (Barrows 1900, Bean 1972, Pearlstein et. al. in press). The differences in fiber strength and flexibility, and the behavior of the fibers in response to wear, were related to the growing behavior of the plants and their microstructures. Each student then treated a coiled basket of likely Cahuilla origin from the ACCM collection, made from the same fibers the students had harvested and worked. The ACCM Curator and Registrar were intimately involved in decision making for treatments, and unlike in some tribal museums, had been clearly designated as custodians by the tribe. Individual object histories were unavailable for these baskets, which were acquired from private collections. Considerations in conserving the baskets therefore followed standard museum practices of minimal intervention. Removal of fiber samples from the baskets was restricted to cases where material was already detached or sampling could supply significant information. In one instance, a well-worn basket soiled through use had been identified as being made of juncus for the coiling fiber. Comparison by a student of the microstructure of a fiber sample with reference samples indicated that the basket was made primarily of sumac. Functional and cultural dimensions of baskets, and the politics of their control and representation in museums, were explored by guest lecturers, including Lorene Sisquoc (Cahuilla/ Apache), Curator for the Sherman Indian Museum; Cindy Alvitre (Gabrielino-Tongva), UCLA Ph.D. candidate in World Arts and Cultures; and Rebecca S. Hernandez, Ph.D. (Mescalero Apache/Mexican American), MSO, UCLA American Indian Studies Center. Consideration of multifaceted, tangible, and intangible properties of objects imparted through these lectures amplified the understanding of these baskets. Backdirt | 39

In addition to lectures, technical fiber studies, and conservation treatments, students completed research papers on topics concerning the cultural preservation of California indigenous materials, including a review of efforts by state agencies and non-profit advocacy groups to protect plant gathering sites from over-harvesting and pesticide use, a comparison between mission statements and practices of the Barona Museum and ACCM, the role of tribal casino wealth in cultural preservation in southern California, and a survey of attitudes of northern and southern California basket weavers toward native repairs, which revealed a wider, more contemporary range of acceptable repair practices than was previously familiar to conservators. Students reported about their treated objects to members of the ACCM staff and invited guests in a way that considered both cultural information and scientific data. The ACCM staff, who received complete written, photographic, and analytic documentation, was thrilled with both the technological information and the sensitive treatments, which were informed by firsthand experience in basket weaving with Largo and histories and accounts provided by subsequent lectures. The goal of dissemination will be addressed next summer in a course offered through

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UCLAs Tribal Learning Center for Education and Exchange on preservation of cultural collections for tribal museums. Ellen Pearlstein is Adjunct Assistant Professor in the UCLA/Getty Conservation Program in Archaeological and Ethnographic Conservation

La Tierra de los Monolitos: Recent Research in the Northern Titicaca Basin

By Aime M. Plourde

References Cited Barrows, David Prescott 1900. The Ethno-botany of the Coahuilla Indians of Southern California. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Bean, Lowell John and K. S. Silva 1972. Temalpakh; Cahuilla Indian Knowledge and Usage of Plants. Malki Museum Press, Morongo Indian Reservation. Clavir, Miriam 2002. Preserving What is Valued: Museums, Conservation, and First Nations. UBC Press, Vancouver. Dozier, Deborah 1998. The Heart is Fire: The World of the Cahuilla Indians of Southern California. Heyday Books, Berkeley. Drumheller, Ann and Marian Kaminitz 1994. Traditional Care and Conservation, the Merging of Two Disciplines at the National Museum of the American Indian. In Preventive Conservation: Practice, Theory and Research. Preprints of the Contributions to the Ottawa Congress, 12-16 September 1994, edited by Ashok Roy and Perry Smith, pp. 58-60. International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, London. Kaminitz, Marian, Robert Kentta, and David Moses Bridges 2005. First Person Voice: Native Communities and Conservation Consultations at the National Museum of the American Indian. In ICOM 14th Triennial Meeting, The Hague, 12-16 September 2005: Preprints, pp. 96-102. James & James, London. Odegaaard, Nancy 2005. Changing the Way Professionals Work: Collaboration in the Preservation of Ethnographic and Archaeological Objects. Getty Conservation Institute Newsletter 20(1). Pearlstein, Ellen, C. De Brer, M. Gleeson, A. Lewis, S. Pickman, . Genay-stn, and L. Werden 2007. An Examination of Plant Fibers Used for Cahuilla Baskets from Southern California. Manuscript accepted for publication, Journal of the American Institute for Conservation. This paper is an abbreviated version. The full paper can be seen in: 2008. In Preserving Aboriginal Heritage: Technical and Traditional Approaches, edited by Carole Dignard, Kate Helwig, Jane Mason, Kathy Nanowin and Thomas Stone. Canadian Conservation Institute, Ottawa.

Photo Captions: Top Left: Agua Caliente Secretary/Treasurer Moraino J. Patencio with ACCM Curator Ginger Ridgway and Ellen Pearlstein (photo Liz Werden) Top Right: Lorene Sisquoc and Cindy Alvitre meeting with students at UCLA/ Getty labs (photo Vanessa Muros). Left: UCLA Conservation student Christian DeBrer preparing a basket start (photo G. Ridgway). Bottom: UCLA conservation students processing fibers for baskets (photo E. Pearlstein).

The Lake Titicaca Basinlocated between two chains of the Andean Cordillera and comprised by the hydrological watershed surrounding the lakewas one of the few locations in the world that witnessed the birth and autochthonous development of a state-level society. Given its location at over 3800 meters in elevation and its cold, semi-arid climate, the development here of such sociopolitical complexity is an impressive testament to the inhabitants and their ancestors of this fascinating land. Archaeology in the basin has had a dedicated but surprisingly small following since the late 1800s. While several noted archaeologists came to the basin early in the last centuryAlfred Kroeber, Alfred Kidder II, and Michael Coe, for examplethe isolation of the region as well as political problems have hampered archaeological research. The northern basin has received even less attention than the south, the location of the capital of the Tiwanaku state. Nonetheless, several scholars, including Charles Stanish, Director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, have persevered in the face of such difficulties and contributed greatly to our knowledge of its prehistory. Over the past nine years, I have worked in the northern basin with Dr. Stanish, first for my Ph.D., and now as a postdoctoral researcher. We began work here by surveying the HuancanPutina River Valley (Figure 1) and excavating at a site called Cachichupa. Provocatively, our research indicated that political hierarchy in fact emerged earlier in the northern basin than in the south. Stanish and colleagues surveyed several other northern valleys, including the Taraco area, identifying it as the center of an incredibly large Middle Formative Period (1300200 B.C.) occupation. Taraco is called the land of monoliths due to the amazing number of carved stone stelae and sculptures found in the town and its environs (Figure 2). In 2004, the Programa Collasuyu began preliminary investigations here, helped by members of the Directors Council, to determine the nature and extent of this occupation. This year we continued investigations in Taraco in two locations in conjunction with our Peruvian colleague, Cecilia Chvez. Abby Levine, a UCLA anthropology graduate student, continued the investigation of Middle and Late Formative Period elite residence in Taraco in an area a stones throw away from the probable center of politico-religious activity, a plaza or court sunken into the ground surface, which we believe lies underneath the towns central square and church. Concurrently, I began excavation at a site named Huayra Mocco, meaning hill of the winds in Quechua. This site is sitBackdirt | 41

Tiwanaku

uated on a low rise on the north side of the Ramis River, directly opposite Taracos town center. The site consists of a sunken court whose walls are clearly visible on the surface and adjacent residential occupation (Figure 3). Unlike Taraco, it appears not to have been damaged by any subsequent construction, leaving us a window onto Middle Formative Period social and political dynamics. Our excavations into the court were preliminary, but confirmed the specialized, non-domestic nature of its construction and its Middle Formative date. The court appears to have been ritually closed: the walls of the court pulled down, then the space sealed with a thick layer of sterile sand taken from elsewhere. The results of our work this season lead us to question whether Huayra Mocco was a regional political center, and if so, what its temporal and political relationships to Taraco and other centers in the northern basin were like. Based on our results, plans are underway to return to Huayra Mocco next year, and hopefully for several following years. With every year I have worked in the Basin I have come to feel more surprised, rather than less so, at how much we still have to learn about the unfolding of history here, and at how little known and appreciated this area remains relative to other areas of the world that were home to ancient civilizations. With any luck, our work in the northern Lake Titicaca Basin will help reveal more of the fascinating history of this place and its people. Aime Plourde is a Research Associate at the Cotsen Institute and NSF postdoctoral fellow at University College London.
Figures: Figure 1 (Top Left): The Titicaca Basin. Figure 2 (Bottom Left): A monolith from Taraco. Figure 3 (Bottom Right): The foundations of a wall at Huayra Mocco.

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What Do Animals Have to Do with People?

By Monica L. Smith
Through archaeological research, we can find evidence of the many ways in which people interacted with animals in the past. Our earliest human ancestors were first scavengers, and then hunters, of wild fauna. By about 40,000 years ago, animals began to play a social as well as nutritional role, and can be found represented in sculptures and cave paintings. At the same time, animals such as dogs, rats, and lice began to habituate themselves to us, cleverly making a niche for themselves around the home, hearth, and clothing of humans. More recently, by about 10,000 years ago, our earliest farming ancestors began to domesticate a small range of docile, tasty beasts that were easy to herd and that could provide a range of useful products such as meat, milk, and wool. In these few words I want to explore another facet of the human-animal continuum, and that is how human behavior can be modeled through examinations of animal activity patterns. Some of the most exciting research in human social systems, ranging from the development of the earliest social groups to the formation of ancient states and empires, has come from examinations of the ways in which animal groups form and are governed. Humans have evolved to a high level of consciousness and are unique in having a diverse artifact repertoire. However, the cognitive structure of our brains, particularly with regard to group behavior, can be modeled as a process that works through many of the same mechanisms as other species. Both animals and people have patterned behaviors that have to do, at the base, with the acquisition of food, occupation of space (territory), and reproduction. Humans undertake these actions to a certain extent consciously and with intent, but with many of the same goals and outcomes as non-humans. How can we utilize studies of animal behavioral patterns to understand the basic decision-making processes of groups in which individuals are both conscious participants and capable of habituated actions? One approach has been through the examination of self-organizing systems, a term that describes how collective groups are formed by herd-living animals. Animals of all sizes and types, from insects to birds and mammals, can survive and communicate as very large groups under quite simple rules of engagement. A fish in a school or a wildebeest in a herd moves in a three-dimensional space under the rule of follow your neighbor. A school of fish or a herd of wildebeest can be of nearly any size to be effective, and there is no difference in individual behavior if the group is large or small. Moreover, the purpose of the grouping mechanism is simple: to protect individuals through strength in numbers.

A limitation of the self-organizing systems model for humans, however, is that their social goals are demonstrably more complex than mere survival. In human groups, many individuals are specialists in economic, ritual, or political actions, which means that individuals are not interchangeable, nor do they all have the same capacities. Another complicating factor is that most human actions require some cooperation, but that cooperation is generated through a process of both consensus and competition. The coordination of large numbers of people, whether to create a one-time monument such as a pyramid or to support an ongoing abstract concept such as a state, requires many levels of hierarchical coordination in the form of middle managers who each are responsible for some portion of the work. Although simple models of animal behavior can be programmed through computer simulation, the complex decisionmaking processes that are evident in archaeological time require a surprisingly robust set of computer applications that are just now being developed. Elizabeth Mullane, a graduate student in the UCLA Interdepartmental Archaeology Program, is working on a dissertation that examines how the middle manager role can be simulated through complex computer modeling that takes into account all of the decision-making steps of human interaction. Grafted onto the self-organizing systems principle, these new forms of modeling may be more successful than previous attempts in analyzing how humans respond to new circumstances but also retain aspects of the follow your neighbor adaptation. Another approach to human behavior that takes animals as a model has been conducted through landscape studies. Archaeologists have long been interested in how ancient people used landscapes, but the mode of analysis has changed considerably in the last few decades. A century ago, the first archaeological surveys were carried out simply to locate the best site for excavation. By about 50 years ago, archaeologists realized that the landscapes themselves could be analyzed as a whole, and that simple facts such as site size could indicate the ways in which people depended on, or avoided, each other in the search for sustainable living. More recently, landscape analysis has taken into consideration how human understandings of time, memory, ritual, and communication produced richly nuanced spatial use in the past. Ancient people used their surroundings to get different resources that might vary in their availability in space and time. Fluctuations in resource availability meant that a landscape was not simply an inert set of surroundings, and instead required a flexible and dynamic approach that involved factors of cooperation and labor availability. People could not effectively control or even know an entire landscape; instead, they moved from one desired resource to the next, ignoring or crossing over areas that did not contain things that were economically, socially, or ritually valuable. This use of the landscape as a network of resources, rather than as a homogenous imposition of control, helps us to characterize the actions of human groups ranging in size from the simple tribe to the most complex empires. Backdirt | 43

The way to understand this selective, efficient use of the landscape is through a modeling process that borrows its premises from animal behavior. Our colloquial understanding of animal territory is of a bounded space that is entirely controlled by an individual animal or a group from the same species, and in which the animals constantly fight off competitors. In practice, however, very different strategies appear. Animal home ranges are observed to consist of a network of paths that connect desired resources (food, water, mates), and much of the area that is conventionally identified as a territory is not actually used. The boundaries of an animals range are also selective and opportunistic. Competition, which is frequently highlighted in wildlife videos as a spectacular clash between dominant males vying for the right to reproduce, are actually relatively rare as they are risky for participants who often succumb to injuries and death (not only from violence, but from slow starvation as when moose lock antlers in a fight). Instead, competitors put their energy into avoidance (through scent-marking and calls) and scheduling that enables competitors to share resources, for example, with one animal using a resource in the day and another using it at night. As a model of behavior applied to our own species, we can identify how landscape use is done effectively through networks of resource access and selective boundary maintenance. Rather than covering a large landscape in a homogenous fashion, humans conceptualize and use their surroundings by targeting specific resources and promoting flexible boundaries. Mobile groups in particular, such as hunter-gatherers and pastoralists, target desired resources through pathways and for the most part arrange to sequence their visits to mitigate competition, a pattern that we can envision for the earliest mobile human groups as well. On a more abstract plane, we can envision how ancient states and empires similarly used a network strategy to tap into resources such as towns, cities, and raw material zones. Traced on the ground through the archaeological remains of groups such as the Romans or the Inka, we can see how selective investments in roads and monuments served to strategically link large portions of whole continents. And, although warfare is celebrated in texts as a focus of state activity, a more realistic assessment of energy expenditure highlights the frequency of other forms of boundary maintenance including threats, alliances, and the sequential timing of resource appropriation among competing groups. Monica L. Smith is Associate Professor in Anthropology and Chair of the Interdepartmental Graduate Program in Archaeology. Her article Territories, Corridors and Networks: A Biological Model for the Premodern State appeared in Complexity 12(4), 2007.

Death and the Maiden: Age and Gender at the Lofknd Tumulus
By Lyssa Stapleton

One of the most interesting aspects of the Early Iron Age burial mound at Lofknd, Albania, is that young women had the richest burials. Mortuary analyses often rely on calculating grave goods and aspects of tomb construction to reconstruct social complexity and ranking systems. A preliminary examination of burial practices at Lofknd for my M.A. project revealed that a methodology which sought only to discuss rank and status would neglect the importance of other social roles, especially those relating to gender and age. Female graves at Lofknd received both the highest number of individual grave goods (more than twice as many as male burials) and the greatest variation of goods. Three of the most intriguing tombs at Lofknd contained juvenile women who were interred with multiple objects including pottery and ornaments. Most of these items were in situ near the cranium and associated with a copper alloy diadem or, in one case, a pair of gold disks. The disks, which were found at each temple, may have been worn on the ears or attached to a headband or other ornament of organic material otherwise lost. All three of these young women were found in multiple graves. Two were interred with men and the third with a man and one additional person of indeterminate sex. All three women died between the ages of 15 and 18, a significant age in any society, and one at which they would be expected to marry and bear children. Both of these roles were critical not only to the immediate family, but for the survival of the community. Marriage arrangements are an integral part of tribal society (as well as of more complex societies) and are frequently associated with the exchange and display of wealth. As the most common cause of death amongst women in premodern societies, death in childbirth must be considered as a possible explanation for the material distinctions between these three tombs and others in the tumulus. Physical anthropological analysis of these graves, however, turned up no evidence of fetal or perinatal bones.

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The age of the deceased appears to be the common factor between these three tombs. Only one other female buried at Lofknd died between the ages of 15 and 18. This individual was interred alone and without any elaborate jewelry. Other tombs contained older females, some buried with men, some with children. Two other diadems were found in tombs belonging to children but no head ornaments were found with individuals who died after 18 years of age. The inclusion of these ornaments in child burials and the lack of evidence for pregnancy or infant remains in these three young female burials indicate that they are symbolic of something other than death in childbirth. Marriage, childbirth, and death are all important rites of passage marking transition from one social role to another. Anthropological theory contends that mortuary rituals symbolically represent roles played in life, and it is has been argued that an individuals most important role is portrayed in death. Evidence from ancient Greece can provide an excellent cross-cultural reference for prehistoric Illyria. Classical Greek funerary epigrams and other texts express symmetry between the wedding ritual and the funeral ritual, the washing and dressing of the brides body, the change of residence, feasting, and finally incorporation into a new community. Scholars of ancient Greek society have observed that the death of a young woman of marriageable age disrupted both the natural and the social balance. As a result, when a young woman died prior to marriage and childbirth the funerary ritual replaced marriage as a rite of passage.

The wealth of these three tombs may be an indicator that these young women enjoyed a more elevated social status than other members of their community, at least in death. The visibility of headgear makes it particularly effective for conveying social messages relating to rank, role, and group affiliation. The critical age at which these young women died and the ancient Greek parallels between death and marriage ritual may indicate that these head ornaments transmitted an unachieved status to the community, in life as well as in death, one which was both suspended and transmuted by death. Lyssa Stapleton is a graduate student in the UCLA Interdepartmental Archaeology Program.
Project Website: http://ioa.ucla.edu/staff/papadopoulos/lofkend/index.html References Cited Papadopoulos, John K., Lorenc Bejko, and Sarah P. Morris 2007. Excavations at the Prehistoric Burial Tumulus of Lofknd in Albania: A Preliminary Report for the 2004-2005 Seasons. American Journal of Archaeology 111(1):105-147. Figures: Opposite Page: Cranium of juvenile female with gold ornament. Top Left: Pair of gold ornaments from Tomb 52 Top Right: Copper alloy diadem from Tomb 55. Bottom Left: Unfinished drawing of copper alloy diadem from Tomb 17. Bottom Right: Drawing of copper alloy diadem from Tomb 72

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Reflecting on Fieldwork in Bocas del Toro, Panama

By Thomas A. Wake

In the summer of 2002 I traveled to Isla Colon in the northwestern province of Bocas del Toro, Panama, to assess the feasibility of an archaeological project in the area. Among the many reasons for the journey were a strong desire to develop a research project in an exciting yet archaeologically poorly known region of Central America, prior field and lab experience in other parts of Central America, and a keen interest in the biodiversity of the Neotropics. What I found was an area rich in archaeological sites, yet lacking in systematic research. Bocas del Toro has been a relatively isolated region. Limited archaeological research conducted in the 1960s and 1970s suggested a region of homogeneous ceramic-bearing shell-midden sites on hilltops overlooking the water, with occupation beginning in approximately A.D. 600. Only a single site, Cerro Brujo, had been examined during the 1970s, producing six radiocarbon dates and the only ceramic sequence for the entire province. I was and still am excited about what I found on the ground in Bocas del Toro. Approximately 26 similar sites had been located and/or documented by the two prior projects in the region. In the first week I was on Isla Colon I located another 10, including a site type not previously noted for the region: a large coastal midden. I also discovered another site that dates from A.D. 100 to A.D. 400. This coastal site, known as Sitio Drago, lies on the northwest corner of Isla Colon and has been the primary focus of my field research for the past five years.

Sitio Drago spreads across ten hectares of beachfront bordered by a Raffia palm swamp to the south and fringing reefs of the Caribbean to the north. Several low artificial mounds are visible across the site. I was pleasantly surprised by the excellent preservation of organic materials, particularly bone, and high artifact diversity at the site. Fifteen radiocarbon dates indicate the site was inhabited from A.D. 800 to 1200. So far, the project has identified many types and varieties of ceramics previously undocumented from Bocas del Toro. DiagPhoto Captions Above: Sunset over the Soropta Peninsula, Boca del Drago. Left: Ceramics associated with Tomb 1 (Unit 14), Sitio Drago. Below: Shell ornaments from Mound 1, Sitio Drago. Opposite Page: Mother-of-pearl ornaments found with Burial 2, Sitio Drago.

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nostic ceramic fragments from Central Panama finally turned up this year, as did material described originally from Pacific coastal Chiriqui, Panama, Diquis, in southwest Costa Rica, Cartago, in central Costa Rica, and Guanacaste, in northwest Costa Rica. These ceramics represent well-made trade wares that arrived at Drago from an astounding total area of approximately 85,000 square km. The stone tools recovered from Drago include basalt prismatic blade projectile points and cutting tools, ground stone tools, and carved bowl and milling stone fragments. No toolquality stone exists on Isla Colon, so the stone tools must have been imported. Evidence suggesting recycling of broken axes into smaller ground stone tools and expedient flakes includes a basalt chisel-making kit discovered in the summer of 2007 that contained raw material, tuff and pumice grinding and polishing stones, antler flakers, large unworked flakes, roughly flaked and finely pressure-flaked pre-forms, and finished tools. Shell artifacts may have been Dragos primary products. A wide variety of shell beads and pendants have been recovered along with plenty of raw material. Triangular beads reminiscent of shark teeth have been found at Drago as well as several central Panamanian sites including Panama Viejo and Cerro Juan Diaz. Carved Spondylus artifacts, including a frog in the same style as gold frog pendants from Costa Rica, are present at Drago. In the summer of 2006 the project documented the first preColumbian architectural remains in the province: a coral slablined tomb containing three individuals. Two of the tomb occupants were interred in an extended position, with their heads at opposite ends of the tomb, and the third, most recent, occupant is represented by a secondary burial package. Continued use over a period of 300 years suggests persistent social memory of the tomb as a special place of interment. Foodways at Sitio Drago reflect a long history of exploitation of the wide variety of resources available in the Caribbe-

an coastal lowlands. Mollusk remains are common, including clams, oysters, and various conchs. Bones of marine fish from reefs, estuaries, and the open ocean dominate the animal bone. Sea turtles, swamp turtles, and iguanas represent commonly consumed reptiles. Mammals present at Drago include manatee, monkeys, deer, peccary, and a variety of forest rodents. The people at Drago also exploited various palm fruits, local tree crops, and starchy roots and tubers. It appears that the past inhabitants of Sitio Drago ate well. Far from leading an isolated existence in a cultural backwater as suggested by previous researchers in the region, the past inhabitants of Drago were active participants in a broad interaction sphere stretching from central Panama to northwest Costa Rica. It is likely that these people exchanged local resources such as shell artifacts and perhaps foodstuffs for the exotic stone tools and ceramics recovered from the site so far. Much work remains to be done in the region. I plan to conduct site surveys on several islands and selected parts of the mainland in the near future. Other historic period and Pre-Columbian sites await excavation and analysis as well. And, of course, the vertebrate and invertebrate comparative collections need further expansion. The future inhabitants of Drago will certainly eat well. Thomas Wake is part of the Cotsen Institute Staff and Director of the Cotsen Institute Zooarchaeology Lab. He is also the director of the Drago Field Project, one of the UCLA Archaeology Field Programs for 2008.

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Digital publishing and archiving

Willeke Wendrich

UCLAs archaeological project in Egypt is a large international effort. The focus of the research in the Fayum Oasis (Egypt) is the landscape of the area northeast of Lake Qarun and the development of land and water use over time in relation to the development of agriculture in the region. This entails a study of the archaeology and geology of the area concentrating on Epi-Palaeolithic and Neolithic remains, as well as Greco-Roman settlements and canal systems. The main activities of survey, remote sensing, and excavation, as well as finds analysis, require a large international team of some 35 specialists. Since export of archaeological materials is not allowed, all analytical work takes place in the projects field laboratory in Egypt. The exchange of information in the field is important and lively, but the time is limited: some participants stay for the full three months of the campaign, but most only participate for a number of weeks. Upon returning to our respective countries serious concerns are the exchange of information and access to data in preparation for the publication of our reports. The Fayum Project, a cooperation between UCLA and the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (the Netherlands), co-directed by archaeobotanist Ren Cappers, does not stand alone in these concerns. The rapid development of online communication provides great promise to provide a solution to the situation sketched above. At the moment our main databases with information on the survey, excavation, and finds registration are available online in a password protected system accessible to the members of the research team. In the near future the information provided by the various specialists will be linked to this system. In this way each team member will have access to a Web site at which all information is accessible. Usually archaeologists translate their database into printed tables, and often only a fraction of the data collected in the field appears in the printed report. We are clearly in a period of transition in which we try to fit our present activities (obtaining most information electronically, and storing all information into a series of computer applications such as spreadsheets, databases, digital photographs, and GIS) into old models (a printed book or article). The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology is developing a flexible publication model in which authors are given the possibility to publish a printed volume with an optional Web component. This way they can combine a printed version with an online text, including images, sound, video, searchable databases, and interactive GIS based maps. Authors can even publish solely online. As an Egyptologist I am well aware that the best-preserved textual remnants are those that have been carved in stone and that these new media present serious preservation issues. Close cooperation between the Cotsen Institute and UCLAs Digital Library, however, provides a safety net for this endeavor. Linked to the California Digital Library, digital librarians have reinvented archiving. Backdirt | 48

The development of digital archiving effectively unites publication and data archiving. For archaeology this means an interesting new development. Rather than keeping data hidden, or sorting data in a limited number of graphs or tables, the digital publication enables a direct link with the actual data. Rather than publishing a series of tables, a searchable database is made available. If the text of the publication maintains that there is an increase in the percentage of ceramic vessels of a certain type, this can be demonstrated through a real-time data search and visualization. This results not only in increased accountability of the researcher, but it also allows discussion on interpretation of the data. Interpretation by its very nature is a form of data reduction, a process that can be rendered more transparent by making the data and decision processes public. Perhaps the largest advance available with online data is that it makes possible ready comparisons between sites, projects and regions. This requires a certain amount of standardization, which is always a problematic subject among archaeologists who maintain, correctly, that circumstances partly dictate the method used. Certain basic standards are adhered to by all archaeologists: we produce specific types of data, such as measurements, descriptions, photographs, drawings, and we discern a spatial position, mostly in stratigraphic levels, which we place in a time sequence. These aspects of time, place, properties, and the relations between them are to a certain extend comparable, as long as data producers are consistent and provide a basic description of their method. Several initiatives have been taken to develop an archival system that satisfies the demands of a broad range of single-minded, stubborn archaeologists. A well thought-out system is Giorgio Buccellatis archaeological grammar (http://www.urkesh.org/). The Alexandria Archive and Open Context initiative provide open access to the materials of several excavations in the Near East (http://www.opencontext.org/), including the Domuztepe project of Elizabeth Carter. The most far-reaching effort is Archaeoinformatics (http://www.archaeoinformatics.org/), a consortium of archaeologists who learn from existing efforts, identify problematic areas, and attempt to provide a platform that is attractive for a large group of scholars and scientists. What is clear, however, is that archaeologists are realizing that the time for isolated, protective scholarship has passed. In spite of concerns about intellectual property and costs, the trend is clearly towards increased cooperation and data sharing. Thinking about these issues goes beyond mere organizational or methodological questions, because they are at the core of how we do research. The increased transparency of processes like data collection, presentation, and interpretation requires courage to revisit ones own methods and preconceptions. It is an exhilarating process that greatly enhances teamwork and which may prove to be the challenge of the twenty-first century. Willeke Wendrich is an Associate Professor in Egyptian Archaeology at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Editor-in-chief of the online UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, Faculty Director of UCLA Digital Humanities Incubator Group and board member of Archaeoinformatics.org

Returning to a Great Excavation of the Past

Gregory E. Areshian and Aram A. Kalantarian
A new joint project between the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology and the National Academy of Sciences in Armenia resumes the work of six decades of archaeologists in the ancient Armenian city of Dvin.

Features

50

The Mundane Extremes of Tarapac

Ran Boytner, Ioanna Kakoulli, Maria Ceclia Lozada, and Mauricio Uribe
An update from the 2007 season in the Tarapac Valley, Chile, where extremely inhospitable conditions continue to offer up the most unexpected nds.

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Cotsen Staff Chile Trip

Preethi Thomas
Preethi Thomas, Department Manager at the Cotsen Institute, gets a rst-hand introduction to the world of archaeology in the summer of 2007 during the eld season in Tarapac, Chile.

66

Investigating a Forgotten Port

Aaron A. Burke and Katherine S. Burke
A brief history of Jaffa, an ancient seaport in Israel which was occupied from the Middle Bronze Age to the Islamic period and beyond. Jaffa is now the site of a new research initiative led by archaeologists from the Cotsen Institute and other institutions, the Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project.

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Life and Death at Domuztepe in the Sixth Millennium BC

Elizabeth Carter
Recent excavations at the site of Domuztepe in eastern Anatolia shed new light on life in the Halaf period, and unearth a mysterious death pit.

76

Gregory E. Areshian & Aram A. Kalantarian

eturning to a Great Excavation of the Past

a new joint project in Armenia

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Kartli
Black Sea
Tbilisi

Caspian Sea
Ku ra

Trebizond

Georgian Bagratuni Kingdom Tayk Bagratuni Principality

Kingdom of Kars
Kars Ani

Lori

Kingdom of Lori (Tachir)

Lake Sevan

Ganja

Arran
Kur a

BYZANTINE EMPIRE

Bagratuni Kingdom Kaysite Emirate

ph ra tes

Dvin

Artsakh Syunik Kingdom

Ar as

Eu

Mu

rat

Manzikert
Lake Van

Mush

Taron Bagratuni Principality

Van Ardabil

Sasun Mokk

Artsruni Kingdom of Vaspurakan

Lake Urmia

Marwanids
Mediterranean Sea
Aleppo
Ti gri s

Sajids
(to 929)

Salarids
Mosu l

Hamdanids

Eu

ph

ra

tes

ABBASSID CALIPHATE

0 0

(km) (mi)

200 120

ocated in the Ararat Plain in Armenia, Dvin is one of the largest archaeological sites of the Central Near Eastern Highlands that include the territory of modern northeastern Turkey, the Caucasus, and northwestern Iran. Spreading over an area that exceeds four square kilometers, with its Citadel Mound rising to the height of 30 meters, the site contains remains of many civilizations dating back to at least the beginning of the third millennium BC, maybe even substantially earlier. It occupies a location on the left bank of Azat River that is a left tributary of the Arax River and comprises four distinct terraces formed by ancient remains: the Citadel Mound, the Lower Fortress, Midtown, and the Outer City.

Opposite Page: Mount Ararat looms over the site of Dvin. Photo by Gregory Areshian. Above: Map of Armenia circa AD 1000, showing the location of Dvin. Image courtesy of Ivan d'Hostingue (alias Smhur), Wikimedia Commons.

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t was one of the first archaeological ruins in that part of the world that attracted the interest of European travelers and explorers. While the Ararat Plain still was a part of the Persian Empire ruled by the Qajar Dynasty, Dvin was visited in 1817 by Sir Robert Ker Porter on his way to the illustrious court of the Iranian Shahanshah (King of kings) which was followed by his explorations at Persepolis and in Babylonia. Ker Porter left to posterity a sketch plan of

where four small attempts at excavations had been made during the ninteenth and early twentieth centuries which yielded only one important result: the location of a very large Christian cathedral with a mosaic floor was identified. For obvious political reasons, the Armenian national archaeological tradition has grown from the end of the ninteenth century within the Russian school of archaeological thought and continued flourish-

Dvin became the pivot and the longest continued excavation in Armenian archaeology. Its excavations started in 1937 as a large-scale project conducted by the Armenian Academy of Sciences with a participation of other Soviet scholars. Four generations of archaeologists worked there with only a brief interruption during World War II until 1994 when the fieldwork completely froze because of absent funding in an environment of socio-economic turmoil...
the whole city of Dvin which nowadays has become an invaluable source of information since most of Dvins Outer City has been absorbed by modern villages and their agricultural activities in the course of the twentieth century. Thus, not surprisingly, after 1828 when eastern Armenia, including the Ararat Plain, was conquered by the armies of the Czars, Russian antiquarians and, later, archaeologists came to Dvin. The Caucasus was the only area within the borders of the Russian Empire where Russian archaeologists could excavate Ancient Near Eastern sites and, from that perspective, two themes had become predominant on their research agenda: the cuneiform civilization of Urartu and Christian antiquities of the Near East. The second theme brought them to Dvin ing as a part of Soviet archaeology through the end of the 1980s. By that time three salient features determined the trajectory of Armenian archaeology: (1) a tremendous amount of fieldwork in progress; (2) solid institutional development; (3) theoretical and methodological eclecticism. The latter was a specific blend of approaches derived from: (a) primitive social evolutionism, (b) intellectual nationalism, (c) historicism, (d) culture history, (e) systems theory as applied to analysis of sites and artifacts. Dvin became the pivot and the longest continued excavation in Armenian archaeology. Excavations started here in 1937 as a large-scale project conducted by the Armenian Academy of Sciences with a participation of other Soviet scholars from archaeological institutions of Saint Petersburg (Leningrad). Four generations of archaeologists worked there with only a brief interruption during World War II until 1994 when the fieldwork completely froze because of absent funding in an environment of socio-economic turmoil that followed the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the re-emergence on its ruins of independent nation-states. From 1937 to 1994 the excavations at Dvin had followed a single historicist-nationalist agenda. Its implicit and, sometimes, explicit goals were three-fold: (a) to illustrate major historical events with archaeological finds; (b) to complement the historical records with archaeological data

Below: Stone relief from a fifth to seventh century church. Photo courtesy of the National History Museum of Armenia.

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concerning those areas of human activities which were not reflected in written texts; (c) to study and present the results of the excavations from a specific perspective of Armenian history. The historical focus of Dvin excavations was fully understandable there hardly is another archaeological site in the Caucasus region which is mentioned so many times in Byzantine, Arabic, Armenian, Persian, and Georgian historical texts from Late Antiquity to the High Middle Ages, and almost all the excavations carried out during the five decades of the twentieth century were concentrated on the sites later levels related to those sources. The versatility of those historical references is truly amazing. They range from a description of the construction of a royal hunting castle in the 330s 340s AD, which happened after a three century-long hiatus in occupation, to quotes from the city charter, to the description of international trade relations, to imperial ordinances concerning the city, to estimates of the number of its inhabitants, to references concerning its gradual decline in the twelth and thirteenth centuries. Here are only few examples. Armenian historian Movses Khorenatsi describes the foundation of a royal residence at Dvin by Armenian Arsacid king Khosrov the Little (330s early 340s AD), son of Tiridates, in the following paragraph of his Armenian History: Khosrov ascended the throne during the eighth year of sovereignty and with the help of Constantius and in the second year of the Persian king Ormizd1 He didnt display courage and didnt deserve good remembrance: his preoccupation was parading, hunting fowl and other game. For that purpose he planted by Azat River a forest that until today has his name on. He transfers the royal court to the hill above that forest where he built a palace cool [inside], which in the Persian language is called Dwin, which is translated as 'hill'." (G.E. Areshians translation) Another account of those events is found in the epic-historic work by Pawstos Buzand (first half of the fifth century AD). Dvin became the capital of Armenia during the last three decades of the fifth century
1 This paragraph contains an anachronism: Hormizd II (AD 303 309) ruled before Constantius II (AD 337 361).

AD. Describing it in relation to the Byzantine military campaign of AD 543 against Persia Procopius of Caesarea, the famous Byzantine historian of Emperor Justinian, presents a picture drastically differing from images of crowded Mediterranean and Near Eastern cities of Late Antiquity: Doubios (i.e. Dvin) is a land excellent in every respect, and especially blessed with a healthy climate and abundance of good water In that region there are plains suitable for riding, and many very populous settlements are situated in

Above: Remains of the cathedral of St. Gregory the Illuminator, fifth to seventh centuries. Photo by Aram Kalantarian. Below: Operation on the southern slope of the Citadel Mound. Photo by Gregory Areshian, 2007.

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Above: Byzantine gold coins from an eleventh century AD hoard found at Dvin. Photo courtesy of the National History Museum of Armenia. Below: Corner of fourth to seventh century AD monumental building at Dvin. Photo by Gregory Areshian, 2007.

very close proximity to one another, and numerous merchants conduct their business in them. For from India and the neighboring regions of Iberia (i.e. Georgia) and from practically all the nations of Persia and some of those under Roman sway they bring in merchandise and carry on their dealings with each other there. And the priest of the Christians is called Catholicos in the Greek tongue, because he presides alone over the whole region. (H.B. Dewings translation) Procopius thus presents Dvin of his times as an agglomeration of commercial and (as we know archaeologically) manufactur-

ing towns within one metropolitan area centered around the Holy See of the Armenian Church and the residence of the Sasanian imperial governor who may have been either a representative of the senior Armenian aristocracy or a Persian appointee of the great King of kings of Iran. The dramatic destruction of Dvin during the great earthquake that happened in December 893/January 894 (the month of Shawwl of the Muslim calendar) is described by several Armenian authors among which the eyewitness account of Hovhannes Draskhanakerttsi is especially interesting for its details. Tovma Artzruni (early tenth century) depicts the earthquake in the following words: The city of Dwin, place of the royal seat, full of people, enclosed in walled ramparts, with its spoiled traders and various sins was collapsed [by God] to the ground; he widely opened its [Earths] mouth like the hell throwing many into the chasm. Even the houses of some of those became graves for them But it was because of the stone-like hearts of the Dwin citizens that he did not spare them. He also inflicted the earthquake damage upon the houses of prayer in sacred places, the walls of which were torn by shaking And it has been said that the number of people killed from the earthquake was more than seventy thousand souls." (G.E. Areshians translation). Arab historian Ibn al-Athr (1160 1234) further dramatizes those indeed horrible events, but without reference to divine intervention: And the moon of Shawwl was darkened and the people of Dbil (i.e. Dvin) and of the country remained in darkness, and the darkness remained until evening when a black wind blew and lasted until the third hour of the night. And at the third hour of the night the city shook and was destroyed and barely a thousand houses were left standing. After that it shook five times and the number of those removed from under the ruins was one hundred and fifty thousand and all of them dead. (A. N. Ter-Ghewondyans and N. G. Garsoans translation) A comparison between these two excerpts provides us with a good insight into the processes of creation and transformation of historical narratives during the High Middle Ages and stresses the epistemological value of archaeology. First, the perception of the magnitude of the disaster had changed

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over time: it demonstrates a clear bias toward augmenting the supposed number of casualties thus exacerbating the feeling of tragedy. Artzruni was a contemporary of the earthquake, whereas Ibn al-Athr wrote three centuries later and they obviously used differ-

of the Armenian Church established here in 470s 480s AD was discovered in Midtown. Several monumental architectural assemblages have been partially excavated within the Precinct which include the Cathedral of St. Gregory the Illuminator, a single-nave

References to Dvin become very cursory toward the end of the High Middle Ages, which most likely reflects the decline of its role in the regional and international political, military, and economic developments.
ent sources. Second, differences between the two paradigms of historical writing are conspicuous. Artzruni focuses on the concept of inevitable punishment for committed sins, while Ibn al-Athrs writing method is based on building emotional pressure through a detailed rendering of specific events, such as the month and the hour of occurrence (not recorded in Artzrunis text), the number of houses remaining after the initial shock, the number of aftershocks. But it is only the future archaeological work that will allow us to make a reasonably objective judgment concerning the real size of Dvins population at that time and the consequences of the earthquake for the subsequent development of the city and the whole region. At this time it must be mentioned that previously conducted excavations had already revealed multiple traces of that powerful earthquake. References to Dvin become very cursory toward the end of the High Middle Ages which most likely reflects the decline of its role in the regional and international political, military, and economic developments. Telling the story of the war of one of the last Great Seljuqs, Sultan Arslan b. Tughril (1160 1176) against the Georgians, a Persian chronicle Saljq-nma by Zahr al-Dn Nshpr (late twelth century) mentions Dvin two times: The Sultan became ill on the road to the city of Dwn. There was a halt for two or three days The illness of the Sultan was prolonged, and they came from the castle of Al.k.y to the fortress of Dwn which they now call the Fortress of dhar. Forty days later they arrived at the banks of the Aras (Arax River). (K.A. Luthers translation) Previous excavations had indeed provided ample archaeological evidence that allows us to clarify and complement the historical sources. The Sacred Precinct of the Holy See church, and two palaces of the patriarchs of the Armenian Apostolic Church: the earlier built in the second half of the fifth century and destroyed in AD 572, and the latter constructed at the beginning of the seventh century. The second was occupied by Byzantine Emperor Constans II during his military campaigns in the East. On the summit of the Citadel Mound and on its western slope the remains of several blocks of residential buildings an workshops dating to the tenth thirteenth centuries AD were excavated, underneath which were uncovered the remains of an eighth century palace of the governor appointed by the Umayad Caliph. The excavations of earlier levels on the Citadel Mound discovered a trinave Christian basilica dating back to the fourth - fifth centuries AD which overlaid the building remains of a Hellenistic settlement (second first centuries BC). A distinct hiatus separates the latter from the underlying level of conflagration that marks the end of a very large Early Iron Age settlement (eleventh early eighth century BC) which has not been excavated yet to any substantial degree. We may also infer from accidental finds originating from different parts of the ancient city that the remains of a very large Early Bronze Age settlement (roughly

Above: Charlie Steinmetz wielding a bronze sword from the Final Bronze Age, 13001000 BC. Photo by Gregory Areshian.

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Above: Gold earrings with pearls, ninth to twelth century AD. Photo courtesy of the National History Museum of Armenia. Below: Faience cup imported from Iran, eleventh to thirteenth century AD. Photo courtesy of the National History Muesum of Armenia.

pre-dating 2400 BC) exist beneath the levels of the Early Iron Age. Enormous collections containing tens of thousands of artifacts, some of which are documented better than others, have been gathered throughout the decades of Dvin excavations. Those are kept at the National Museum of History of Armenia in Yerevan, at the National Museum of Ethnography at Sardarapat, and at the dig-house built at Dvin after World War II. Sculptures, jewelry, faience, glass, and pottery, architectural details and stucco decorations, weapons

and tools, and several thousand coins discovered at Dvin reflect sociopolitical, economic, and cultural processes, and the daily lives of Dvins citizenry form Late Antiquity through the High Middle Ages. Some groups of artifacts, such as sealings, glass, and coins found before the late 1970s have been meticulously investigated and published in Armenian and Russian languages in a number of monographs. Other groups of finds still require further study and publication. General summaries of excavations carried out through the early 1980s are presented in the books by K.G. Ghafadaryan and A.A. Kalantarian. Scholars that had studied Dvin during the twentieth century made important contributions toward a construction of artifact typology and the understanding of chronology. Their research has vastly complemented the data from the historical records, especially with regard to crafts and international commerce. Moreover, studies of the excavated evidence allow us to unveil essential errors in historical accounts. For example, the archaeological finds unambiguously refute historical chronicles that ascribe the complete destruction of Dvin and its final abandonment to the Mongol conquest in 1236. No traces of destruction related to the Mongols have been uncovered so far. To the contrary: glazed pottery dating to the late thirteenth century together with Anatolian (Rumi) Seljuq and Georgian coins of Kay Khusrau II (1242 1243) and David Ulu (after 1247) were found which tells us that urban life, although in a state of decline, continued at Dvin for several decades after the Mongol conquest. That was the state of research in 1994 when the excavations at Dvin were interrupted. Since then, the Armenian and several Western archaeological institutions have contemplated the possibility of resuming the studies of Dvin, yet only in August 2006 Dvin became the focal point of the co-operation agreement signed between the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA and the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia. Resuming the study of such a major site that has a long history of previous excavations is a very challenging task. In the process of designing the plan for a new longterm project we have to take into account the uniqueness of the research situation. The

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new strategic approach derives from several imperatives: (A) the outmoded nationalistic research agenda must be replaced with a new theoretical vision that would allow us, using Dvin as a basis, to formulate and explore such research questions which can contribute to an understanding of socio-cultural processes on a regional and global scale; (B) the major disparities between the studies of different parts of the site and between different chronological periods must be corrected; therefore substantial efforts must be devoted to the study of stratigraphy, the excavations of Early Iron Age and earlier remains, and the exploration of the settlement dynamics which will require substantial work in the Outer City; (C) contextual studies of complete assemblages have never been done at Dvin, therefore they become top priority; (D) not a single major architectural complex has been completely excavated and published so far together with its stratigraphic record and related artifacts; the completion of studies of those complexes is another important goal; (E) a new system of field recording that would allow for a computerized processing of information must be introduced; (F) the vast collections of artifacts gathered during the twentieth century fieldwork must be restudied; and (G) conservation works must become an integral part of future explorations. Reaching these goals would allow us to create an archaeological reconstruction of an anthropological regional history which, in its turn, should become an independent component of an interdisciplinary history. Several major research topics that may be developed at Dvin already are clearly visible. First, as one of the largest Early Bronze Age sites (first half of the third millennium BC) in the Central Near Eastern Highlands Dvin may contain many clues for understanding the trajectory of transformation of a unique civilization which has been known as the Early Transcaucasian or Kura-Arax culture. Spreading from the Dagestan in the Russian

tural area DPAA) it was the largest cultural-geographic entity in the Ancient Near East during the times of Early Dynastic Mesopotamia. Since we may hypothesize that Dvin was one of the principal centers (if not the capital city) of the Early Iron Age (eleventh ninth centuries BC) political-military confederacy of Etiuni, the study of respective levels may shed light on the issue of differences and commonalities in the processes of primary and secondary state formation in the northern part of the Ancient Near East. As one of the cities that has played a crucially important role in the relations between Byzantium and Iran (fourth seventh centuries AD) Dvin presents us with a unique opportunity to develop an archaeology of sociopolitical dynamics in the borderlands between the superpowers of Late Antiquity. A h i s tor ic a l-a rchaeological study of Dvin may become a major contribution to the study of collective identities during the periods from Late Antiquity through the High Middle Ages. As the capital city of Armenia for 500 years (from the end of the fifth through the end of the ninth centuries AD) Dvin and its population had been at the center of the processes of transformation of the Armenian national identity, the formation of which begun no later than the first half of the third century AD. From a broad anthropological, archaeo-

Above: Glazed bowl depicting a stork killing a snake, eleventh to thirteenth century AD.

Resuming the study of such a major site that has a long history of previous excavations is a very challenging task. In the process of designing the plan for a new long-term project we have to take into account the uniqueness of the research situation.
Federation in the northeast to Palestine in the southwest (whence the recently suggested term Dagestan-Palestinian archaeocullogical, and historical perspective this direction of our research at Dvin may clarify the emergence and transformation of ethnic, and
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Top: Fragment of a black burnished pythos, Early Bronze Age circa 27002500 BC. From the Citadel Mound. Photo courtesy of the National History Museum of Armenia. Middle: Stone box and a lid from a similar box. Pre-mid-5th century AD. Photo by Gregory Areshian, 2007. Bottom: Stucco decoration from the 11th 12th century palace in the citadel. Photo courtesy of the National History Museum of Armenia. Opposite Page Top: Dumpster waste from a pottery kiln. 11th12th centuries AD. Opposite Page Bottom, left to right: Aram Kalantarian, Charlie Steinmetz, Charles Stanish, and Gregory Areshian in the exhibit hall of the dig house at Dvin. September 2007.

more broadly-conceived, social identities in frontier situations. And also we should not underestimate the fact that the site has a very substantial potential for Byzantine, Iranian, Caliphate, and Seljuq studies. With this long-term view in mind we conducted the first excavation season of the joint project which lasted from the end of August through late October 2007. Studying the stratigraphy of the site and completing the excavations of previously discovered architectural complexes will be the goal of the first several campaigns, which later will be complemented by an extensive survey of the Outer City. In order to link previous excavations with our new fieldwork, the 1937 grid established by Nicholas Tokarski was restored by the architect of our expedition, Koryun Ghafadaryan. The excavations were carried out in six areas of the site. Two of those areas included squares started at the southern (top of the Citadel Mound, supervisors Frina Babayan and Gayane Kocharyan) and northern (foot of the Lower Fortress tell, supervisor Irena Kalantarian) ends of the stratigraphic step-trench. We think that the approximately 50 meter-long step-trench, when completed (which may require 12 15 field seasons), may reveal the stratigraphic sequence of the northern part of the Citadel Mound from its top to the virgin soil level beneath the tell. The work in two areas on the southern edge of the Lower Fortress terrace (supervisor Aghavni Zhamkochyan) opened the upper part of the southwestern corner of the monumental Arsacid or Sasanian (presumably palatial) plastered building, and the overlaying remains of the later, twelth thirteenth centuries habitations which must be excavated during several coming seasons and removed in order to excavate the monumental building itself. In the Sacred Precinct located in Midtown excavations were carried out in the southwestern part of the First Patriarchal Palace (supervisors Nyura Hakobyan and Diana Mirijanian) where a tri-dimensional stratigraphic sequence consisting of five superimposed layers that cover the period from the fourth and early fifth through the eleventh

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centuries AD was clearly identified. Finally, at the western edge of the Citadel Mound top a small area with the deposits of the Hellenistic Period was excavated (supervisor Gayane Kocharyan) beneath the remains of the palace of the Caliphate governor. Simultaneously with the excavations, Hans Barnard collected pottery samples for residue analyses in order to identify the contents of ancient vessels. This kind of research is conducted for the first time in this part of the Near East. The Dvin Expedition was very pleased to host the Cotsen Institute Director Charles Stanish and the Institute Directors Council Member Charlie Steinmetz who actively participated to the fieldwork and discussed with us and our Armenian colleagues many aspects of future US Armenian cooperation in archaeology and related fields of the social sciences and the humanities. We look forward to the coming excavation and study seasons at Dvin and related sites in Armenia.
Gregory E. Areshian is Visiting Professor of Near Eastern and Eurasian Archaeology with the Cotsen Institute at UCLA. Aram A. Kalantarian is Professor of Archaeology at Yerevan State University and Advisor to the Director of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia.
References Cited: Artzruni and Anonymous 1985. Patmutiwn tann Artzruneats (History of the Artzruni House). Original text annotated and translated into modern Armenian by V. M. Vardanian. Yerevan: Yerevan University Press. Khorenatsi 1981. Movsisi Khorenatswoy Patmutiwn Hayots (The Armenian History of Movses Khorenatsi). Critical text compiled, edited, and annotated by M. Abeghian and S. Harutyunian (1913 reprint), translation into modern Armenian and commentary by S. Malkhasian (1940 reprint). Yerevan: Yerevan University Press. Nshpur 2001. The History of the Seljuq Turks. From the Jmi' al-Tawrkh, an Ilkhanid Adaptation of the Saljq-nma of Zahr al-Dn Nshpr. Translated and annotated by K.A. Luther, edited by C.E. Bosworth. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press. Procopius 1954-68. With an English translation by H.B. Dewing (The Loeb Classical Library, Greek Authors). London: W. Heinemann; New York: The Macmillan Co. Ter-Ghewondyan, Aram 1976. The Arab Emirates in Bagratid Armenia. Translated by N. G. Garsoan. Lisbon: Armenian Library of the Galouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

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The Mundane Extremes of

Northern Chile, 2007 Season

By Ran Boytner, Ioanna Kakoulli, Maria Ceclia Lozada, and Mauricio Uribe

he Tarapac Valley is so dry, it is difficult to distinguish between the bones of a 130-year-old dead horse and human bones deposited more than 1,000 years ago (Figures 1-2). Both are completely preserved in the hyper-arid Atacama Desert as if they were buried a few weeks ago. But because 2007 was our third season at Tarapac, we accepted these extraordinary conditions as standard. The extreme is normal, just a mundane condition of Tarapac life. Each year, we are surprised again by findings at Tarapac, unable to predict what spectacular objects the valley would reveal next. By 2007, after two seasons, we thought we knew the valley well and expected a season without too many sur-

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Figure 1 (left): Horse skeleton, possibly from the War of the Pacific period (1879-1883), discovered in the Tarapac Valley. Figure 2 (below): Remains of human skull found at the site of Carora.

prises. Well, these were the plans. Reality proved to be different. Our project is focused on understanding the role Tarapac Valley played in the general evolutionary process of the entire Andes. We are also interested in studying local adaptations to the harsh environment and are fascinated by the sophistication and scale of local sites, especially those dated to the first millennium CE. We work in small, specialized teams, each focused on a specific task addressing the main research question. The following will describe their discoveries this season and how those continuously increase our appreciation for the ingenuity, tenacity and capabilities of the ancient inhabitants of the Tarapac Valley. Backdirt | 61

Figure 3 (above): Survey team documenting a series of circular features. Figure 4 (bottom left): Survey team recovering remains of two War of the Pacific bayonets. Figure 5 (bottom right): A belt buckle, found in association with the bayonets, with the Chilean military star embossed.

We identified in past seasons many sites on both the north and south rims of the river channel. Few were for human habitation; most are circular rock piles (frequently burials) or small scale geoglyphs (Figure 3). Water is vital at Tarapac, so we wondered how far sites could reach into the dry plains (Pampa) away from the river. We assumed sites would be no more than two kilometers from water. After two weeks of walking and ten kilometers inland, it became apparent that we were completely wrong (Figure 4). Our survey team reached the mountains

After two weeks of walking and 10 kilometers inland, it became apparent that we were completely wrong.
on the horizon, climbed to their peak and found sites even there. We were exhausted and gave up. The ancient inhabitants of the valley were more capable then we

are, and certainly built sites far from water. The question of how far will have to wait for future years, when we can assemble a team of better and stronger surveyors. The survey produced its own spectacular results. About eight kilometers inland, we recovered two bayonets and a metal belt buckle (Figure 5). The star on the buckle indicates Chilean troops and research indicated the bayonets date to the War of the Pacific (1883-1897). But who dropped them and why? A quick and intensive search in the immediate vicinity recovered the remains of a dead horse, about 300 meters to the north (Figure 1). While we are not positive the horse and bayonets are related, a narrative emerges that makes a plausible story: after the Chilean army was defeated at the Battle of Tarapac, individuals became separated from their units and ran for their lives ahead of the pursuing Peruvian and Bolivian victors. Two Chilean cavalry rode

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their horses frantically into the mountains, seeking a hiding place until nightfall when they could retreat under cover of darkness to Iquique. But they rode their horses too hard. When the first horse collapsed, both rode the surviving horse. When this one died, they left it where it fell and continued on foot. But without water, exhausted from the battle, they needed to be as light as possible. The last thing a soldier throws away is his weapon. When they could carry those no longer, they let them drop, unbuckling their

Two Chilean cavalry rode their horses frantically into the mountains, seeking a hiding place until nightfall when they could retreat under cover of darkness to Iquique.

Figure 6 (top): The destruction of structure at San Lorenzo de Tarapac immediately after the 2005 earthquake. Figure 7 (bottom): Mass burial recovered at the cemetery of Carora, likely dated to the Late Intermediate Period (ca. 900-1,400 CE).

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Figure 8 (top): The narrow canyon just north of Pachica where complex panels of rock art were found. Figure 9 (middle): Details of rock art panel showing boats towed by mythical marine creatures. Figure 10 (bottom): Close up of the rock art panel at the site of Pachica. Opposite Page Figure 11: A map of Tarapac valley with sites identified during the 2005-07 survey.

We assumed this was just a typical local cemetery. But we quickly discovered the valley delivered another surprise. At the top was a fully wrapped mummy bundle with many small bags, each containing different objects. We believe this was a shaman.
ure 6). Among the many effects of this earthquake, the steep valley walls collapsed over the single narrow road connecting the world to the village of Pachica. During the clearing of the road in 2007, workers from the Chilean Public Works Agency noticed human remains projecting from the sand. Archaeologists were contacted and asked to engage in rescue excavations. We agreed to lead this effort. We assumed this was just a typical local cemetery. But we quickly discovered the valley delivered another surprise. At the top was a fully wrapped mummy bundle with many small bags, each containing different objects. We believe this was a shaman. Under him was a huge pile of human bones (Figure 7). Some were in unorganized piles, other bones were in position suggesting they were still held together by flesh when buried. Although not complete, initial lab analysis suggests at least 15 individuals were buried there in antiquity. Based on textile styles, this mass burial can de dated to the Late Intermediate Period (ca. 1200-1400 CE). Mass burials are rare in the Andes, and we are still trying to study why this one was created. Meanwhile, our rock art team discovered and began exploring a unique, rich collection of petroglyphs. Unlike most

leather belts and just letting the bayonets slide down. They continued to the mountains, where their final fate is unknown. We did not find any bodies, and so many Chileans died that day that it is impossible to know if two more cavalry perished away from the valley itself. They may have even succeeded in hiding and reconnecting with Chilean forces to the southeast, but we will never know for sure. While the survey continued in full force, the physical anthropology team approached what would later become a major find. On June 13, 2005, the Tarapac Valley was rocked by a major earthquake, measuring 7.9 in magnitude (FigBackdirt | 64

Today, the Tarapac Valley is a remote, sparsely populated area. But it was not always so. Our continued efforts expose a rich cultural history with special and unique practices.
rock art from Tarapac, this site is secluded and intimate. It is located at the mouth of a very narrow canyon and includes dozens of drawings (Figures 8 and 9). Many are of anthropomorphic forms, others of geometric designs. More surprising, some show individuals in boats (Figure 10). Given how shallow the Tarapac River is, no boats are used locally. This art represent coastal people who walked many days to come to Tarapac and the density of the art suggests the site was visited repeatedly. It was probably a place where special ceremonies were carried out, likely involving small number of individuals. Modern archaeology cannot exist without a major and concentrated conservation effort. The conservation team was focused on the very delicate task of preserving human remains but also worked on a range of materials. From reconstructing ceramic vessels to the very difficult excavation of baskets, conservation is always an equal player in our project. Today, the Tarapac Valley is a remote, sparsely populated area. But it was not always so. Our continued efforts expose a rich cultural history with special and unique practices. The work there is thrilling, and every year brings exceptional finds and new surprises. This may not be very good for publicationshow can you publish if each year yields new evidence that change your mind about what happened in the valley? But it certainly makes for exciting archaeological work. And why else should anyone practice archaeology? Ran Boytner is Director of International Research at the Cotsen Institute. Ioanna Kakoulli is Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at UCLA with joint appointment in the UCLA / Getty Conservation Program. Maria Ceclia Lozada is a Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Mauricio Uribe is Chair of the Anthropology Department at Universidad de Chile, Santiago. Backdirt | 65

By Preethi Thomas Photos by Preethi Thomas and Elizabeth Klarich

Above: View of the Isluga Volcano from the town of Isluga, N. Chile. Opposite page: Top Right: Iquique, the Miami of Chile. Middle: Preethi Thomas and Ran Boytner visiting archaeological sites in the Tarapac Valley. Bottom Left: Field school student recording a mummy bundle in the conservation lab. Bottom Right: Site of Caserones, largest prehistoric site in the region.

Cotsen Sta Chile Trip

Was this a tibia or a fibula?
I wondered as I reached into a bucket of bones to pick one out. There were several people in the room, all of us with masks over our noses to prevent us from inhaling any fungus covering the ancient mummy bones as we cleaned them. The bones had been dug up a few days ago from a location about two miles from where we were stayinga now closed boarding school for boys run by American missionaries.As I continued rubbing the dirt o the bones, my mind raced to the sequence of events that brought me far from home in Los Angeles to the Tarapac Valley in Northern Chile in the winter of July 2007. It all began when I was oered a job by Prof. Charles Stanish (Chip as he is popularly known), Director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology (CIOA). A few days before I started my job at the Institute, he took me to lunch and shared his plans and goals for CIOAs future. One of his visions was to establish Archaeological Field programs in dierent countries to not only introduce undergraduates to this fascinating eld, but also as a research site for the graduate students and faculty. He said that I would have to travel to various eld schools as part of my job to study the administrative and scal viability of such schools. To say I was thrilled at the prospect of traveling is an incredible understatement. This would be my rst visit ever to the Southern Hemisphere and my rst experience with winter in July! By now I had cleaned a pile of bones, working furiously with an undergraduate student from University of Chicago. My thoughts wandered o again to the month of June 07. . . .

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Chip had decided that I should go to see the eld school in Chile with Liz Klarich, our Assistant Director. The time from that decision passed quickly and already the 12 hour night ight from LAX to Santiago, Chile was a blur. I remember arriving in the dark a few days before on the morning of July 20, nally reaching the hotel at 7am only to be told that our rooms were not ready. Neither Liz nor I had slept much on the ight-I had been too excited to sleep and had spent my time trying to peer out of the window enjoying the sight of glistening snow on top of the Andes.With time to kill, Liz, who had visited Santiago before, took me sightseeing by foot for the next ve hours (I was sleep walking the last hour or so). Listening to Liz converse with Chileans, I was left wondering if Spanish was her rst language! 4

For a moment I thought I had landed on the moon. I had never seen terrain quite like that before in my life, so dry, with mountains of sand.

At this point, I had nished cleaning and I decided to reward myself with a few minutes rest in my bunk bed before going to dinner. As I rested, my thoughts returned to the day we landed in Iquique . . . . For a moment I had thought I landed on the moon. I had never seen terrain quite like that before in my life, so dry with mountains of sand. Downtown Iquique was also dierent, unlike any other small beach town I had seen. Liz and I had eaten lunch at El Tercer Ojo. Upon learning that the name translated to The Third Eye, I had been fascinated as the phrase carries signicant meaning in my culture. In India, Hindus place a dot on their foreheads to represent the third eye of the Hindu god Shiva. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the restaurant manager and waitresses of that restaurant wore dots on their forehead. The menu, however, did not carry any Indian dishes. The next morning, on July twenty-second, on the drive to the eld school in Pachica, I had been sitting next to Ran Boytner thinking: Now this is what Id call an adventurous drive! a thought which I had to revise after riding with Hans and Ioanna! The drive was about two hours long up the side of a sandy mountain and the entire terrain was extremely dry and desolate. 4 Backdirt | 67

Above: Erika Brant, graduate student project member, with the Isluga Volcano in the background. Opposite page: Top Right: An Apacheta at the site of Mocha and Carol Schultze, UCLA graduate student. Middle Left: Maria Ceclia Lozada, Project Co-Director, and her crew working on salvage excavations of a cemetery eroding into the highway. Middle Right: Elizabeth Klarich with Santiago in the background. Bottom Left: Chullpa (burial tower) at the site of Pukara Kolla. Bottom Right: rock art in the Tarapac Valley being recorded by Erika Brant.

Now it was time for dinner and we all walked across the courtyard to the dining hall with its old wooden benches and tables. I looked around at the hungry students and remembered meeting them for the rst time four days ago. The eld program lasts ve weeks, with the rst week devoted to classroom instruction in Iquique. The remaining four weeks are spent in the valley with ve dierent supervisors at various sites learning about dierent aspects of archaeology. We had arrived during the eldwork part of the program and met eleven enthusiastic undergraduate students, mostly from the United States and a couple from Chile. They had been working hard during the week at their respective sites and then partying hard during the weekends in Iquique. Being a mom, I love to feed my kids and everyone elses (sorry!!). Knowing I would be there to evaluate a program for young people, I had taken a lot of treatschips, cookies and chocolates. Liz had claimed that because of that reason only I became

popular with the student group. Whether true or not, it helped me as I tried talking to all the students to get their input about how the eld schools were run what they liked the best, what was the least popular, and what changes they would most welcome. Based on their responses, it had become clear to me that most of all they really had embraced the academic part of the program and would love to do it again, if possible nancially. I was pleased that I even received practical suggestions for cost savings in Iquique and improvements to the menus for vegetarians, especially in San Lorenzo de Tarapac, the village where we usually ate. We had taken up accommodations with the students in the former boarding school in Pachica. Liz and I shared one of the rooms, which had bunk beds and basic amenities. After the second night she told me that I snored, something that I had heard from my husband and my daughter and which I had always denied. I should make sure that topic never comes up when Liz meets my family! Cold water showers were available but I, like most others, had not felt bold enough to try it in winter. Just having a wash everyday was very uncomfortable with the dry air sucking the moisture from my skin with force like a prickly sensation. Although I would have normally felt dirty, I had started to feel at home since most of the folks around me were equally dirty! 4 I came back to my room after dinner and after socializing with the students and their supervisors. As I lay in bed thinking about the whole trip, I was lled with mixed emotions and thoughts as I was leaving the Valley the next day to drive back to Iquique and take a ight back to Los Angeles. The idea of the eld school is going to be successful and nancially viable if the cost factors could be worked out better (Ran Boytner is already aware of what needs to be done). The exposure it gives the young minds is an immense plus and with that thought I dozed o. There were so many sights that I had seen which were already indelible in my mind. To name a few, the Chullpas (burial towers), the ceremonial center church in Isluga, Tarapac Viejo, Carora, the unnamed rock art area adjacent to Pachica, and the bonre outside the dining hall. That walk on the rocky surface had been dicult, as had the climb up and down rocks and hills. In fact, without Liz, Ioanna, Hans, and the students helping me, I might not have seen it! I reminded myself to thank my Director for sending me to a eld school. I thought about how easy it was for me to sit in my oce in Los Angeles

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and ask for receipts and proofs in order to reimburse my faculty members. Now I understand how frustrated a faculty member can get when asked to follow policies as they are trying hard to explore in remote corners of the earth where banks, credit cards, travelers checks, and receipts are rare. Why do they do it? To unearth information for their research which we all can enjoy, thats why! Travel advance really comes in handy in places like this and it should be made available to eld research coordinators and faculty members even for trips which are of shorter duration. 4 On my ight back to Los Angeles, I felt a sense of pride at what we, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, are doing under the leadership of Chip and the eld school program coordinator, Ran Boytner. I am convinced that we can denitely mirror these programs in dierent countries with success. Preethi Thomas is Department Manager of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. For more information about the new UCLA Archaeology Field Programs, please turn to page 20.

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FP

Investigating a

orgotten ort:

The Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project

Aaron A. Burke & Katherine S. Burke

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Figure 1. Section through Bronze and Iron Age fortifications in Areas B (Bathhouse) and D (Kaplan archive).

afo, ancient Jaffa, sits in southern Tel Aviv on the coast of Israel between Caesarea and Gaza. It consists of an ancient mound atop a sandstone ridge that overlooks the Mediterranean Sea and a sprawling lower city and port (Peilstcker 2000). It was inhabited almost continuously from the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 1900 BC) to the present and possessed, therefore, unique connections with its hinterland neighbors and distant maritime centers throughout the Mediterranean. After nearly sixty years of intermittent work, a new program of renewed and systematic exploration and publication was initiated by the Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project (JCHP) in 2007.

Figure 2. Layout of gate of Egyptian fortress showing location of faade added by Ramesses II (Kaplan archive).

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Figure 3. The Clock Tower square on the north side of Jaffa (pho tograph by A. A. Burke).

A HIsTORY OF JaFFa

The first permanent settlement at Jaffa is usually attributed to the second half of the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 17001530 BC), which is attested by burials and the remains of massive earthen ramparts (Figure 1). During the Late Bronze Age, an Egyptian fortressa part of New Kingdom Egypts attempt to control the coastattests to a large Egyptian garrison based at the site (Kaplan 1960). The means by which Jaffa was wrested from Canaanite control, probably during the fifteenth century B.C., may be suggested in The Capture of Jaffa (Simpson, 2003: 7274). In it Egyptian soldiers are smuggled into the city in baskets to retake the city. The Egyptian fortress, which was located in Area A at the center of the mound, was probably constructed during the fifteenth century BC, although

during the thirteenth century the gate faade was embellished with an inscription by Ramesses II (Figure 2). By the start of the Iron Age, ceramic evidence suggests that Canaanite Jaffa was integrated into the Philistine orbit that had spread northward to Jaffa, which was located only a few kilometers south of the boundary of Philistine settlement, the Yarkon River. While the extent of Philistine settlement during the Iron I period (ca. 12001000 BC) is uncertain, insofar as the biblical tradition can bear witness to the ethnicity of Jaffas inhabitants during the tenth century BC, it appears that Jaffa remained a Phoenician port. During this period Solomon is said to have employed Jaffa as the port by which materials, namely cedar from Lebanon, were brought across the coastal plain and into the highlands (2 Chronicles 2:16). The existence of a large sheltered harbor, which is posited to have existed on the east side of the site in an estuary formed at the outlet of the Ayalon River, may have made Jaffa an ideal port that we suggest was the so-called Solomonic Harbor, which today is no longer visible since it silted up. Evidence of Jaffas Iron II settlement (ca. 1000539 BC), not unlike that of its Middle Bronze Age settlement, consisted largely of ceramics, poorly preserved buildings, and the sites massive fortification system. The original excavator of these fortifications, Jacob Kaplan, suggested that the fortifications were built in response to the threat posed by the Assyrian king Sennacherib, who invaded the coast and attacked Judah at the end of the eighth century BC (Kaplan and Ritter-Kaplan 1993). Assyrian sources attest to the control of Jaffa by its southern neighbor Ashkelon at that time. In any event, the fortifications consisted of a more than 10 meter-high rampart with stone glacis, which was detected on the northern and eastern sides of Jaffa (Figure 1). Not surprisingly the fortifications are quite comparable to those of the Phoenician city of Byblos in Lebanon. Although Jaffa only receives a passing men-

During the Persian Period Jaffa flourished under Phoenician control, which is amply attested in nearly all fields of excavation.
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Figure 4. Map of Jaffa showing areas excavated in 2007. tion, it was in Jaffa during this period that the biblical story of the prophet Jonahs departure for Tarshish is set (Jonah 1:3). During the Persian Period Jaffa flourished under Phoenician control, which is amply attested in nearly all fields of excavation. The town was apparently ceded to the Phoenician king of Sidon along with Dor and thus could be considered part of the Sidonian coast until the arrival of Alexander. At least one destruction, revealed in the 2007 excavations in the Ganor Compound, may reveal the early stages of the Hasmonean conflict with the Seleucids in the mid-second century BC. In 63 BC, when Palestine came under Roman control, Jaffa began to look increasingly Roman. Its importance, however, as the primary port of Jerusalem was undermined by Herods construction of Caesarea Maritima to the north. Thus, Jaffas geographic position with respect to Jerusalem was superseded, thus undermining Jaffas growth. Nevertheless, on the western side of the mound Kaplan uncovered two-storied houses of wealthy Jewish citizens of Jaffa dated to the first century AD that were destroyed in the First Jewish Revolt (AD 6670), which are similar to contemporaneous homes found in the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem. While Jaffa suffered a fate not unlike other cities in Palestine during Roman control, it continued to thrive into late Roman and Byzantine times. This is amply attested

While Jaffa suffered a fate not unlike other cities in Palestine during Roman control, it continued to thrive into late Roman and Byzantine times.
by evidence of occupation not only atop the mound but also throughout the lower town to the east of the tell. The transition into the early Islamic period (AD 6141098) is difficult to distinguish as the town seems largely unchanged by the rise of Islam, and although many of the major Crusader buildings were not preserved following their abandonment, significant traces of their occupation are to be found in nearly all excavation areas. During the Mamluk period Venetian traders exported the regions cotton from Jaffa. By 1514 Jaffa like the rest of the Levant fell under Ottoman control, which remained Backdirt | 73

in place until 1917 when allied powers divided up Ottoman holdings. The Ottoman period is perhaps one of the most interesting phases of settlement in Jaffa, forming an essential link between the towns past and its present form. In addition to extensive archaeological phases, which consist of the foundations of buildings and cemeteries, standing buildings, monuments, maps, travel logs, and photos permit a detailed understanding of the Jaffas features and its evolution during the Ottoman period, during which it was once again Palestines principal port (Figure 3).

ThE JaFFa CULTURaL HERITaGE PROjEcT

Despite its evident historical importance and that since 1947 more than eighty excavation permits have been issued for Jaffa, its archaeology remains virtually unknown. The reason is simple: despite years of archaeological research and recent salvage excavations in advance of urban renewal, no systematic publication strategy for previous and ongoing archaeological work at Jaffa has ever existed. Therefore, Jaffa has contributed little to scholarly discussions of the settlement of the coastal plain and Mediterranean trade. For this reason in 2007 the JCHP was initiated under the direction of Martin Peilstcker (Israel Antiquities Authority; hereafter IAA) and Aaron Burke. The JCHP is an interdisciplinary cultural heritage project aimed at revealing, researching, preserving, and presenting the cultural heritage of Jaffa. As a large and complicated archaeological site within a living town with a diverse cultural heritage, coordinating these efforts is a monumental task. For this reason, the JCHP is a collaborative research project involving a number of institutions, which also include the Gutenberg Universitt in Mainz (Germany) and the Old Jaffa Development Company as well as affiliated research associates. It is divided into a number of projects, the activities, resources, and results of which are coordinated, shared, and disseminated. Its activities are fourfold: fieldwork, publication, conservation, and outreach. Initial work in the summer of 2007 focused on archaeological fieldwork and groundwork for a publication strategy for unpublished research.

FIELDwORk
In 2007 fieldwork was undertaken by the IAA in four major areas: the Qishle or Turkish fortress on the north, the Ottoman harbor on the west, the French Hospital on the south, and on the eastern slope in the Ganor Compound (Figure 4) where a joint excavation program was carried out by UCLA and the IAA. The primary goal of our fieldwork was to provide a comprehensive picture of settlement in this area. While previous excavations by the IAA in the southern and eastern portions of the compound were excavated in 19941996, 19992000, 20022003, and 2006, a large area of Backdirt | 74

about one hundred 5-x-5-m squares (ca. 0.25 ha) remained unexplored (Figure 5). Settlement phases encountered in the Ganor Compound in 2007 consisted of the following: Persian, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Early Islamic, Crusader, Ottoman, and the British Mandate. The earliest remains were encountered in probes in the center of the excavation area where the foundations of a large Persian building were encountered revealing a rich occupation with materials in situ within destruction layers. Hellenistic building phases were found above, although their complete plan cannot yet be reconstructed. Following Hellenistic settlement the area was abandoned during the early Roman period and reused as a cemetery during the late Roman period. In our deep sounding one burial featured a canted ashlar block cover and a late Roman cooking pot placed at one end (Figure 6). In the Byzantine period a large, secular basilica was built over the entire area. Complete with a mosaic, which was conserved and removed (Figure 7), nearly the entire plan of this structure was recovered. Despite the presence of early Islamic ceramics across the excavation area, no structures are preserved above the basilica that can be definitively identified with an early Islamic phase of occupation. It may be, therefore, that the area was largely an open activity area at that time. The early Islamic remains stand in stark contrast to the unequivocal evidence for Crusader settlement of this area during the twelfth century, including the plan of a building with plastered walls and floors. This area, outside the city wall to the east, was not reoccupied until the Ottoman period, when the bases of loadbearing arches were cut into the Crusader and Byzantine layers below. These foundations were later demolished during the British Mandate and replaced with large, crude cement bases.

cavation plans and sections, field diaries, site and object photos, negatives, pottery bucket records, and more than three thousand object registration cards. These were digitized and will be incorporated into a single online database. In order to assess the feasibility of publishing Kaplans data, we examined the records of the excavations of the fortification system in Areas B, D, and G at the northern end of the site (Figure 1). This revealed that the materials do permit the publication of Kaplans excavations in a manner commensurate with modern standards. The first volume, a collection of articles entitled The History and Archaeology of Jaffa, is projected to be published in 2009 and will include several studies resulting from the project initiated in 2007.

Photos, opposite page (from top): Figure 5. Ganor Compound excavations in 2007 (photo graph by A. A. Burke). Figure 6. Roman tomb in deep sounding (photograph by A. A. Burke). Figure 7. Byzantine basilica mosaics in Ganor Compound (photograph by A. A. Burke).

LOOkING AhEaD
In 2008 the JCHP will initiate fieldwork in the area of the upper mound, in order to expose Bronze and Iron Age levels. Given the amount of development in the region, the IAA under the auspices of the JCHP will also continue salvage excavations. Preparatory work for publishing the Kaplan materials will also continue. Aaron Burke is Assistant Professor of the Archaeology of Ancient Israel and the Levant in the Near Eastern Languages and Cultures Department, and Co-Director of the Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project, UCLA. Katherine S. Burke is Research Associate at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology and Associate Director of the Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project, UCLA.
References Cited Kaplan, Jacob 1960. Jaffa. IEJ 10:12122. Kaplan, Jacob and Haya Ritter-Kaplan 1993. Jaffa. In NEAEHL, vol. 2, ed. E. Stern, 65559. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society. Peilstcker, Martin 2000. Tel Yafo (Jaffa): A Key Site of the Central Coastal Plain Re-Discovered. Preliminary Results from New Excavations in the 1990s. In Proceedings of the First International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East, eds. P. Matthiae et al., 134552. Rome: Universit degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza. 2006. La ville franque de Jaffa la lumire des fouilles rcentes. Bulletin Monumental 164:99104.

ANaLYsIs aND PUbLIcaTION WORk

In addition to our archaeological fieldwork, in 2007 substantive progress was made towards publication of previous archaeological research. A digital archive of the records of Jacob Kaplans excavations (1955-1982) was initiated. They include ex-

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LD

eath at Domuztepe in the Sixth Millennium BC

Elizabeth Carter
n 1993 I began a regional survey of the Kahramanmarash valley. It was at that time an unexplored, but potentially important, region along the Syro-Anatolian frontier. Once we discovered Domuztepe (Figure 1), I realized its importance immediately and invited Dr. Stuart Campbell, then a recent Ph.D. who had written his dissertation on the Halaf Period (sixth millennium BC), to come to Turkey and participate in a systematic surface survey of the site (Figure 2). Our early work established the size of the prehistoric occupation at about twenty hectares, one of the largest settlements of this date in the ancient Near East. In 1995 I began excavations at the site in co-operation with the Kahramanmarash Museum and Dr. Campbell, who by then had become a lecturer at the University of Manchester (Figure 3). All of our work in Turkey has taken place with the support and help of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the local museum and officials in Kahramanmarash and the region. Backdirt | 76

The site also has a restricted late period occupation. A sounding in Operation VII shows that the mound was reoccupied after a 5000-year hiatus when the top of the main mound and western side of the site was settled in the Hellenistic Period (ca. 331 BC). Excavations in Operation VII shows that a substantial building was constructed on the top of the mound in Late Roman times during the first two centuries AD and that this structure was rebuilt and recycled until the Middle Islamic Period (eleventh-fourteenth centuries AD). Elizabeth Mullane, UCLA Archaeology Program, and Asa Eger, University of Chicago, are in charge of this aspect of the project. In the summer of 2007 (September 14-16) the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures sponsored an international and interdisciplinary conference at the Cotsen Institute that included participants from those who had worked on the site and the survey from its early years to two students who participated in the season just last summer. Our goal was to discuss the preparation of the first two volumes of the final publication of our research and to present the latest results of our analyses. Fifteen participants came from a variety of US and international institutions. Talks and lively discussions on surveys, chronology, stratigraphy, ceramics, lithics and small finds, the death pit, ritual, symbolism, style, and trade were combined with detailed discussions of past environments, settlement structure (including geophysical data) and the reports of our plant and animal specialists. Dr. Arlene Miller Rosen (University College London), Professor Steven Rosen (Ben Gurion University of the Negev), and Professor Guillermo Algaze (UCSD) served as consultants. Workshops devoted to the structure and completion of the publications also took place. I would like to thank Professor Charles Stanish and the staff of the Cotsen Institute for their help in organizing the conference and to express my gratitude to Dr. Ernestine Elster, the former Director of Publications and long-time supporter of our project, for allowing us to use her home for our final party and show our guests a bit more of Los Angeles than Fowler A222. Excavations until recently have concentrated on the Late Halaf architectural layers at Domuztepe (Late Neolithic) immediately below the surface of Operation I on the southern mound (ca. 5500 BC). The discussion below focuses on some of our most recent finds from earlier levels:

Figure 1 (top): Map of Turkey showing the location of Domuztepe. Figure 2 (bottom): Topographic plan of Domuztepe showing the location of the operations.

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Figure 3 (top): View of Domuztepe from the East. Figure 4 (bottom): Ditch and Red Terrace in Operation 1, back-filled death pit marked with an arrow

the Early Halaf ditch cut into the red terrace, and the mass burial (death pit) also cut into the red terrace a bit south of the ditch (Figure 4). The northern area of Operation I was found to rest on an artificial terrace and to predate the adjacent structures to the south. Although we will use the term ditch for simplicity, it is slightly misleading because it is actually not a single feature. It is a complex linear feature of repeatedly recut channels that runs east-west along the upper section of terrace edge and cuts the lower parts of the terrace deposits. The ditch was full of ceramics, other artifacts, bones, charcoal, and gleyed soil. It was recut numerous times as the terrace grew in height. Five new

radiocarbon dates allow us to date the deposit to ca. 5800-5900 cal BC, the earliest excavated context on the site to date. The deposit from the ditch soil contained a high concentration of finds: ceramics, bone tools including finely worked needles, lithics, animal bone, stamp seals, and part of a handled obsidian mirror. Here I discuss three unique painted vessels from the ditch that contribute to our understanding of the cultural history of the period. The first vessel shows an architectural scene (Figure 5). Four groups of three peaked-roof structures made of what appears to be posts and reed matting are placed around the shoulder of the vessel. The central building is shown from the broad side and has a bowed ridgepole on which a row of birds sits. If these are accurate depictions of contemporary dwellings or special purpose buildings, then it is no wonder that their archaeological preservation above the foundation level is so ephemeral at the site. The second vessel is a jar showing women dancing in a circle (Turkish halay; Figure 6). The women stand below rosettes and wear long slightly transparent skirts. They hold hands, arms bent upwards at the elbows, and seem to move to the right around the pot. They may well be wearing animal masks with horns and long streamers, which are portrayed in profile, while their fringed skirts and lower bodies are shown frontally. Finally this same context also yielded the death pot (Figure 7): a jar decorated with a scene that depicts a tree, with two headless male figures splayed flat on the ground surrounded by birds, and a head, which we can identify on the basis of other single heads with a larger figure facing right. The figure is shown in pseudo-profile, facing right and carrying an unidentified object in his raised right hand. These naturalistically decorated vessels give us

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A RTIFaCTS

OF

DOMUZTEPE

Top Left: Drawing of architectural pot. W. P. Finnerty Top Right: The death pot Photos by S. Campbell; Rollout drawing W.P. Finnerty Middle Left: Photo reconstruction of architectural pot. S. Campbell Middle Right: Sherds showing human heads. Photo K. Cronin Bottom Left: Drawing of jar showing a circle dance on the shoulder. W. P. Finnerty Bottom Right: Pendant figurines without heads. Photo S. Campbell Backdirt | 79

DOMUZTEPE DEaTH PIT

Top: Reconstruction of the pit made by joining together a large number of individual photos using GIS. E. Kansa. Middle Left: Skull buried separately out side the death pit. Photo S. Campbell. Middle Right: Skull reconstructed showing blunt force trauma to the buried side of the head. Photo Suellen Gauld. Bottom: Color reconstruction of the upper phases of the pit. W.P. Finnerty.

an exceptional new insight into the architecture, dance, and symbolic thought of the inhabitants of the site in the early sixth millennium BC. Might these vessels of the Halaf Period be the means of expressing symbolic and narrative activities that in earlier periods appear in wall decoration at sites such as atalhyk? Finds from the ditch, aside from these vessels, included around 20 percent of the stamp seals and pendants found to date on the site, a large number of bone tools, and a fine terracotta head. We do yet not know whether the varied and striking finds from the ditch originally were used in buildings on the terrace or if these discoveries are unusual for the site as a whole in this period. We suspect that these finds originate in activities with particular communal and ritual significance, such as feasting, but this supposition remains to be established.

THE DEaTH PIT

In 2006 Drs. Suellen Gauld and Sarah Whitcher Kansa completed their analysis of human and animal bone from the large mass burial dated to ca. 5600 BC called the death pit (Figure 8). Analysis of the approximately 3000 identifiable human bone fragments indicates a minimum number of individuals of 38, representing both sexes and all age classes. These studies of the human bone demonstrate extensive corpse processing, preceded by catastrophic death and possibly followed by consumption of human flesh, that took place before deposition of the fractional and extensively fragmented remains into a pit burial. The animal bone assemBackdirt | 80

blage (3863 animal bones of all types and 3650 indeterminate bone fragments) from the pit shows a somewhat different composition than the rest of the site with more cattle and dog and far fewer pigs. It emphasizes prime age breeding stock. A minimum number of 12 cows were slaughtered and included in the pit indicating a communal ritual. Human and animal bones are both heavily processed in much the same way.

ENVIRONMENT

aNd ECONOMY

Plants and Animals The food economy relied heavily on domestic plants and animals. The animal bones show very little evidence of hunting and include sheep/goat, cattle and pig. The cereal grains are domestic and consist largely of emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccum) with some barley (Hordeum vulgare). Einkorn (T. monoccocum) and free-threshing wheat (T. durum/aestivum) are also present. In 2006-2007, cores from the Salk Gl on the western side of the valley were analyzed. Interestingly, coring results from Henk Woldring and Elsa Kleine of Gronigen University have shown a peak in a particular green alga (Pediastrum boreanum), which abruptly starts during the Halaf and falls back to insignificant values around the end of this period. This type of algal bloom has been connected with a temporary change in nutrient composition of the lake water, most probably as a result of the introduction of cattle dung. Crafts, Craft Residues, and Trade Study of the small finds and craft residues from the site show that a wide variety of craft activities related to textile and ceramic production, as well as lithic and stone vessel manufacture, took place on-site. Dr. Elizabeth Healeys studies of obsidian have shown that both the eastern (Lake Van) and the western (Cappadocian) obsidian sources are present at Domuztepe. The work of the archaeologists and specialists at the site is now beginning to form a nuanced picture of life in the first half of the sixth millennium BC. The nature of our discoveries has led us to focus on communal ritual as a means of integrating a large population. The residents of Domuztepe, however, made good use of the diverse resources that surrounded the site, engaged in trade and manufacture, and developed a basic system of accountability: all suggesting a time of emerging social complexity at the site.

Elizabeth Carter is Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology and Chair of the Near Eastern Languages and Cultures Department. She is a long-time member of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology and former Chair of the Archaeology Program.

Above: Death pit under excavation. Photo E. Carter. Below: Overview of Operation I with death pit under the shade in the center.

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Commentary

Why I Love eBay

by Charles Stanish
Below: Authentic antiquity, or modern fake? Photo by Charles Stanish.

A little over a decade ago, professional archaeologists had a collective nightmarethe emergence of an Internet auction site in the mid-1990s called eBay, which sold illegal, looted antiquities. The illegal market for antiquities had existed for centuries, of course, with devastating consequences for the worlds cultural heritage. But at least we took some slight comfort in the fact that this illicit trade was confined largely to either high-end buyers or dealers on one side or to rural flea markets on the other. The sheer physical constraints, by todays standards, kept the market relatively small. The creation of eBay and other online auctions altered the whole landscape. As Alex Barker, the current Director of the Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of MissouriColumbia, wrote in 2000: Some of the main players in the antiquities trade have traditionally been art dealers and auction houses. Now theyve been joined by a new and powerful force, the online auction house, led by giants eBay and Amazon. The global reach and instant accessibility of the Internet which serves us so well in other areas here has simply served to democratize the antiquities trade. Everyone has access to a dealer or auction house; commercial antiquities dealers and auction houses are never more than a few mouse clicks away (Barker 2000). In the old pre-eBay days, the cost of acquiring and ultimately selling an antiquity was high. In economic terms, the total costs of getting an illegal object from the ground to the retail buyer were substantial. The actual looter was usually paid little, but the various middlemen down the line added huge costs. Transportation was a big expense, even for portable objects, and the potential for arrest was always a risk that added to the total cost Backdirt | 82

of doing business. These costs, plus those associated with the authentication, conservation, and occasional restoration of the pieces, ultimately made the buying and selling of quality antiquities a wealthy persons vice. Our greatest fear was that the democratization of antiquities trafficking would lead to widespread looting promoted by ordinary travelers and micro-dealers. This seemed a logical outcome of a system where anyone could open up an eBay site and sell artifacts dug up by locals anywhere in the world. It seemed that an unorganized but collectively massive looting campaign was about to begin, with everything from potsherds to pieces of the Great Wall and Stonehenge put on the auction block for a few dollars. A very curious thing has happened in the eight years since Barker wrote that article that reflected so many of our fears. In an ironic twist, it appears that the existence of electronic buying and selling has actually hurt the antiquities trade. This is counterintuitive, to say the least, and it is virtually impossible to get quantitative data on this phenomenon, for obvious reasons. How is this possible? Here, I offer some observations, most anecdotal, but based upon many years of professional interest, which help us understand this strange business. The short answer is that there appears to have been a steady shift by the primary producers of the objects from the actual looting of sites to creating cottage industries that produce cheap fakes. Likewise, no one thought in the pre-internet days that so many people would be willing to put down good money for a low-end piece of airport art. People who used to make a few dollars selling a looted artifact to a middleman in their village can now produce their own almost as good as old objects and go

In an ironic twist, it appears that the existence of electronic buying and selling has actually hurt the antiquities trade. How is this possible?
directly to one person in a nearby town who has an eBay vendor account. I know many of these people in Peru and Bolivia. This person will receive the same amount or even more than they could have received for actual antiquities. Ironically, the low capital needs of the fake artifact business mimics precisely the ancient manufacturing conditions of the real things. I have seen a number of these workshops as well. Using local materials and drawing on their cultural knowledge, small manufacturers can produce pieces that are in some cases remarkably accurate to the real things. The really smart ones do not reproduce pieces at all but create a ever-so-slightly modified version of the real ones that have the look and feel of an authentic ancient object. The economics of these transactions are quite simple. The vast majority of antiquities on eBay are obvious fakes to the trained eye. Like spammers, they must be making money or they would not keep coming back to sell their wares. It is the ability to offer, for minimal cost, the sheer volume of fake knock-offs and airport art sold as ancient objects that apparently workseven if you sell to one in ten thousand, like spam, you are making money. In short, because the eBay phenomenon has so substantially reduced total costs by eliminating middlemen, brick and mortar stores, high-priced dealers, and cutting other marginal expenses, the local eBay-ers and craftsmen make more money knocking off cheap fake artifacts than they can spending days or weeks digging around looking for the real thing. It is true that many former and potential looters lack the skills to make their own artifacts. But the value of their illicit labor decreases every time someone buys a genuine Moche pot for $35, plus S&H, as you can now see on many eBay sites and even on the auctions of established dealers in New York. In other words, because the low-end antiquities market has been flooded with fake antiquities that people actually buy for $35, the value of the real ones has gone down as well, making old-fashioned looting less and less lucrative. The value of real antiquities is likewise impacted by the increased risk that the object that you buy is a fake. The likelihood of reselling it for more money is diminished each year as more of them are produced. Another economic factorrisk of arrestis also removed by eBay fakes. You can never be arrested for importing a fake (which explains why so many eBay dealers are so brazen). If you do intend to import what you think is an illegal antiquity but it turns out to be a fake, you are probably safe, too, even though you are technically violating the law. If you try to sue the seller who is outside the US, good luck. If you question sellers in

the US, they have ingenious ways to avoid returning your money as described below. In a word, the risk from lawsuits or criminal charges is effectively removed from the sale of antiquities when they are not really antiquities, a fact that markedly reduces the cost and risk to both buyer and seller. Since most people cannot distinguish between a good fake and the real thing, as the cost of one goes down, the cost of both decreases along with profits for dealers. This in turn further incentivizes people to make even better fakes, fueling the cycle even more. Remember, making fakes is cheap; digging them up is expensive. Transport cost is dramatically reduced by commerce on the web. One site on eBay advertises a Greek marble head for sale dated to circa 300 B.C.E. For this rare artifact, the shipping costs from Cyprus are a whopping $35 to anywhere in the United States. Of course, it is ludicrous to think that a rare Greek miniature sculpture would be sent by DHL, but that is what they do. This is a far cry from the old days when a real illegal antiquity had to be couriered by a specialist who not only knew how to care for the piece, but how to doctor it up to avoid being arrested at customs, either in the country of origin or in the US. I have been tracking eBay antiquities for many years now in a casual but systematic manner. From what I can tell, the shift from looting sites to the creation of home industry fakes

Local eBay-ers and craftsmen make more money knocking off cheap fake artifacts than they can spending days or weeks digging around looking for the real thing.
in the low-end market began around 2000, around five years after eBay was established. Even more remarkable is that the lowend market phenomenon has actually given rise (as I actually predicted a while back) to the distortion of the mid-range and lower high-end market as well. Again, this seems counterintuitive. How could the selling of bad fakes and tacky airport art as inexpensive antiquities distort the higher end markets? Surely the sophisticated high-end buyers would not be affected by the rubes who pay $14.99 (+ $4.50 shipping) for 7 Ancient Uncleaned, Unsearched Coins straight from the digs of Europe or by the one who pays $223 (+ $30 shipping from Lima) for a genuine Pre Columbian Moche III Fineline piece (which, by the way, you can pick up for $15 from the gal selling pottery outside your tourist bus in Trujillo). Well, the high-enders are indeed affected. It was only a matter of time before a few workshops producing the cheap fakes started to go higher end, producing actual reproductions and forgeries that can fool even supposed experts like me. My tracking of web sites among established dealers tells me that the Chavin piece listed as worth around $1000-2000, but which sells for Backdirt | 83

$150 by their own admission, is probably in that category as well. A number of these workshops in Europe, East Asia, and the Americas are in full production mode. They have swamped the mid- and low high-end market with beautiful pieces that require intensive study by specialists and high-cost technical tests to authenticate. This manufacturing business never could have developed on such a scale without the internet, and they have forever altered the antiquities market beyond anything that we could have imagined just a decade ago. From the professionals point of view, there are really three kinds of antiquities on eBay. The majority are obvious fakes or airport art that can be detected by looking at the picture, even the fuzzy ones. These are easy to pick out because they are not intentional reproductions, but simple pieces manufactured for tourists and sold legitimately as such. The creators of these pieces mix up iconography and choose colors and shapes for the visual effect as contemporary art. They are obviously not ancient. Another 5% or so are probably real while the rest are in the ambiguous category of I would have to hold it in my hand

Why there are so many eBay sites in countries that have treaties with the US that so openly offer antiquities? Is it because they in fact do not have ancient objects to sell at all and know that they are under no real legal threat?
to be able to make an informed decision. This latter category is growing fast. In the first years of eBay, it was about a 50-50 realto-fake ratio. About five years ago, my informal assessment was that about 95% were obvious fakes and the rest were real or dubious. This was the period when the workshops first went into high gear; the market was flooded with low-end junk. Now, the workshops are producing much higher quality fakes, increasing the ambiguous category of objects now available. I base these estimates not only on what I see on eBay, but from my occasional work with U.S. Customs and my avocational fascination with antiquities dealers and antiquities manufacturers in South America. One learns much by hanging around the men and women who produce these objects and by window-shopping in the shops of dealers. I know, for instance, of one fellow who makes grass-tempered reproductions of a 2,000-year-old pottery style. Having been a skilled worker for archaeological projects for years, he learned to get the grass for his fakes from ancient middens near his house. If one were to carbon date the organic residue in his pots, you would get a very old piece indeed. Looters on the north coast of Peru have discovered not only Chancay anthropomorphic vessels, but also the original moulds used to make the vessels. Thanks to professional archaeological reports, they also now use the original clay sources and minerals to make and paint the pottery. As a result, you have virtually perfect reproductions. Not only that, Backdirt | 84

but the fact that the Chancay culture is late in prehistory makes the use of thermoluminescence dating difficult because of its high standard error. I have visited several workshops in Peru and Bolivia. I particularly like the seventeenthnineteenth century painting workshop in a back alley in La Paz where they ask the buyer coming in how old she wants itthe amount and type of lacquer and other oil finishes used to coat the painting depends on what century you want the painting to be from. In an antiquities store in La Paz, I saw about four shelves of supposed Tiwanaku (circa AD 400-100) pottery. I told the owner that most were fakes and she became irritated and called me a liar. So I simply touched each one sequentially saying fake, real from Cochabamba, real from Tiwanaku, fake, fake made by Eugenio in Fuerabamba, and so forth. She paused for a moment, pulled one down that I said was real and told me that it was also a fake. I responded by congratulating her for the fact that her fakes were getting better and she just smiled. This is an instance of what the archaeologist Karen Olsen Bruhns (n.d.) identifies as the very experts themselves being trained on fakes and in turn authenticating objects as real when in fact they are not. Of course, with pottery you can use thermoluminescence dating that can definitively establish the antiquity of the vessel if it is old enough. However, the cost of hiring a professional to take the sample and run the analysis is high for the mid-range pieces, and prohibitively expensive for the low-end market. Some eBay sites are brilliant in this regard. They state that they will return all your money if you have a letter from a recognized specialist that proves the piece not to be authentic. However, this guarantee is nullified if you conduct any kind of destructive analysis on the object. To the non-specialist this seems reasonable. However, the sampling of a few specks of clay from a vessel for thermoluminescence dating by a professional conservator is not even noticeable to the naked eye. While standard procedure in the art and museum world, this is technically a type of destructive analysis. It nullifies the guarantee, but it is the only way that a recognized specialist can possibly prove the authenticity of a piece of ancient pottery. As a result, the guarantee is meaningless. Well-made stone and metal reproductions are almost impossible to authenticate. Some kinds of spectrographic analyses can rule out some specimens as fakes, but if the ancient source materials are used by the producers, it is very difficult to prove definitively whether a piece is authentic or not. The auctions on eBay are full of stone objects purported to be ancient. With the advent of laser lathes and chemical techniques to forge patinas, anyone who buys 50 Neolithic Arrowheads Sahara, an Assyrian alabaster stone Mask 700 BC or Ancient Chinese Jade carvings-Frog Arrowhead thinking that they have bought real antiquities, is, in my opinion, a thoroughly naive fool.

So where does the illegal antiquities market go from here?

Karen Olsen Bruhns (n.d.) notes that there are other positive aspects that have developed out of this otherwise dangerous online market. The fact that the holdings of the dealers around the world are put before the public helps customs officials and other law enforcement agencies. She notes that the web sites also allow countries of origin to have basically a free source of information on antiquities trafficking in and out of their countries. Bruhns also points out that the ability of the internet to host the U.S. State Departments image gallery of items that are protected under special provisions also helps make the illegal antiquities trade a bit more expensive (U.S. Department of State n.d.). From a legal point of view, if it can be demonstrated that a person knowingly brought in an illegal object to the US the penalties are substantially higher than if they did not know it was restricted. Having this information all over the internet increases the likelihood of a person facing a stiffer penalty if caught. Of course, this also begs the question as to why there are so many eBay sites in other countries that have treaties with the US that so openly offer antiquities. Is it because they in fact do not have ancient objects at all to sell and know that they are under no real legal threat? There is another factor looming on the horizon that is rarely discussed by dealers. As the sophistication in forgeries continues to increase, museums, law enforcement, and other professions charged with protecting our cultural heritage will look for even more reliable means of authenticating objects. There will come a time when technology will outpace the looter and antiquities dealer. As with our post-industrial economy in general, the cost of the technologies will likely always fall continually, but the cost of professional labor will always rise, adding another cost for dealers. Like radiocarbon dates for organic objects, the application of these new techniques will become standard practice for all antiquities bought and sold. This will also inject a new element of risk for the buyer that will dramatically add to the cost of illicit, high-end trafficking. In a word, who wants to spend $50,000 on an object guaranteed to be ancient by todays standard, when someone can come along in five years with a new technology that definitively proves it to be a fake by a new standard. So where does the illegal antiquities market go from here? Certainly, looting continues and will continue in the future. There will always be the gamblers who do not act economically rational and will continue to look for the jackpot. The highest-end dealers will probably be around for a long time, but with significantly higher marginal costs associated with their illicit trade. But for most of us the web has forever distorted the illicit antiquities trafficking market in a positive way. The sophistication of the forgery workshops is simply outstanding and each year the incentives to increase quality continue to grow. I have always seen Moche, Chimu, and Nasca reproductions that were difficult to distinguish from the real thing, but I have not seen

so many as I have in recent years. The workshops of Piura and Ica have been around for decades and the quality of their highend products continues to go up. New workshops in places like Puno and Ayacucho are popping up every year. Obviously, as the high quality fakes increase, the real antiquities and the obvious fakes available will decrease in number. This trend started around 2000 and continues today. In 10 more years, I expect to see a return to the roughly 50:50 ratio when eBay started. But instead of a 50/50 split between actual antiquities and junk, I predict it will be 50% low-end objects and 50% ambiguous ones. Of the ambiguous ones, almost all will be high-end forgeries. If you can sell a $15 Moche knock-off for $200, imagine what you can do with a really good reproduction. We can only hope, but it is just conceivable that online commerce will actually put a lot of antiquities trafficking out of business by the sheer volume of sales and quality of product that even fools the experts. What drives this new dynamic is the small fraction of people who actually believe that someone will sell you an ancient Roman coin for less than three dollars or that you can buy a real Moche Fineline for 200 dollars and have it shipped from Peru by mail without any risk. It is this money that provides the capital for the cottage industries to keep producing and fueling the cycle of an ever-increasing quality and quantity of forgeries. There is, in reality, no mystery to all of this. It is the logical outcome of all buyers, sellers, and producers acting in their individual economic self-interests. I suppose that if people stopped believing that you can buy a pill that will help you lose weight without dieting or exercise, or that there really are Nigerian businessmen who will pay a stranger a few million dollars to transfer some money, then it is possible that people will stop paying good money for bad knock-offs online as well and we will return to old- fashioned looting. We will just have to wait and see what surprises the Internet brings us in the future. Charles Stanish is Director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology and Professor of Anthropology at UCLA.
References Cited Barker, A. W. 2000. Ethics, E-Commerce, and the Future of the Past. Society for American Archaeology Bulletin 18(1). Bruhns, Karen Olsen. n.d. International trade in looted antiquities. Electronic document. http://archaeology. about.com/od/lootingandsmuggling/a/plundered_past_2.htm U.S. State Department Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs n.d. International Cultural Property Protection. Electronic document. http://exchanges. state.gov/culprop/index.html.

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Between the Lines

Moche Fineline Painting from San Jos de Moro

By Don McClelland

oche civilization, which flourished on the north coast of Peru between A.D. 200 and 800, is widely known for its beautiful ceramic vessels. Some are three-dimensional modeled representations of people, mythical creatures, animals, plants and other objects. Other vessels are decorated with complex painted designs that illustrate a wide variety of topics, including warfare, sacrifice, and oceanic activities performed by mythical creatures or human beings. Thousands of these vessels now reside in museums and private collections throughout the world. When Chris Donnan and Donna McClelland began their research on the iconography of Moche art in the late 1960s, it soon became clear that the complex painted designs are the richest source of iconographic content. However, it was found to be impractical to study the designs on a vessel by inspecting a few photographs of it, because the designs are painted on the round surface of the vessels. If the design is transferred from the vessel surface to a flat rollout drawing, it is possible to see the entire design at one time. Although rollout drawings of Moche paintings had been produced previously by several researchers and artists, Chris and Donna felt that a larger sample of rollout drawings was essential for understanding Moche paintings and that these rollouts needed to be more accurate than those previously done. This conviction led them to develop a new method of producing rollouts, in which the drawing is accurately traced from a large number of photographs, each of which covers only a small area of the vessels surface. The resultant collection of photographs and drawings has become an important part of the UCLA Moche Archive, which now contains over 800 rollout drawings. By the mid-1990s, Chris and Donna had located, photographed, and drawn enough paintings that they felt the time had come to produce a definitive summary of the Moche fineline painting style. The result was Moche Fineline Painting: Its Evolution and Its Artists, which was published by the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History in 1999. Historically the vast majority of Moche vessels have been looted by grave robbers, leaving no record of the context in Backdirt | 86

which they were found or the valley of coastal Peru from which they were looted. However, through stylistic analysis beginning in the early 1980s followed by archaeological excavations beginning in 1991, Chris and Donna were able to identify more than 225 examples of elaborately painted Moche ceramics that came from a single location: the site of San Jos de Moro in the Jequetepeque Valley of northern Peru. Moreover, these vessels were clearly produced during a brief period of time, the final phase of the Moche style. Even before the 1999 book was published, a firm decision had been made to follow it with a similar volume devoted entirely to the Moche painted ceramics from San Jos de Moro. Most of the known Moro fineline painted ceramics are illustrated in this book: Moche Fineline Painting from San Jos de Moro, which was published by the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology in 2007. Many of the illustrations are in color and are accompanied by rollout drawings of the designs painted on their chambers. The distinctive features of the Moro vessels suggest that the potters and painters were deliberately producing a substyle of Moche ceramics, which reflected their ethnic identity. Many of the potters and painters who created the Moro vessels probably knew each other and would have been able to recognize each others work. Through a detailed analysis of the painted vessels from San Jos de Moro, we have been able to identify multiple paintings by eighteen individual artists and have used similarities in style to suggest how the paintings by certain artists influenced the paintings of others. This volume provides the first clear example of a Moche substyle and allows the reader, for the first time, to visualize and appreciate a community of Moche potters and painters who developed a distinctive style of ceramics and left a splendid legacy in clay. As other substyles are identified, researchers will be able to recognize distinct Moche polities and to assess their degree of interaction, thus giving us important insights about the nature of Moche political organization. Don McClelland is a Research Associate in the UCLA Moche Archive.

2007 Cotsen Publications

The Archaeology of Ritual

Edited by Evangelos Kyriakidis
Cotsen Advanced Seminars 3 ISBN 978-1-931745-47-5 (p), 978-1-931745-48-2 (c) This book is the fruit of the third Cotsen Advanced Seminar conducted at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA. A wide spectrum of scholars, historians, art historians, anthropologists, students of performance and of religion, archaeologists, cognitive scientists, and linguists were all asked to think and comment on how ritual can be traced in archaeology and on possible directions for ritual research in the discipline. The outcome is a collection of papers that is thought provoking, often controversial, but always of extremely high quality.

Berenike 1999/2000

By Steven E. Sidebotham & Willeke Z. Wendrich

Monograph 56 ISBN 978-1-931745-28-4 (p), 978-1-931745-29-1 (c) Excavations at Berenike, a Greco-Roman harbor on the Egyptian Red Sea coast, have provided extensive evidence for trade with India, South-Arabia and sub-Saharan Africa. The results of the 1999 and 2000 excavations by the joint mission of the University of Delaware, Leiden University and UCLA, have been published in a comprehensive report, with specialists analyses of different object groups and an overview of evidence for the trade route from the Indian perspective. The book is lavishly illustrated with photographs, drawings, plans, and a large foldout map of Berenike and Sikait.

Kasapata and the Archaic Period of the Cuzco Valley

Edited by Brian S. Bauer
Monograph 57 ISBN 978-1-931745-34-5 (p), 978-1-931745-35-2 (c) Although the Cuzco Valley of Peru is renowned for being the heartland of the Incas, little is known concerning its pre-Inca inhabitants. Until recently it was widely believed that the first inhabitants of the Cuzco Valley were farmers who lived in scattered villages along the valley floor (ca. 1000 BC) and that there were no Archaic Period remains in the region. This perspective was challenged during a systematic survey of the valley, when numerous preceramic sites were found. Additional information came from excavations at the site of Kasapata, the largest preceramic site identified during the survey. It is now clear that the Cuzco Valley was inhabited, like many other regions of the Andes, soon after the retreat of the Pleistocene glaciers and that it supported thriving cultures of hunters and foragers for hundreds of generations before the advent of permanent settlements. Backdirt | 87

Machu Picchu: Exploring an Ancient Sacred Center

By Johan Reinhard
World Heritage and Monuments 1 ISBN 978-1-931745-44-4 Machu Picchu, recently voted one of the New Wonders of the World, is one of the worlds most famous archaeological sites, yet it remains a mystery. Even the most basic questions are still unanswered: What was its meaning and why was it built in such a difficult location? Renowned explorer Johan Reinhard attempts to answer such elusive questions from the perspectives of sacred landscape and archaeoastronomy. Using information gathered from historical, archaeological, and ethnographical sources, Reinhard demonstrates how the site is situated in the center of sacred mountains and associated with a sacred river, which is in turn symbolically linked with the suns passage. Taken together, these features meant that Machu Picchu formed a cosmological, hydrological, and sacred geological center for a vast region.

Moche Fineline Painting from San Jos de Moro

By Donna McClelland, Donald McClelland, and Christopher B. Donnan
Monograph 58 ISBN 978-1-931745-38-3 (p), 978-1-931745-39-0 (c) Moche civilization flourished on the north coast of Peru from AD 200 to 800. Although the Moche had no writing system, they left a vivid artistic record of their beliefs and activities on intricately painted ceramic vessels, several thousand of which are scattered in museums and private collections throughout the world today. Unfortunately, nearly all were looted by grave robbers so their origin and context are unknown. In recent years, however, through a combination of archaeological excavation and stylistic analysis, it has been possible to identify more than 250 painted vessels from the site of San Jose Moro. To date, this is the largest sample of Moche art from a single place and time. Thus it provides a unique opportunity to identify a distinct sub-style of Moche ceramics, and to assess its range of artistic and technological variation. Moreover, within the sample it is possible to identify multiple paintings by 18 different artists, thus elucidating the range of subject matter that an artist would paint, as well as the variation in the way he would portray the same scene. By discussing and illustrating more than 200 painted vessels from San Jos de Moro, this volume provides insights about a community of ancient Peruvian potters who shared a distinctive painting style and left a fascinating record of their achievement.

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Moche Tombs at Dos Cabezas

By Christopher B. Donnan
Monograph 59 ISBN 978-1-931745-51-2 (p), 978-1-931745-52-9 (c) This study focuses on five extraordinary Moche tombs that were archaeologically excavated at the site of Dos Cabezas. The tombs are remarkable not only for the wealth of objects they contained but also because we know how the tombs were constructed, how they relate to one another both spatially and temporally, and what individuals they contained. The tombs provide an unusual opportunity to understand aspects of Moche funerary practice that are lost when tombs are looted, and to appreciate the extraordinary artistic and technological sophistication of this ancient Peruvian civilization.

Rethinking Mycenaean Palaces II

Edited by Michael L. Galaty and William A. Parkinson
Monograph 60 ISBN 978-1-931745-43-7 (p), 978-1-931745-42-0 (c) This revised and expanded edition of the classic 1999 edited book includes all the chapters from the original volume plus a new, updated, introduction and several new chapters. The current book is an up-to-date review of research into Mycenaean palatial systems with chapters by archaeologists and Linear B specialists that will be useful to scholars, instructors, and advanced students. This book aims to define more accurately the term palace in light of both recent archaeological research in the Aegean and current anthropological thinking on the structure and origin of early states. Regional centers do not exist as independent entities. They articulate with more extensive sociopolitical systems. The concept of palace needs to be incorporated into enhanced models of Mycenaean state organization, ones that more completely integrate primary centers with networks of regional settlement and economy.

The Archaeology and Historical Ecology of Late Holocene San Miguel Island
By Torben C. Rick

The Archaeology and Historical Ecology of San Miguel Island

By Torben C. Rick
Perspectives in California Archaeology 8 ISBN 978-1-931745-36-9 (p), 978-1-931745-37-6 (c) Californias northern Channel Islands have one of the longest and best-preserved archaeological records in the Americas, spanning some 13,000 calendar years. Focusing on the archaeology of five sites dated to the last 3,000 years, this book examines the archaeology and historical ecology of San Miguel Island, the westernmost and most isolated of the northern Channel Islands. Detailed faunal, artifact, and other data are woven together in a diachronic analysis that investigates the interplay of social and ecological developments on this unique island.

Perspectives in California Archaeology, Volume 8

Series Editor: Jeanne E. Arnold Cotsen Institute of Archaeology University of California, Los Angeles

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Faculty Profiles

Cotsen Institute Core Faculty

Jeanne E. Arnold
Jeanne Arnold (Professor of Anthropology) continues work on three primary research projects. Two projects focus on complex hunter-gatherers on the American Pacific Coast and the third is a modern material culture study of contemporary Los Angeles households. Ongoing work on the Channel Islands centers on evidence for the invention of Chumash plank canoe, craft production systems and political economy on the northern Channel Islands, and the role of property ownership in the emergence of political leadership. Analyses have been completed from Arnolds excavations in British Columbia at Tsq:ls, a Coast Salish historic village in the Fraser River Valley. This work was conducted in conjunction with the international Fraser Valley Archaeological Project team. Work also continues with the Department of Anthropologys Center on Everyday Lives of Families. Jeff Brantingham (Assistant Professor and Vice Chair of Anthropology) continues to conduct research on paleoanthropology of the Tibetan Plateau, method and theory, evolutionary theory and simulation modeling. One of his projects is the UC MaSC (Mathematical and Simulation of Crime) Project, which is funded by the Human Social Dynamics Program at the National Science Foundation. The project integrates theoretical, methodological and empirical work to develop analytical and computational models of crime pattern formation. Simultaneous development of mathematical and simulation models, as well as empirical testing, will provide a guide for the experimental use of these tools in the social sciences. Also, the interdisciplinary foundation of the project will provide a model for collaboration between mathematicians and social scientists. Aaron Burke (Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures) is the co-director of the Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project (JCHP), an interdisciplinary cultural heritage project with a research focus on the history and archaeology of Jaffa in Tel Aviv, Israel. Initiated in January 2007, the project is a collaborative effort between its senior partners, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) and UCLA, and other partners including The Gutenberg Universitt in Mainz (Germany) and the Old Jaffa Development Company. The JCHP serves as a coordinating body for research, publication, conservation, and outreach regarding the cultural heritage of Jaffa (see page 70).

P. Jeffrey Brantingham

Aaron Burke

Elizabeth Carter

Liz Carter (Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures) continues work at the site of Domuztepe. The site, located at a major crossroads between highlands and lowlands along the Syro-Anatolian frontier of south central Turkey, has been the focus of survey and excavation projects since 1995. The last few years of fieldwork have uncovered a number of exciting finds, including a large mass burial dated to ca. 5600 BC called the death pit (see page 76). During late summer of 2007, Carter organized a multi-day international and interdisciplinary conference at UCLA that was co-sponsored by the Cotsen Institute and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. The conference brought together 15 project participants and several consultants to share results of data analyses and to discuss the publications resulting from this multi-year project.

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Chris Donnan (Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Cotsen Institute Executive Committee) recently published two books with the Cotsen Institute: Moche Fineline Painting from San Jos de Moro (see page 86) and Moche Tombs at Dos Cabezas. These full color publications have been very well received. Donnan dazzled audiences at book lectures with the impressive painted pottery from San Jos de Moro and the stories of discovering five unlooted tombs at Dos Cabezas. These tombs provide an unusual opportunity to understand aspects of Moche funerary practice that are lost when tombs are looted. Also, Donnan is close to completing a book on the excavation of Chotuna, a site that corresponds to an ancient Peruvian legend.

Christopher B. Donnan

Susan Downey (Professor of Art History) has been a member of the Mission Franco-Syrienne de Dura-Europos (Syria) since 1988 and continues to instruct, publish and lecture on the results of this multi-year project. In 2007, she served as a Member of the Scientific Committee for the Eredi di Alessandro in Asia Exhibit (Museo Civico dArte Antica, Torino, Italy), and was commissioned to write the catalogue essay on Parthian art. While she contributes significantly to the Interdepartmental Archaeology Program through the instruction and mentorship of graduate students, she is also very active in a number of key administrative committees at UCLA. Downey also regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Greek and Roman art and archaeology and travels for public and university lectures on her research in Syria and Iraq. Ioanna Kakoulli (Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering with joint appointment in the UCLA/Getty Masters Program in the Conservation of Archaeological and Ethnographic Materials) is currently focusing on the analysis of spontaneously mummified human remains from the Tarapac Valley in northern Chile through investigations of the taphonomic and diagenetic processes of hair and skin and the study of the burial micro-environment. The innovation of this research is based on the application of non-invasive and non-destructive methods of examination and analysis including field spectrophotometry, CT scanning, multispectral imaging and combined variable pressure scanning electron microscopy and Raman spectroscopy. Future plans include the application of analytical techniques using synchrotron radiation. Richard Lesures (Associate Professor of Anthropology) interests include ancient belief systems, social relations, and sociopolitical organization, as well as the conceptual framework of archaeology and the history of anthropological thought. His field research has concerned pre-state (Formative) societies of Mesoamerica and he has worked along the Pacific coast of Chiapas and in the highland state of Tlaxcala. In February 2008, he organized a small conference of scholars working on Archaic to Formative sociopolitical transformations in the Soconusco area of coastal Mexico. The conference, hosted at the Cotsen Institute, included archaeologists with a number of specializations and incorporated multiple geographical, temporal, and analytical scales of analysis to address the period of 4000-400 BC in Chiapas. Kathryn McDonnell (Assistant Professor of Classics) is a new addition to the UCLA faculty and to the Cotsen Institute core faculty. She is interested in various aspects of Italian archaeology, particularly the Roman Empire. Her research interests include Roman tombs, the archaeology of non-elites, the archaeology of gender, Latin epigraphy, and historical and Roman slavery. She co-directs the excavations at San Martino in Torano di Borgorose, Italy, which is one of the new UCLA Archaeology Field Programs. The excavations will focus on the area around the church where there is archaeological and/or documentary evidence of a pre-Roman sanctuary, a Roman-era villa, a medieval hospital, and the still-standing medieval church. Please read her interview on page 10 to learn morewelcome Kathryn!

Susan B. Downey

Ioanna Kakoulli

Richard Lesure

Kathryn J. McDonnell

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Sarah Morris

Since 2004, Sarah Morris (Steinmetz Professor of Classical Archaeology and Material Culture in the Department of Classics and Advisor of the Post-baccalaureate Program in Classics), along with John K. Papadopoulos, and Lorenc Bejko (ICAA & Institute of Archaeology) have been co-directing the excavation of the burial tumulus at the site of Lofknd. The project was carried out as a collaboration of the Cotsen Institute, the International Center for Albanian Archaeology (ICAA) and the Institute of Archaeology, Tirana. The overall aim of the Lofknd Archaeological Project was to initiate protohistoric investigations in south-central Albania and the final season of excavations at the Early Iron Age tumulus was in 2007 (see page 36). Morris is also exploring Bronze Age vessels from Greece to trace the early development of wine and wine-related materials. The primary research projects of John Papadopoulos (Professor and Chair of Classics) all have to do with the theme of death and particularly burial grounds in the formative period between ca. 1200 and 600 BC. He is actively involved in the excavation, research, and publication of three important Early Iron Age cemeteries: the burial tumulus of Lofknd in Albania (see page 36), the Early Iron Age cemeteries in the area of the Athenian Agora, and the cemetery that spans the Late Bronze Age through the early Classical period at the site of Liatovouni in Epirus, northwest Greece. Research on these cemeteriesone in the heart of the ancient Greek world, the other two on its peripheryare dispelling scholarly notions of a Dark Age and are showing that this is a formative period that led directly to the creation of the ancient Greek city-state.

John K. Papadopoulos

Ellen Pearlstein

Over the past year, Ellen Pearlstein (Adjunct Assistant Professor and Academic Coordinator of the UCLA/Getty Masters Program in the Conservation of Archaeological and Ethnographic Materials) has worked to promote collaborative conservation education, including teaching a program for students in Egypt and working with the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum in Palm Springs to train UCLA students (see page 39). Pearlstein also received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to organize and host a symposium in June 2008 entitled, Storage Symposium: Preservation and Access to Archaeological Materials. This symposium will bring together directors of excavations and of centralized storage repositories for archaeological collections, archaeological conservators who have achieved innovative and accessible storage methods, and archaeologists who have developed digital management systems. Greg Schachner (Assistant Professor of Anthropology) is a new addition to the UCLA faculty and to the Cotsen Institute core faculty (see page 12). He is currently working on three primary research projects: completing a book manuscript based upon his recently completed fieldwork in the El Morro Valley of New Mexico; continuing his examination of social developments during the Pueblo I period (AD 700-900); and establishing a long-term research project east of Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. Schachner is also working with Tiffany Clark, a Research Associate of the Cotsen Institute, to organize and manage the extensive collections of materials from the Pajarito Archaeological Research Program, a major research project (1977-1981) directed by the late Professor James N. Hill. Welcome Greg! David Scotts (Professor of Art History and Chair of the UCLA/Getty Masters Program in the Conservation of Archaeological and Ethnographic Materials) principal interests are the analysis of museum objects, the characterization of pigments, ancient metals and microstructure, the teaching of conservation, and the archaeometallurgy of pre-Hispanic Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. He is involved in a number of research projects, including recent data collection from museum objects at the San Diego Museum of Man. During the winter quarter he spoke at the Institute about Issues in Ancient Egyptian Green Pigments: Recent Discoveries and Old Problems and will be presenting The Trials and Tribulations of Iron Artefact Conservation during spring quarter.

Gregson Schachner

David A. Scott

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Monica Smith (Associate Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Interdepartmental Archaeology Graduate Program), along with Dr. R.K. Mohanty, directs the excavation project at Sisupalgarh, India, an ancient city of the early centuries AD. Smiths research examines the role of cities for the ordinary person in the past, and how urbanism developed as centers of economic, social, ritual and political networks. She also sustains a long-term interest in the archaeology of food, the growth of ancient states and empires, and the way in which ordinary goods define and sustain trade networks in both the past and the present. Recent publications include papers in Cambridge Archaeological Journal, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, Complexity, and reports of fieldwork published with her colleagues in Indian journals. Chip Stanish (Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Cotsen Institute), his graduate students, and Peruvian colleagues have continued their excavations and mapping of a major settlement complex in the northern Titicaca Basin of Peru. This area, known as Taraco, housed a massive mound and pyramid complex from approximately 1400 BC to AD 900. Excavations revealed adobe pyramids that were constructed in the first millennium AD along with earlier complex architecture from the first millennium BC. Based on years of field research in the Titicaca Basin, Stanish has been writing a volume for the Cotsen Institutes new World Heritage and Monument Series.

Monica L. Smith

Charles S. Stanish

Lothar von Falkenhausen (Professor of Art History and Associate Director of Cotsen Institute of Archaeology) spent the first four months of 2007 as a visiting professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he taught a seminar based on his recently published book, Chinese Society in the Age of Confucius (Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, 2006). He traveled to Mainland China and Taiwan several times during that period for field visits, and he participated in a month-long research trip to medieval sites in southwest China during the early summer. UCLAs collaborative project with Peking University and the Chengdu Institute of Archaeology, which Falkenhausen co-directs as the American Principal Investigator, is a multi-year endeavor undertaking an archaeological survey in the ancient salt-producing area of central Sichuan province. Willeke Wendrich (Associate Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures) is co-directing a UCLA excavation and survey project in Egypt that concentrates on the landscape around Lake Qarun in the Fayum Oasis, and specifically the development of agriculture. In cooperation with the Rijksuniversiteits Groningen (the Netherlands) and archaeobotanist/co-director Ren Cappers, the project concentrates on the two major periods in which agriculture was developed in this region: the Neolithic and the Greco-Roman periods. Wendrich is also Editor-in-Chief of the recently launched UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology online, a world-wide cooperation of Egyptologists, archaeologists, linguists, art historians, geologists and all other disciplines that are involved in research in Egypt. She also is the Faculty Director of the UCLA Digital Humanities Incubator Group and a member of the Cotsen Institute Digital Initiative Committee (see page 48).

Lothar von Falkenhausen

Willeke Z. Wendrich

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Notable Achievements
Congratulations and kudos to our faculty for notable achievements this last academic year.
To Jeanne E. Arnold for her three National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grants; Giorgio Buccellati for grants from the Catholic Bible Association, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Getty Conservation Institute; to Aaron Burke for his Digitial Humanities Fellowship; to Christopher Donnan for his Award of Merit by the City of Lambayeque and the Bruning Museum of Peru; to Ioanna Kakoulli for grants from the Kress Foundation, the A.G. Leventis Foundation, and the National Science Foundation; to Sarah Morris for being named Phi Beta Kappa Society Visiting Schola; to John Papadopoulos being named the Charles Eliot Norton Memorial Lecturer of the Archaeological Institute of America and for his Kress Foundation Grant, to Ellen Pearlstein for her National Endowment for the Humanities Preservation and Access and Andrew W. Mellon grants; to Monica Smith for her National Geographic Grant; to David Scott for his Mellon Foundation Grant; to Charles Stanish for his NSF Senior Research and NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant; to Lothar von Falkenhausen being named Corresponding Member of the Deutsches Archaeologisches Institut; and to Willeke Wendrich for her grants from the Antiquities Endowment Fund, the National Geographic Society, and the National Endowment of the Humanities.

Congratulations and kudos to our graduate students for notable achievements this last academic year.
To Julienne Bernard for her NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant; Ivor Noel Hume Fellowship, Institute of American Cultures Research Grant and Dissertation Year Fellowship; to John Dietler for his NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant and Dissertation Year Fellowship; to Colleen Donley for her NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant; to Kelly Fong for her Jacob K. Javits Fellowship and the David and Pearl Louie/ Chinese Historical Society of Southern California Scholarship; to Mike Lenert for his NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant and Dissertation Year Fellowship; to Susanna Lam for her Graduate Student Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution; to Mike Lenert for his NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant and a Dissertation Year Fellowship; to John "Mac" Marston for his Graduate Division Portable Supplement Year Fellowship and his Steinmetz Family Foundation Travel Grant for Turkey and Egypt; and to Christine Thompson for her two grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research

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2007 Donor List

We want to take this opportunity to thank all of our donors who helped us this year. Thanks to the support of some many people, we had a record year in fundraising for our programs. Everyone who donates help makes this a special place, and we appreciate the effort of the members of the Directors Council and the Friends of Archaeology. We especially wish to acknowledge the gracious bequest of the late Ms. Ruth Baus who was a friend of ours for her whole adult life. Ruths energy and spunk will be missed by all. Her donation has been used to support Ernestine Elsters research at the Scaloria Cave in Italy. This cave was excavated by the legendary Marija Gimbutas. Ernie and her team will bring together the materials to publish this very important data set. Tania Norris graciously supported a student from Albania to continue her studies at UCLA. We are very grateful for this gift. Charlie Steinmetz continued his generous support with gifts for our projects in Armenia and Greece and his family foundations annual gift to support our graduate students. Mrs. Zaruhy S. Chitjian graciously offered support for a student to work on the Armenian project at Dvin, headed by Gregory Areshian. We thank her for her generosity. Harris Bass donated funds for the work of JoAnne van Tilburg on Easter Island. This will be used as a match to the ArAbsalom, Phyllis L. Adelson, Harold E. ArchaeoPaleo Resource Management, Inc. Areshian, Gregory E. Arnold, Deborah Arthur Hughes Muir Jr. Trust Bailey, Jeanne McKenzie Baker, Douglas A. Baldwin, James E. Bambush, J. A. Bartley, Pamela Hunt Bass, Harris David and Margaret Beaudry-Corbett, Marilyn P. Bernard, Nancy S. Bernacchi, Bernard D. and Eugenia B. Blackwell, Patricia Renaye Boocheever, David R. Brady, James Edward Bretney, John C. Buccellati, Giorgio Butler, Randall D. Ciervo, Kathy Stephens chaeological Institute of America and serve to preserve the heritage of this outstanding monument. David Boocheever graciously has supported our work in Armenia for which we are deeply grateful. We hope to see him visit us soon at this wonderful cave that preserves organic remains from the fifth millennium BC. Roger and Patty Civalleri donated funds to support a worthy student on our new field school in Santa Catalina Island. This scholarship will be named in their honor and we are sure that the gift will be greatly appreciated by one of our students. Debby Arnold and Walt Zipperman helped us with a new initiative in Israel whereby we will host a conference every other year, one in Jerusalem, and one in Los Angeles. We thank them for their gift. Perhaps the most unique gift of all was the money sent by Debby Arnold and Charlie Steinmetz to Willeke Wendrich in Egypt to build a fence. The fence will protect a rare archaeological site and we are grateful that our two friends came through so quickly in our urgent request. Finally of course, we acknowledge and thank the continued generosity of Lloyd and Margit Cotsen for their phenomenal support of the CIOA. Civalleri, Patty and Roger Conte, Courtney B. Corbett, Don Costin, Cathy Lynne Cotsen 1985 Trust Cowley, Marjorie H. Crouse, Carol Crowell, Frederick P. Deal, Nan H. Diamant, Jacquelin Dillon, Dejon M. Donohue, Sally Duque, Mercedes Dusette, Guanda M Dye, Willie E. Elster Family Survivors Trust Elster, Ernestine Eve, Debra F.H.I.S., Inc. Fahey D.Env., Janet Lebow Gottesman Family Trust Girey, Helle

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Grancell, Sherman Grasse, Gale Halfon, Oli Healy, Patrick K. Hector, Bruce P. Henderson Jr., Theodore C. Herrman, William H. Holmes, Marillyn H. Holz, John F. Holz, Margaret Maynard Housing Development Services Inc. Hull, Gordon E. Hullett, Katherine International Institute for Mesopotamian Area Studies Jacobson. Lawrence Howard Johnson & Johnson Contribution Fund Johnson, Tracy E. Kamin, Stan Kay, Jean Steinmetz Kendle, David W. Lawson, Beverly Diane Leland, Mary Jane Leventhal., Richard M. Long, Douglas M. Lopez, Anna Nelson Lutkehaus, Nancy Manske, Tippian Marks Jr., Walter N. Mauck, Judi L. Mc Clain, Nadra M. Mc Cormick, Kathleen Paige Metastasio, Mary V. Metcalfe, Howard H. Morales, Gail Morehouse, Martha Jo Morley, Selma Muir, Arthur Mulkey, Linda Norris, Tania Mc Norton, Fred H. ODonnell, Janet Lee Orellana, Sandra L. Orrange, William W. Patricia E. Oliansky Revocable Trust Perry, Carolyn T. Porcasi, Judith F. Backdirt | 96

Pollinger Family Foundation Pritzkat, Barbara Wynn Purcell, Christopher Rohde, Michael F. Ruth B. Baus Trust Schenck, Barbara J. Schoch., Ed Sidney Stern Memorial Trust Stanish, Charles Steinmetz Family Trust Steinmetz Foundation Steinmetz, Charles W. Stepans, Elga Struthers, Baerbel Sweitzer, Noel Switzer, Irma Lang The Olson Family Trust DTD. The Polinger Family Foundation Tournaire-Cooper, Helene Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. Inc. Tuttle, Robert Van Slyke, Noel E. Wake, David B. Walker, James L. Waters Charitable Trust Watson, Leroy and Lisa Wood, Barbara Lynn Yamamoto, Andrew J. and Magdalena Young, Robin Zuccaro, David