UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology

06/01/2026

WEDS TALKS 6/3/26
ABSTRACT: Cult in the Late Bronze Age southern Levant is characterized by worship in temples, most notably in temples of the “Midgal” type that are famously found in places like Megiddo, Pella, and Shechem. In the Iron Age, a diversity of cult places is attested, with typologies in the past tracking various types of cultic contexts known to us from the archaeological record. While cult in the Iron Age notably differs in many ways from Bronze Age traditions, certain aspects of worship continue from earlier periods. Corntinuities can be seen, for instance, in the types of cultic paraphernalia found in both Bronze Age and Iron Age contexts. Shrine models, ceramic altars, and cult stands are some examples of paraphernalia in continuous use. The primary aspects of worship, including animal sacrifice, incense offerings, “idol” veneration, libation, and feasting also carry on from earlier periods. On the other hand, many have argued that temple-based worship ceased in the Iron Age. Drawing from previous work, my goal is to explore cultic buildings in the northern Kingdom of Israel in the late Iron Age IIA—a period that experienced a “boom” in cult activity. The differences between Bronze Age temples, typically referred to as “houses of the deity”, and Iron Age cultic buildings is thus explored. It is argued that, based on the similarity of certain building types to domestic houses, that the concept of “God’s dwelling” changed in the Iron Age. It is also stressed that some aspects of Canaanite worship continued into the late Iron Age IIA in the north, but that this ceases in the Iron Age IIB after Hazael’s destructions.

BIO: Prapti Panda is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Northwestern University. Trained as a historical archaeologist, her research focuses on colonial urbanism, heritage politics, and architectural history in coastal western India. Her ongoing doctoral research has received support from institutions including the Luso-American Development Foundation and the American Philosophical Society.

05/29/2026

ARCHAEOLOGY SPOTLIGHT: Meet Kristine Martirsoyan-Olshansky, Director of the Armenian Archaeology Lab, and graduate student researcher Katrina Kuxhausen, and undergraduate students Emma Bertoutian and Vera Mkhsian.

05/26/2026

WES TALKS 5/27/26
ABSTRACT: Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, port-cities in the Indian Ocean became critical nodes in expanding trade networks linking Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Europe. Among these were emerging European colonial settlements, where imperial regimes attempted to order large and mobile populations of merchants, artisans, fishermen, religious communities, and landholders whose labor sustained global exchange. Scholarship on these early colonial cities in South Asia has largely emphasized forts, churches, and administrative architecture, drawing on colonial archives that foreground elite European perspectives. This talk revisits colonial urbanism in South Asia through the archaeological landscape of Chaul, a Portuguese port-city on India’s western coast (occupied 1510-1740). Drawing on ongoing archival and archaeological work, I explore how the built environment can offer new ways of approaching social difference and inequality during colonial expansion, focusing on the configuration of domestic architecture and neighborhoods. Although imperial regimes often aspired towards ordered and legible urban landscapes, the cities that emerged through colonial settlement were by no means homogenous. Through the case of Chaul, I explore how historical archaeology can illuminate the plural resident communities and everyday spatial negotiations that shaped colonial urban life in early modern South Asia.
BIO: Prapti Panda is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Northwestern University. Trained as a historical archaeologist, her research focuses on colonial urbanism, heritage politics, and architectural history in coastal western India. Her ongoing doctoral research has received support from institutions including the Luso-American Development Foundation and the American Philosophical Society.

05/19/2026

WEDS TALKS 5/20/26:
ABSTRACT: Roman archaeological material played a central role in Italian Fascist propaganda: Mussolini presented his regime as an extension or rebirth of the Roman empire and sponsored major excavation and restoration projects in and beyond Rome. Italian colonial archaeology in Libya extended this project and archaeological remains were positioned as Italian cultural heritage and mobilized to justify colonial occupation by drawing explicit parallels between ancient Roman and modern Italian expansion. This talk examines the important role photography played in this Fascist appropriation of the Roman past in Libya; by tracing histories of the production, circulation, reception, and assembly into archives of such images, I argue that archaeological photographs were not merely documentary objects but rather functioned as political tools which transformed Libya’s archaeological heritage into monumental symbols of Italian Fascism.
BIO: Taylor Carr-Howard is a Ph.D. candidate in Archaeology at UCLA. Her dissertation, “Archaeological Photographs and the (De)Colonial Imagination,” examines the role that archaeological photography played in the history of French and Italian colonial archaeology in North Africa and, drawing on this history, explores the ways in which this photographic archive can be used to decolonize the discipline of classical archaeology. Her research has been supported by the Archaeological Institute of America.

05/12/2026

WEDS TALKS 5/12/26
ABSTRACT: Over 500 dōtaku (銅鐸) bronze bell-shaped objects, traditionally dated to the late-middle Yayoi until the beginnings of the Kofun period (ca. 200 BCE-250 CE), have been excavated predominately from the central Kinki region of the Japanese archipelago. However, this number does not include so-called “small dōtaku” (小銅鐸) or pottery miniatures (銅鐸形土製品), seldom included in analyses of larger examples. Adopting a macroscopic geographic and chronological perspective on a historically circumscribed topic, this presentation and (re)considers dōtaku of all sizes and materials within the framework of early East Asian skeuomorphism, as related to the development of the broader Bronze Age economy.
BIO: Kirie Stromberg completed her PhD at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA in 2023 and currently serves as the Rand Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian Studies at Pomona College. She was a recipient of the US Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship for her dissertation (“Music and Political Authority in Early China and Japan: Pre- and Protohistory”), for which she was was based at Kyushu University in Itoshima, Japan. Her work elucidates the relationship between musical material culture and the formation of complex society across early East Asia. She is currently writing the first monograph in a Western language about Yayoi period (ca. 900 BCE-250 CE) dōtaku bronze bells, as well as their reception in medieval and early modern Japan.

05/06/2026

WEDS TALKS 5/6/26🪏Come join us and our guest presenter in Fowler A222. Hope to see you there!

04/20/2026

Come join us and our guest presenter in Fowler A222 on Wednesday 4/22 !!! 🌊 Hope to see you there!

04/14/2026

WEDS TALKS 4/15/26
ABSTRACT: This presentation aims to highlight textual and artistic case studies during Egypt’s 27th Dynasty (ca. c. 525–404 BCE) that showcase the manipulation of Egyptian culture by the new Persian rulers. These Persian kings represented themselves as traditional pharaohs within Egypt’s borders and utilized longstanding Egyptian artistic motifs and textual traditions in their monumental constructions. These cultural themes, however, were not always copied blindly; some were manipulated in subtle ways to send targeted messages to audience(s) of this art. Scholars tend to situate textual and visual styles within the longue durée of cultural tradition and pick a singular, official, and centralized perspective to narrate the history and reception of that art. In the case of Egypt, this perspective is often that of the king, and assumes there was a monolithic message sent to his people. But we are not dealing with a homogeneous people; a diverse population would have had varied reactions and interpretations to this visual signaling. By highlighting both the augmentation of traditional texts and motifs undertaken by the Persians and the multiplicity of perspectives they hold for their audience(s), we can better understand ancient art as being dynamic in function and interpretation, rather than as a static snapshot of carbon-copied royal authority.
BIO: Marissa Stevens is the Assistant Director of the Pourdavoud Institute for the Study of the Iranian World and Yarshater Center for the Study of Iranian Literary Traditions. Trained as an Egyptologist who studies the materiality, social history, and texts of the Third Intermediate Period and Late Period, she first earned an Honors BA in History and Sociology from Washington & Jefferson College and an MA from the University of Chicago, before completing her PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. Combining art historical and linguistic approaches, her research interests focus on how objects can solidify, maintain, and perpetuate social identity, especially in times of crisis when more traditional means of self-identification are absent.

04/07/2026

WEDS TALKS 4/8/26: Refugee Storytelling and Material Culture as Knowledge Production in Digital Humanities

ABSTRACT: Politics are heavily ingrained in dominant understandings of refugeehood through the political categorization of refugees, selective admittance to countries of asylum, and dehumanizing statistics reported by governments receiving these individuals. In recent years, communities have begun work to shift understandings of refugeehood and its dominant narrative to one spread by the individual, centering voices of refugees in works of storytelling, preservation of heritage, and the sharing of material culture. This talk will discuss the work being done by the Refugee Material Culture Initiative to shift understandings of refugeehood from those spread by policy, statistics, and governing peoples to understandings built on the personal narratives told by individuals who have experienced refugeehood. The talk will discuss how the centering refugee voices and the act of storytelling works to establish refugees as knowledge-producers in their own histories, applying frameworks including feminist epistemology, memory-work, and postcolonial theory discussed across Critical Refugee Studies, as well as digital archaeology techniques, to preserve, share, and make accessible the various individual stories of Vietnamese Refugees. The talk will showcase the exploration and sharing of material culture donated by Vietnamese Refugees and their families to the Vietnamese Heritage Museum in Westminster County’s Little Saigon, and the role this digitization plays in processes of storytelling, knowledge production, and re-centering of refugees in their own history.
BIO: Charley Walsh is an undergraduate junior in the College of Arts and Sciences at UCLA, pursuing a BS in Anthropology and a BA in Classical Civilizations.
Connor Lim is a senior undergraduate in the Samueli College of Engineering studying Mechanical Engineering; his specialties lie in optical engineering and imaging technologies.

04/02/2026