Archaeological Research Facility

In the fall of 2022 we held a graduate seminar foregrounding the articulation of social science research with restorative justice and contemporary community struggles for self-determination, with a particular emphasis on community-accountable scholarship. This poster presents the results of projects committed to community authority, which represent new kinds of risks and rewards for both sides, and directly impacts the types of research questions addressed in their partnered project deliverables.

In the hyper-arid core of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile dozens of Terminal Pleistocene archaeological sites  been identified in an area that previously held seasonal surface water channels, riparian vegetation, and a wetland landscape. These sites shed light on the early peopling of western South America because the onset of hyper-aridity during the early Holocene resulted in severe decline in habitat for most plant and animal life, including humans. The extreme aridity also allowed for the preservation of horse, ground sloth, camelid, rodent, and bird remains that might correspond to different time frames but are being exposed by wind erosion along with other fossilized botanical remains.

As sand dunes are actively covering and uncovering the surface, in 2018  we carried out geophysical research at Quebrada Mani where some of these archaeological and paleontological features have been exposed and dated to between 12.5 to 11.2k cal BP. In this poster we assess some of the challenges in interpreting the past aeolian landscape using geophysical (GPR and gradiometer) and geomorphic methods to assess site and landscape dynamics including the potential preservation of certain features.

This poster, presented at the 2023 Annual Meeting of the Society for California Archaeology, describes the first season of the UC Berkeley Archaeological Research Facility Field School. The 2022 ARF Field School recruited students from a broad range of backgrounds and several nearby colleges with the goal of increasing the discipline’s diversity with 10 new archaeological technicians and graduate students.

The Palestinian Rural History Project (PRHP) (2014- ) is an ongoing effort to document, preserve, study and publish culturally and scientifically important information concerning Palestine’s rural history and heritage. The corpus contains over 1,300 personallyconducted oral history interviews documenting the local body of knowledge of some 700 Palestinian communities. It encompasses rare and invaluable information about Palestine’s historical geography, genealogies, toponymy, archaeology, nature, economy, politics, agricultural practices, traditions and lore. Lastly, it also holds, inter-alia, over a century’s worth of personal stories and recollections of life under Ottoman, British, Jordanian and Israeli rule.

In this presentation, I revisit the digital training that was carried out by myself and colleagues at the UC Berkeley Multimedia Authoring Center for Teaching in Anthropology (MACTiA). During the period of its existence (1998-2011) the program transformed itself enormously not only in response to changing hardware and software, but also as our own interests and experience in archaeological education and community building grew, along with our changing (and diverse) viewpoints of what “digital education” meant in practice. I regard the experiments that I was able (allowed and enabled) to carry out in teaching digital practice and media literacy through the MACTiA being the backbone of my own intellectual development during this period and more recently. The collaboration between faculty, graduate and undergraduate students in the MACTiA courses was quite unique, and created many diverse ways of developing digital practices. Throughout this diversity and change, however, there are certain features – notably the encouragement of remediation and re-use of media, a “content-first” attitude, and an “education of attention” - that characterize the “MACTiA style” of digital archaeology and continue to affect our practice.

This chapter is part of an ongoing process in the construction of a recombinant history about Neolithic Anatolia and Southeast Europe called Dead Women Do Tell Tales (DWdTT). It is an extraordinarily complex tangle of fragments about the archaeological construction of Neolithic households, based in the records of the excavations themselves and their published interpretation and interpretive vignettes from my creative imagination. It addresses the question of how to turn this tangle of related fragments into a narrative that is both “landscaped” and “gendered”; and how to make this a narrative that is both engaging for professionals and draws our broader audiences into the glow of engaged curiosity that encourages them to participate in the enterprise of constructing gendered landscapes of the past. The response to these questions is my first step in the design of a serious game based in archaeological research.

Tobler's Walking Model data converted to a Vertical Factor Table for use in ArcGIS Spatial Analyst distance functions.

This poster describes a study that used ethnographic field data to derive an asymmetrical Cauchy (Gaussian) equation that describes the movement of a llama caravan along an ancient trail system as a function of topographic slope. This model is further refined by using ranked observations of changes in trail quality,the negotation of obstacles such as stream-crossings, and the type and duration of rest periods during the daily travel. The resulting cost-distance function was then applied to the actual caravan route in order to evaluate the realism of the model.

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Related publication: Tripcevich, N., 2016. The Ethnoarchaeology of a Cotahuasi Salt Caravan: Exploring Andean pastoralist movement. In The Archaeology of Andean Pastoralism, edited by J. M. Capriles and N. Tripcevich, pp. 211-229. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque  https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7vr6580k

The Chivay Obsidian Source and its position in the South-Central Andes is the slides and notes from a talk presented by N. Tripcevich in 2005 at the Simposio Internacional Sobre Arqueología del Área Centro Sur Andina in Arequipa, Perú.

English Abtract: Obsidian from the Colca Valley in Arequipa, Peru has been found throughout the south-central Andes and represents over 90% of the obsidian artifacts analyzed from the Titicaca Basin. Recent research in the high altitude source area has documented a quarry pit, a prehispanic road, and numerous obsidian processing areas. Survey and test excavations in 2003 focused on identifying changes in obsidian procurement over time with an emphasis on the lithic reduction strategies and on possible evidence of long distance exchange. The results from this research, and their regional implications in the south-central Andes, will be explored in this talk.

Resumen en español: En los Andes meridionales se han desarrollado patrones de carácter político y social distintas por su organización espacial y extensión en la prehistoria. Por un lado, las características Andinas de la altura y las redes de intercambio utilizando camélidos domesticados. De otro lado, el tema antropológico de las situaciones que condicionan la reciprocidad y el afloramiento de poder jerarquizado en la zona. La intensidad de consumo regional de la obsidiana Chivay ha variado en la prehistoria atrás de 10,000 años. Nuestra inquietud es conocer: ¿Por qué, la producción y distribución de la obsidiana tuvo gran demanda en el Formativo temprano, y después  ha bajado en su intensidad aun que otras formas de interacción regional se han desarrollado en épocas posteriores?