Archaeological Research Facility

John Berger recognized that oil painting was the essential medium of visual imagery of early capitalism. Both Berger and Susan Sontag have drawn attention to the power of the photographic visual imagery for modernistic capitalism. My argument in this paper is that computer generated imagery (CGI) is both the ultimate medium for the expression of the visual imagery of later corporate capitalism, and the medium through which some of the concepts of the feminist critique of science (including archaeology) may be expressed, including a celebration of the ambiguity of the archaeological record and the multiplicity of its interpretations, the multiplicity of scales at which prehistory may be written, and the multiplicity of prehistories that are out there.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Since the explicit collaboration of biological and physical scientists with archaeologists started in the late 1930s, the discourse on the nature of this collaboration has been intense. The question of the relative roles of the specialist scientist and the archaeologist in the collaboration, and the training and experience of both in the use of scientific techniques of recording and analysis is still not resolved, as we shall indicate by our experience in the Catalhoyuk Archaeological Project in Turkey. In this paper, we shall expand this discourse to examine the more recent collaboration of archaeologists with computer graphics specialists as archaeologists increasingly incorporate cutting-edge and not-so-cutting-edge digitaltechnologies into their practice.

This paper is a critical analysis of my own research and that of my U.S., and European colleagues who go to Southeast Europe to do their research. It analyses the nature of their collaboration with the local Balkan archaeologists. It looks at the effect on this collaboration  of the post-2nd World War Socialism/Communism. The aim of this paper is to help make more effective the collaboration between archaeologists coming from different political and philosophical backgrounds.