Cotsen Institute of Archaeology

The remains of the artful gateways, platforms, walls, and sculpture at Tiahuanaco, an important Middle Horizon site at the southern end of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, have for centuries sparked what has seemed like unanswerable questions about how they were made. The masons’ highly sophisticated knowledge of mathematics, geometry, and stonecraft is evident in the tight joints and perfectly sharp, right angles of these fine examples of Andean cut-stone architecture. The Inca prized the precise stone masonry of this important site, which is considered by many scholars to be the precursor of the stonebuilding traditions of their civilization, which flourished four hundred years after the decline of Tiahuanaco. Protzen and Nair refute this long-held theory, arguing that Inca architecture could have been inspired by Tiahuanaco, but was not derivative of it. Looking to the stone itself for answers, the authors performed original experiments with stone tools to better understand how the artisans had shaped and finished the stone, revealing a new appreciation for their pre-metallurgic accomplishments.

Series: Monographs 75

Emanating from a colloquium in pre-Columbian art and archaeology held at the University of Chile in Santiago, Images in Action presents interpretations of a large corpus of art and iconography from the Southern and South-Central Andes, bringing together some of the most esteemed scholars in the field. More than thirty authors, all with extensive experience in the Southern Andes, examine artifacts, artworks, textiles, archaeology and architecture to develop creative new insights on the cultural interactions between people in prehistoric western South America. The volume’s nearly 700 images are archived in an online database with metadata, fully referenced in the text, and searchable.

Series: Cotsen Advanced Seminar 6

Tlacuachero is the site of an Archaic-period shellmound located in the wetlands of the outer coast of southwest Mexico. This book presents investigations of several floors that are within the site's shell deposits that formed over a 600-800 year interval during the Archaic period (ca. 8000-2000 BCE), a crucial timespan in Mesoamerican prehistory when people were transitioning from full blown dependency on wild resources to the use of domesticated crops. 

The floors are now deeply buried in an limited area below the summit of the shellmound.  The authors explore what activities were carried out on their surfaces, discussing the floors’ patterns of cultural features, sediment color, density and types of embedded microrefuse and phytoliths, as well as chemical signatures of organic remains.

The studies conducted at Tlacuachero are especially significant in light of the fact that data-rich lowland sites from the Archaic period are extraordinarily rare; the wealth of information gleaned from the floors of the Tlacuachero shellmound can now be widely appreciated.

Machu Picchu, voted one of the New Wonders of the World, is one of the world’s 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 sun's passage. Taken together, these features meant that Machu Picchu formed a cosmological, hydrological, and sacred geological center for a vast region.

Series: World Heritage and Monument 1

The rugged highlands of southern Yemen are one of the less archaeologically explored regions of the Near East. This final report of survey and excavations by the Roots of Agriculture in Southern Arabia (RASA) Project addresses the development of food production and human landscapes, topics of enduring interest as scholarly conceptualizations of the Anthropocene take shape. Along with data from Manayzah, site of the earliest dated remains of clearly domesticated animals in Arabia, the volume also documents some of the earliest water management technologies in Arabia, thereby anchoring regional dates for the beginnings of pastoralism and of potential farming.

 The authors argue that the initial Holocene inhabitants of Wadi Sana were Arabian hunters who adopted limited pastoral stock in small social groups, then expanded their social collectives through sacrifice and feasts in a sustained pastoral landscape. This volume will be of interest to a wide audience of archaeologists including not only those working in Arabia, but more broadly those interested in the ancient Near East, Africa, South Asia, and in Holocene landscape histories generally.

Series: Monumenta Archaeologica 43

In 2007 the Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project (JCHP) was established as a joint research endeavor of the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Among the project’s diverse aims is the publication of numerous excavations conducted in Jaffa since 1948 under the auspices of various governmental and research institutions such as the Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums and its successor, the Israel Antiquities Authority, as well as the Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project. This, the first volume in the Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project series, lays the groundwork for this initiative. Part I provides the historical, economic, and legal context for the JCHP’s development, while outlining its objectives and the unique opportunities that Jaffa offers researchers. The history of Jaffa and its region, and the major episodes of cultural change that affected the site and region are explored through a series of articles in Part II, including an illustrated discussion of historical maps of Jaffa from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Recent archaeological discoveries from Jaffa are included in Part III, while Part IV provides a first glimpse of the JCHP’s efforts to publish the Jacob Kaplan and Haya Ritter-Kaplan legacy from Jaffa. Together the twenty-five contributions to this work constitute the first major book-length publication to address the archaeology of Jaffa in more than sixty years since excavations were initiated at the site.

Series: Monumenta Archaeologica 26

This book presents a detailed account of authenticity in the visual arts from the Palaeolithic to the postmodern. The restoration of works of art can alter the perception of authenticity, and may result in the creation of fakes and forgeries. These interactions set the stage for the subject of this book, which initially examines the conservation perspective, then continues with a detailed discussion of notions of authenticity, and the philosophical background.  There is a disputed territory between those who view the present-day cult of authenticity as fundamentally flawed, and those who have analyzed its impact upon different cultural milieus, operating across performative, contested, and fragmented ground. Case studies that explore the ideas of conceptual, aesthetic, and material authenticity provide a informative discourse about art from the ancient to the contemporary, illuminating concerns relating to restoration and art forgery. 

Moche civilization flourished on the north coast of Peru between approximately AD 100 and 800. Although the Moche had no writing system, they left a vivid artistic record of their beliefs and activities in beautifully modeled and painted ceramic vessels, remarkable objects of gold, silver, and copper, sumptuous textiles, and carved and inlaid bone, wood, and stone. Tens of thousands of these objects can be seen today in museums and private collections throughout the world. Unfortunately, nearly all of them have been looted from Moche tombs by grave robbers, and thus there is no record of the grave, or the archaeological site, or even the valley from which they came. This lack of information severely limits what could have been learned about the Moche if the graves had been excavated archaeologically and their contents systematically recorded. 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.Illustrated in full color.