ADAPTATION, TRANSFORMATION, AND CONTINUITY:
THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF TRANSITIONS

5th Annual UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology
Graduate Research Conference

January 30-31, 2015: University of California, Los Angeles
With Keynote Address by Michael Blake (University of British Columbia)

Thanks to the generosity of Dr. Michael Blake, we are offering a $300 Travel Prize for Best Abstract (priority given to international students)

CALL FOR PAPERS

Change has been a constant throughout human history: empires have emerged, dynasties dissolved, civiliza-tions collapsed. As individuals progress from womb to tomb, they both influence and are influenced by the cultural systems and structures around them. Although archaeology has assessed such transitions over long periods of time, the intersecting effects of change and its feedback across a range of spatial and temporal scales have only recently begun to be appreciated in the discipline. Past and recent geopolitical events demonstrate that change should be viewed as a complex process that has effects at and is enacted among multiple scales of the human experience, from the individual and local to the global.
For this conference, we invite students from all disciplines to explore the multi-scalar effects of cultural, po-litical, and individual transitions in the past and to consider how archaeology and the material record can be used to analyze the processes, mechanisms, and effects of those transitions. How did large scale change (political, economic, environmental, or social) affect the individual at the micro-scale and, in turn, how did individuals and their choices affect higher scales of organization? Topics for presentations include, but are not limited to:

  •   the relationship between rites of passage and the creation, reification, or consolidation of social mores
  •   the process of introducing or adapting new technologies
  •   the dynamic between the emergence or decline of a political regime and household practices

We seek to highlight methodological and theoretical approaches to the archaeology of transition and to con-sider why change occurred at a specific time, how that change was effected, and how it affected a society across different scales of life. Students from all disciplines are invited to submit, but preference will be giv-en to papers that engage with the material record or present a relevant theoretical framework.
Abstract for individual papers (250 words max.) for 20–minute presentations and a current C.V. should be sent to CIOAconference2015@gmail.com no later than November 15, 2014.