Patrizia Piacentini, University of Milan “La Statale”
In recent years more than four hundred ancient tombs, dating from the 6th century BCE to the 3rd century CE, have been discovered on the West Bank at Aswan, Egypt, near the Aga Khan mausoleum. A multidisciplinary team, including the Egyptian-Italian Mission, has found more than a hundred individuals along with their funerary equipment. Piacentini will share the first results of this archaeological research, highlighting the multicultural environment of the necropolis and possible diverse geographical origins of the people buried there.
Free and open to the public. Free event parking at the 52 Oxford Street Garage. Presented by the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East and the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture.
Advance registration required for both in-person and online attendance
Read the article “Unearthing History: The Remarkable Journey of John Wesley Gilbert” by Tamara Shiloh to learn more about the first Black alumni from a Brown University masters department, as well as the first African American archaeologist in America!
This two day conference, organized by Amanda Gaggioli (University of Memphis) and Raymond Hunter (Brown University), brings together scholars of the environmental past to discuss how contemporary environmental crises focus the political orientation of their scholarship.
We live in an age of intertwined environmental crises. Ongoing biodiversity loss, global heating, sea level rise, pollution of air and water, geophysical conditions, and mass extinction — crises often grouped together under the term ‘Anthropocene ’— creates an urgency for environmental studies. Despite criticisms in its definition (both when and what the Anthropocene is), the environmental crises for which the term has become shorthand have increasingly focused debate in the social sciences and humanities as in other disciplines. Confronting these crises poses political, theoretical, and methodological challenges as scholars must contend with human-environment relationships assembled at ever expanding chronological and geographic scales.
Scholars of the past have responded to these challenges in different ways. For some, the urgency to attend to contemporary environmental crises prompts a shift towards searching for resolution in ‘lessons from the past.’ Others turn to the environmental past as a means of calibrating theoretical and political engagements in the present; for instance, by drawing on historical data to challenge the ways in which concepts like the Anthropocene recast a false and treacherous ontology of humans as apart from, separate to, and outside of ‘nature’, or advocating radical ethics that foreground the unruliness of uniquely modern objects and materials, such as plastics and pesticides. Still others draw on Indigenous and non-Western ontologies and advocate political (re)alignments that approach the living world holistically, understanding bios and geos alike as living entities. Others draw out the historical connections between environmental crises and ongoing injustices, especially anti-Indigenous and anti-Black violences, to demand that climate politics attend to inequalities along intersections of race, class, gender, coloniality, and latitude.
This conference aims to further these critical approaches by querying how researchers who focus on the material traces of the human-environmental past can engage the political valences of contemporary and future crises in their scholarship. It also explores theoretical and methodological challenges posed by contemporary environmental crises, especially questions of scale posed by globalizing ecological thought. How can studies of the environmental past contend with the political urgencies, theoretical quandaries, and methodological challenges engendered by contemporary crises? How do these crises re-focus and re-calibrate the ways in which researchers should approach the environmental past?
The conference will provide a unique opportunity for scholars to engage in dialogue and collaboration, while reorienting studies of the environmental past to attend to the political exigencies of ongoing environmental crises at scales that portend a new geological age.
Free and open to the public. No RSVP or registration required.
Co-Sponsored by Brown University’s Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World and by the Institute at Brown University for Environment and Society.
Join the Rhode Island Historical PReservation and Heritage Commission to celebrate Rhode Island Archaeology Month! This month long event features 17 free public programs this October. Participate in tours, lectures, hands-on projects, and other activities led by professional archaeologists.
Special thanks to the Archaeological Institute of America Narragansett Society, Battle of Rhode Island Association, Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park, Everyday Anthropology, HDR, Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Harmony Library, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Old Slater Mill Association, Portsmouth Historical Society, Public Archaeology Laboratory (PAL), Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project, Salve Regina University, Scituate Preservation Society, South Kingstown 300, University of Rhode Island, and Warwick Public Library.
Find a full description of the event calendar here. Registrati0n may be required for some events.
The American Research Center for Egypy podcast is back, and this season will focus on ARCE’s 75th Anniversary. The season will feature four episodes; the first of which will delve into the founding and early beginnings of the American Research Center in Egypt.
Join them for Rhode Island’s 45th Heritage Festival, which will explore the world through art and music. It is on Saturday, October 21 from 12pm to 5pm. It will take place at WaterFire Arts Center in Providence. It is open to the public and free!
They will also be hosting Rhode Island Archaeology Month in October 2023. Rhode Island Archaeology Month will feature free public programs led by professional archaeologists from Brown University, HDR, PAL, RIHPHC, RI Marine Archaeology Project, Salve Regina University, University of Rhode Island, and more. Here’s a calendar preview–with more events to come:
Archaeological Examples of Narragansett Indian & Native American Life (virtual)
Archaeological Excavations at the Old Potterville School (Scituate)
Archaeology Month Open House at Old Slater Mill (Pawtucket)
Archaeology of Glocester
Behind the Scenes: Engaging the Americas at the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology Mellon Grant Project (Providence)
History and Archaeology of the URI Campus Landscape (South Kingstown)
Preservation After Dark Open Lab at Salve Regina University (Newport)
The HMS Gaspee Archaeology Study: An Exhibit Opening (Warwick)
Uncover Archaeology: Community Archaeology Day at the Joukowsky Institute (Providence)
Check the website for all the events–including hands-on activities, walks, talks, exhibits, and open houses–and full details. Rhode Island Archaeology Month is organized by the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission in collaboration with individual and organizational partners.
Six chapters of FLAAR Mesoamerica’s fully-illustrated discussion of zoology and Maya iconography of crocodiles of Mesoamerica are now available for you as a download.1. Crocodiles are obviously associated with Water, So in Maya Art, Crocodiles as associated with Water Symbolism
2. Maya portraits of Crocodiles as 3-dimensional ceramic figurines and deep-relief renditions
3. Full-bodied Crocodiles as roof of Throne Rooms
4. Crocodiles in Bas-relief Sculptures at Copan, Honduras
5. Crocodile Trees, Izapa, Early Classic Maya, Late Classic (Codex Style vases)
6. Crocodile and Composite Deer-Crocodile as Bicephalic Cosmic Monster
The bibliography and list of suggested reading on crocodiles and caiman of Guatemala, Mexico, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador is a separate PDF to download.
For archaeologists, epigraphers and especially iconographers, lots of material here.
For botanists and ethnobotanists, the Crocodile Tree is of interest. Some are obviously Crescentia species, gourd tree (jicaro, morro), but there are other species not yet identified. Plus there are many trees in Guatemala named “Palo de Lagarto” with Lagarto meaning crocodile and not merely lizard.
Join the Costen Institute of Archaeology Press’ Author Spotlight, featuring the recent publication of two volumes edited by Sarah Morris and John Papadopoulos. Ten years in the making, the volumes discuss Ancient Methone and recent discoveries by archaeologists.
The Joukowsky Institute recognizes the invaluable contribution that Black and African American archaeologist have made to the field, and the world at large. This February, we highlighted the work of six Black anthropologists, archaeologists, and explorers that have revolutionized how we study and practice archaeology.
The display can be found in the alcove nearest to the East entrance, surrounding the portrait of John Wesley Gilbert, known as the first Black anthropologist and the first African American to graduate with advanced degree from Brown University. It was created by Christina Miles (`25) with contributions from Erynn Bentley (Ph.D, expected May 2025).
John Wesley Gilbert (1864-1923) John Wesley Gilbert is considered the first African American archaeologist. He earned a BA (1888) and an MA (1891) from Brown University. The topic of his MA thesis was “The Demes of Attica”. He was the first African American to earn an MA from Brown. He also conducted fieldwork in Eretria, Greece, and spent the 1890-91 academic year at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, on a scholarship awarded by Brown. He subsequently became a Professor of Greek and English at Paine Institute, Augusta, Georgia, a historically black, liberal arts college.
Dr. William Montague Cobb (1904-1990) Born in October of 1902 in Washington D.C., Cobb was the first ever African American to receive a PhD in anthropology from Case Western Reserve University, becoming a renowned physical and medical anthropologist. He spent much of his career dispelling myths of racial pseudo-science, as well as highlighting the medical racism that Black Americans faced. He was one of the first “activist scholars” of anthropology who used the tools of the field to dismantle white supremacy, and became the first African American President of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Over his career he would publish thousands of articles in academic journals and teach over 6,000 African American anatomy students at Howard University, changing the face of medical anthropology and medicine.
Matthew Henson (1866 – 1955) Born in Maryland one year after the end of the Civil War to two freeborn sharecroppers, Henson would become one of America’s most famous Arctic explorers, totaling 7 expeditions over the course of 23 years. In 1909, he and Robert Peary worked alongside Inuit men, women, and children in an attempt to reach the Geographic North Pole. While later explorers would reveal that they had missed their mark by 10 miles, it was still an impressive feat, and Henson was rewarded with a Congressional Medal of Honor in 1936. In 1912 he would publish the book A Negro Explorer at the North Pole, chronicling his expedition as well as the moment he, a Black man, placed the American flag down on what was widely thought as the top of the Earth.
Zora Neale Hurston (1891 – 1960) Born in Notasulga Alabama in 1891, Hurston was an anthropologist, filmmaker, and author. Her anthropological research started at Barnard College in New York (where she was the only Black student), conducting ethnographic research on African American and Caribbean folklore. She studied under famed linguistic anthropologist Franz Boas, whom she would later study with as a graduate student at Columbia. Her work explored themes of racial identity, sexual violence against Black women in north Flordia lumber camps, and Jamaican and Haitian folk culture. She was also a famous literary author during the Harlem Renaissance, publishing revolutionary work such as the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Her literary and anthropological talents combined in the nonfiction book Barracoon: The Story of the Last black Cargo, where she chronicled the life of Oluale Kossola (later named Cudjoe Lewis) from the Middle Passage to freedom.
Alicia Odewale Dr. Alicia Odewale is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma. As the first person to graduate from the University of Tulsa with a PhD in anthropology, her work specializes in African Diaspora archaeology as it appears throughout the Afro-Caribbean and Southeastern United States. Her most recent project discusses resilience of the Greenwood community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she analyzes historical evidence excavated from the 1921 Tulsa Race massacre. She continues to advocate for increased diversity and accessibility in the field, leading her to co-found the Estate Little Princes Archaeological Field School in St. Croix, which gives students the opportunity to train in archaeological methods for free.
Pearl Primus (1919 – 1994) Born in Trinidad in November 1919, she emigrated with her parents to New York City in 1921. Originally having a passion for the sciences, she received a BA in biology and pre-medical sciences in 1940, only to be unable to find lab technician work due to racial discrimination. This led her to work backstage in the wardrobing department for America Dances, where she found her love for dance as well as her natural talent. She studied formally at the New Dance School in New York City, where she was the first Black student to do so—it was here that she ignited her love for artistic activism that would eventually lead to a career in anthropology. Having received her PhD in anthropology in 1978, she would go on to meld ethnographic research and dance to interpret the lives of African Americans and Liberians. In 1991, she received the National Medal of Arts for her contribution to American dance.
Theresa A. Singleton (1952) Born in April of 1952 in Charleston, South Carolina, Singleton is currently a professor of Anthropology at Syracuse University, where she focuses on historical archaeology and museology. Her debut into the field of archaeology was groundbreaking, with a complex study on the Gullah-Geechee people of Coastal Georgia, who are descendants of enslaved Africans. A trailblazer, Singleton was the first African American woman to receive a PhD in historical archaeology and African American history and culture from the University of Florida. She is currently a curator for the National Museum of Natural History.
Mark Hanna Watkins (1903 – 1976) Born in Huntsville, Texas as the youngest of fourteen children, Watkins quickly found a love for language. As there were no linguistic departments at the time, he would pursue a Masters in anthropology from the University of Chicago under Edward Sapir, writing about language exchange across indigenous Mexican language groups such as Zapotecan and Tarascan. For his PhD he turned his attention to African languages, writing A Grammar of Chichewa: A Bantu Language of British Central Africa between 1930-1932, one of the only complete grammars of the language, and the first grammar of an African language written by an American. He would later become a professor of anthropology at Fisk University, a Historically Black College, where he was one of 6 faculty members in the first ever African Studies program in the United States. Prior to his retirement in 1972, he worked at Howard University promoting language exchange programs between African and American students.
