Archaeology Brown Bag Series
Archaeology Brown Bag Series
The Archaeology Brown Bag Series provides an informal, interdisciplinary venue for presentations of work in progress; projects by faculty, graduate students, and visiting scholars; and discussion of developments in recent archaeological literature. These events are open to all those with an interest in archaeology both at UVA and in the greater Charlottesville community.
Want to volunteer a talk or discussion topic? Email Adria LaViolette
For the archive of past Brown Bag Workshops, click here
2024–2025 Brown Bag Series
Brown Bag Double-Header! ⛏️ Apr 18, 4:00–5:30pm, Brooks Hall 2nd-Floor Conference Room
Global Trade, Local People: Black Atlantic Archaeology in The Bight of Bonny (C. 1600-1900 CE)
Omokolade A. Omigbule
Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia
Black Atlantic archaeology on the West African coast has contributed to understanding African participation in the transatlantic and global political economies in the last 500 years. While historical records attest to the Bight of Bonny's significant role in this economic system, its archaeology has the potential to contribute to current debates on African agency in the transatlantic economy. As a step toward exploring the material vestiges of the transatlantic economy in the Bight of Bonny, I present preliminary archaeological and ethnographic data from its major coastal entrepots: Bonny Island and Old Calabar. I discuss emergent Atlantic entanglements in the region through exotic architecture and accompanying material culture. Drawing on ideas within daily life archaeology, I examine household objects to foreground the role of African elites and non-elites in the Black Atlantic and the Bight of Bonny specifically.
3D Modeling as an Analytical Tool for the study of Rock-Cut Tombs across the Roman Empire
Dustin Thomas
Department of Art, University of Virginia
Program in Mediterranean Art and Archaeology
As a “tomb-type,” rock-cut tombs are distinctive yet understudied in present scholarship about death and burial in the Roman world. This funerary architecture was used almost exclusively in the provinces of the Roman Empire from the 1st century BCE through 4th century CE, especially in its eastern territories. During this period, rock-cut tombs were largely absent from the Italian Peninsula. Collectively, this geographic distribution suggests that the funerary customs associated with these tombs closely reflected the sociocultural dynamics of the imperial provinces. As a part of a broader doctoral dissertation project that uses these tombs as a springboard for examining the cultural complexity of the Roman Empire, this paper will discuss how 3D recording and modeling methodologies – principally handheld LiDAR and photogrammetry – can be a fundamental tool in conducting comparative analysis of tombs from disparate geographical regions. It will conclude with a showcase of models made of rock-cut tombs from Cyprus, Malta, and Spain demonstrating the advantages of 3D models as a means of examining and illustrating their nuanced details.
Feb 28, 4:00–5:30pm | 2nd-Floor Conference Room, Brooks Hall
Let Monuments Lie? The Legal and Ethical Concerns of Monuments as Information Operations
Dr. Kate Harrell
University of Virginia School of Law
Curia Conflict Observatory
We have all experienced information operation (IO) campaigns, generally understood as mis- and disinformation spread online and in the news. But mis- and disinformation are not the only sources of IO, as scholars who have theorized so-called “dark heritage” are quick to point out. Charlottesville’s own recent history of racial confrontation, which spiked with the nefarious appropriation of civic spaces by Unite the Right and the murder of Heather Heyer, and ultimately led to the removal of Confederate statues, underscores the staggering capacity of monuments to perpetuate historical negations, as well as the hierarchy of social values that underpin these historical negations.
Ukraine similarly faces an onslaught of Russian monuments being built on Ukrainian territory that negate Ukrainian history and identity, replacing them with pro-Russian narratives. It is not difficult to imagine that Ukrainian officials could begin to consider new Russian monuments not as benign elements of culture but as important physical components in the hegemonic process known as Russification, designed to impose Russian language and assimilation on occupied Ukrainians while erasing all aspects of independent Ukrainian self identity. Moreover, in the context of an on-going full scale war in this region, these new monuments are literally under fire. The 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict outlines the protections on heritage, as well as the limits of these protections. his talk will consider to what extent new Russian monuments in eastern Ukraine could be considered legitimate military targets and the ethical considerations and responsibilities of preservationists in light of these arguments.
Nov 8, 4:00–5:30pm | 2nd-Floor Conference Room, Brooks Hall
3D Archaeology of Archaeology: remote sensing and digital mapping to rediscover the ancient Greek city of Heloros (Sicily)
Davide Tanasi
Professor, Department of History, University of South Florida
Heloros, located on Sicily’s Ionian shore, is believed to be the first sub-colony of the Greek city of Syracuse. Despite its historical significance, it remains relatively obscure. The Heloros Advanced Digital Exploration and Surveying (HADES) project seeks to clarify the site’s architectural and topographical evolution from its uncertain foundation in the late 8th century BCE to its heyday, in the Late Hellenistic period, and beyond. By digitizing and verifying legacy data and integrating them with newly acquired 3D geospatial documentation—employing global positioning, digital photogrammetry, drones, LIDAR, and ground-penetrating radar—this project reveals new insights into Heloros' history, including its pre-Greek occupation and revised interpretations of key structures. Using Heloros as a case study, this talk illustrates how the 'digital excavation' approach can yield substantial archaeological knowledge without new physical digs. The process of datafication, which involves creating new data through the layered collection of natively digital and digitized legacy data, guided the efforts for virtual reconstruction and future planning. This methodology resurfaced unpublished or previously unknown information about the site, verified interpretative hypotheses, and generated significant new data to rewrite the history of this important yet little-known Greek city.
Oct 18, 4:00–5:30pm | 2nd-Floor Conference Room, Brooks Hall
Inka Landscapes of Power: Sacred Places, Power, and Social Memory
Sonia Alconini
Department of Anthropology
Previous talks
2023–2024 Brown Bag Series
Oct 13, 4:00–5:30pm | 2nd-Floor Conference Room, Brooks Hall
An Introduction to Cultural Resource Management (CRM) and the Virginia Department of Historic Resources
Sean Tennant
Archaeology Data Manager, Survey and Information Management Division, Department of Historic Resources
This informal talk will discuss the state of CRM archaeology in Virginia and talk about the role of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources in managing Virginia's cultural heritage, as well as opportunities that DHR offers students and researchers. These include DHR's archaeological collections, archaeological conservation lab, and the Virginia Cultural Resource Information System (VCRIS), an online database with over 50,000 archaeological site records and access to over 12,000 archaeological reports.
Oct 20, 1:00–2:30pm | Brooks Hall Commons
An Indigenous Hermeneutic Approach to the Archaeology of Potsherd Pavements in Yoruba Culture
Olanrewaju Lasisi
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Race, Place, and Equity, UVA School of Architecture
Through the lens of indigenous hermeneutics, this talk expands upon the previous interpretation of potsherd pavements in Yoruba culture, moving beyond their role as architectural floors. It emphasizes their multi-functional roles, serving as sundials, naturalistic art objects, and cartographic maps. By examining festival ceremonies associated with potsherd pavements in two Yoruba kingdoms— Ijebu and Ile-Ife— the presentation reveals that the newly identified functions of these pavements are integral to the Yoruba's systems of time-reckoning, ritual practices, power dynamics, and spatial politics, as well as to the broader fabric of their social organization. Therefore, this talk advocates for a nuanced approach to Yoruba archaeology, one that considers the 'unwritten documentations' found within this hermeneutical framework as a basis for locating sites, excavating units, and interpreting finds. Through this hermeneutical lens, we open new avenues for understanding social complexity in pre-colonial African societies.
Co-sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Archaeology Program and the Carter G. Woodson Institute
Nov 10, 4:00–5:30pm | Brooks Hall Commons
Colonoware Ceramics in the South Carolina Lowcountry
Corey Sattes
Curator of Archaeological Collections, Monticello
“Colonoware” is a form of hand-built earthenware pottery made by enslaved Africans and Native Americans between the 17th and 19th centuries. This type of pottery served as daily cooking, storage, and serving vessels for most enslaved people living in colonial-period settlements and plantations in early America. The distinctively “plain” appearance of this pottery is intriguing, as it is quite unlike the vibrantly decorated pottery made by contemporaneous societies in Africa and Native American groups. Sattes will discuss the study of colonoware in Charleston, SC and how current research explores its production and relationship to emerging colonial identities.
Feb 2, 4:00–5:30pm | Fayerweather Hall Lounge
A Scholarly Divide in Research in the Forum at Pompeii: Archaeological Basics Yield Dividends
John Dobbins
Professor Emeritus, Department of Art and Archaeology Interdisciplinary Program, UVA
This talk presents the clash between archaeologists who adhere tenaciously to nineteenth-century views on the Forum at Pompeii and the Pompeii Forum Project (UVA), a late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century project that sees things differently because we use evidence.
Feb 16, 4:00–5:00pm | Brooks Hall Commons
The Valle de Mairana, Bolivia (c. 1000-1532 CE): Elucidating the Everyday
Sophia Marques
Department of Anthropology
Sometime during the Late Intermediate Period or the Late Horizon, the Valle de Mairana, Bolivia became part of the farthest reaches of the Inka empire, which at its height spanned the Andean Mountain range from Colombia to Argentina. However, relatively little is currently known about the people who lived in this valley during these centuries. How did the materiality of daily life respond to and shape people’s lived experiences of and within larger scale transformations surrounding Inka imperialism in the valley? This paper addresses this question with data from pedestrian survey, subsurface testing, and excavation in the valley. A focus on the small-scale realities of lived experience centers the agency of past peoples in shaping their world. What was important to people? How was that negotiated materially? How can we better understand the relations and choices that contributed en masse to large-scale socio-political trends? From this, we begin to explore power and agency in imperial processes, epistemologies of the mundane, and the materiality of relational ontologies.
Mar 15, 4:00–5:15pm | Brooks Hall Commons
Changing Social Relationships Between Plantation Owners and Their Laborers in the 17th-century Chesapeake: Evidence from Tobacco Pipe Assemblages from 44PG92, Flowerdew Hundred
Beth Bollwerk and Fraser Neiman
Department of Archaeology, Monticello
Enslaved Africans, indentured servants, and land-owning family members lived and worked together in close proximity at 44PG92, a mid- to late 17th-century occupation at Virginia’s Flowerdew Hundred. The artifact assemblages, carefully excavated by Dr. Ann Markell and cataloged into the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS), contain a wide variety of domestic refuse, including thousands of imported and locally made tobacco pipes. Using detailed contextual and artifact data, we track how these pipes were used across the site and what these patterns can tell us about who used them. We begin by developing a fine-grained, seriation-based chronology, which allows us to measure synchronic spatial patterning and change over time in multiple dimensions of variation among pipe assemblages. We discuss how the results clarify the extent to which locally made pipes were predominantly used by enslaved and indentured laborers or by landowners.
Apr 12, 4:00–5:30pm | Brooks Hall Commons
Finding Community on the Frontier: The archaeology of village life in 2nd millennium western Zambia
Zachary McKeeby
Department of Anthropology
The Machile River and its surrounding tributaries in western Zambia formed a significant locus of Iron Age life in Zambia and served as a conduit for the localized movements of people, things, and ideas in south central Africa over much of the last two millennia. Within this dynamic corridor, the early 2nd-millennium CE Kanono site represents a short-lived but well defined Middle/Late Iron Age farming community that integrated local crafting practices with global and regional orientations, during a period of dramatic political and economic changes across southern, central, and eastern Africa. Combining high-resolution geophysical survey and the results of targeted excavations at Kanono, this talk traces the emergence, growth, and abandonment of the village between the mid-thirteenth and early fifteenth centuries CE. I argue that changes seen in the village relate to the formation of a bounded co-residential community built around unilineal descent, and that founding families may have leveraged prestige in iron working into other forms of prestige – namely wealth in people and access to exotic goods. Approaching the archaeological record at Kanono from the perspective of household archaeology and daily life allows for an evocative ‘peopling’ of south-central African political economies.
Apr 26, 4:00–5:30pm | Brooks Hall Commons
A global history of insular worlds in the western Indian Ocean: the periodization of transfers and sociocultural changes over a millennium
Laurent Berger
Associate Professor of Anthropology, School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS, Paris) and Research Fellow at the Laboratoire d'anthropologie sociale (Collège de France, Paris)
This talk presents the long-term connections and interdependent trajectories of settlement and development of the islands of Madagascar and the archipelagos of the Comoros, Mascarene Islands and Seychelles in the Western Indian Ocean, between the 8th and 19th centuries. These islands and archipelagos constitute a regional area of acculturation unique in the world, as an Afro-Eurasian civilizational melting pot, forged in one of the last inhabited places of the planet, at the crossroads of Bantu, Arab-Persian, Austronesian, Indian and Western influences, through the centuries-old relations maintained with the Indian Ocean rim, in the west (the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers, the Swahili islands: Zanzibar, Kilwa, Pemba, Mafia, Pate), as well as to the east (the India of Gujarat, Sindh and the Malabar coast; the Indonesia of Sumatra and Java, the Riau archipelago, Sulawesi and Borneo). The unity of these island worlds is based primarily on common climatic and geographical conditions, which, through deep-sea navigation and coastal shipping, until the advent in the 19th and 20th centuries of steamboats, roads with carriageways and air and sea container lines, created the framework and rhythm of exchanges with the overseas territories. The unity of these island worlds is based secondly on the marginal and then peripheral position that their populations occupy in the exchange networks and the interregional division of labor set up through the export, by their elites, of a servile workforce, foodstuffs (rice, sugar, cattle) and raw materials (wood, minerals, aromatic resins) in order to obtain, until the 19th century, textiles, pearls, precious metals, ceramics and weapons. The objective of this talk is to consider the criteria of historical periodization, highlighting the phases of convergence and divergence of the trajectories of settlement and development of these island worlds through the combined arrival of Bantu and Austronesian populations distinct from the Swahili rise, the regional propagation of Islam and long-distance maritime trade, the insular state formation process and the Indian-oceanic slave trade, the struggles for influence of the Western, Omani and island empires until their colonial annexation.
This talk is sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Archaeology Program and the Department of Anthropology.
