Photography by Fotis Ifantidis
Curated by: Yannis Hamilakis, Justin Han, Kelley Tackett

An exhibit of photographs taken at the archaeological site of Koutroulou Magoula in central Greece, a site which was a Neolithic village for several centuries in the 6th millennium BCE and also used for burials in later periods. Since 2009, the site has being explored by the Koutroulou Magoula Archaeology and Archaeological Ethnography Project and is currently a collaboration between the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology, other universities, and the Greek Archaeological Service (Dr. Nina Kyparissi). The selected photos, out of the many hundreds taken, come from the 2017 and 2018 seasons and fall into five themes: Diggers, Landscapes, Bodies, Tactilities, Theatre/archaeologies. The photographs are accompanied by passages from the reflective, personal diaries of some of the Brown and RISD students who participated in the project in 2018.

Archaeologists use photographs all the time, primarily for the purposes of recording and documentation. In the field, many other, non-official, “social” photographs and snapshots are taken, which rarely become part of the archaeological story. There is, however, a third kind of photographic-archaeological production: photographs that comment visually on the process of archaeology, on excavation and on field practices, photographs which are at the same time artistic creations but which can also operate as photo-ethnographic objects; as one of the outcomes of the archaeological process which can be disseminated in various ethnographic contexts, and provoke and elicit responses and reactions that can lead to further reflection and research. This is the kind of photography we exhibit here. In doing so, we foreground the archaeological site not only as a site of research and education but also as a site of cultural and artistic production.

Sunday, January 27
Presentations and discussion about archaeogaming
10:00am-5:30pm
Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab
No registration required

Monday, January 28
Workshop Interactive Historytelling with Twine
10:00am-3:00pm
Sidney E. Frank Digital Studio
Registration required for Monday’s workshop - to register, email eva_mol@brown.edu

The value of video games to archaeology and vice versa has been discussed and shown in a number of related fields such as cultural heritage, ethnography, media studies, education and in a variety of archaeological thought and practice. The combination of games and archaeology, also known as archaeogaming, has grown to be a rich and multifaceted aspect in both scholarly discourse and heritage outreach. It functions not only to educate about the past and to recreate it, but also as a tool to think differently and more reflexively about archaeology and the way we engage with the past.

This two-day series of talks combined with a workshop will discuss the state of the field in gaming and archaeology with a specific focus on how interactive, virtual media function as a differential space for theory-crafting, historytelling, and public outreach. As the most popular form of entertainment globally, it is a given that games are instrumental in democratizing access to the past. Yet this often happens outside of the realm of disciplines that normally produce knowledge of the past. In short, any engagement with games includes confronting our materially-constructed and linear versions of the past with those that take place in digital playgrounds. How do games afford experiences of the past and the practice of archaeology? How do game developers craft specific versions of the past through playful, nonlinear and multi-vocal narratives in alternative virtual worlds? How can games produce awareness on past and present matters, create communities,and forge new relations between different people? But also, how can playing with time, materiality, and history in this interactive, digital medium shape the analogue study of the past?

Registration is required only for the Monday, January 28th Twine workshop. To sign up, please email: eva_mol@brown.edu

More info at: brown.edu/go/playingthepast

Dr Manuel Fernández-Götz is a Reader in Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, Executive Board Member of the European Association of Archaeologists, and winner of the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Archaeology. He has authored more than 140 publications on Iron Age societies in Central and Western Europe, the archaeology of identities, and the archaeology of the Roman conquest.

Dan Plekhov, a doctoral candidate in Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University, will be discussing his research in an informal talk. Pizza and soda will be provided, or feel free to bring a lunch.

For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit http://blogs.brown.edu/archaeology/2018/08/02/brown-bag-talks-for-spring-2019/

“Heritage in the Metropolis” (ARCH 0317) and “The Archaeology of College Hill” (ARCH 1900) are teaming up to present students’ final projects which focus on conducting research on an aspect of Providence’s history and then imagining/designing/proposing a way to tell that history to a broader public.

Providence is a city of hidden histories, some lying beneath the ground waiting to be unearthed and others tucked away in overlooked buildings and backstreets. Join Brown and RISD students as they share a diverse range of stories from Providence’s past that they have uncovered through archaeological excavations, archival research, and collecting local memories and oral histories. Short presentations and posters will also feature the students’ original proposals for how we might interpret and preserve these pieces of Providence’s heritage in creative, accessible, and sensitive ways.

This event is part of The Year of the City: The Providence Project, a year long exploration of the history, life and culture of Providence and the first in a series of three events around the theme of engaged archaeology that will be held at the Joukowsky Institute on February 1, 4, and 6, 2019.

The Joukowsky Institute invites undergraduates to present work in engaged archaeology on 4 February 2019!

On Monday, February 4, 2019 at 5:30 PM, the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World will hold an event to highlight undergraduate work in the field of engaged archaeology. This will be the second in a series of three events around the theme of engaged archaeology that will be held on 1, 4, and 6 February. We invite proposals for 15-20 min presentations by current Brown undergraduates. We particularly welcome presentations of work done for classes in recent semesters, including but not limited to term papers for related courses in archaeology.

The topic of engaged archaeology can be interpreted liberally; examples of relevant work include community archaeology projects, collaborative research, research that focuses on issues of ethics or social justice, and papers dealing with these and related topics. More information regarding engaged scholarship and archaeology can be found on the Joukowsky Institute’s website, and background on engaged scholarship in general can be found on the Swearer Center’s Engaged Scholars Program website.

If interested, please submit a short description of your topic to joukowsky_institute@brown.edu by 3 January 2018. For any questions, clarifications, or to discuss possible submissions, please email aliosha_bielenberg@brown.edu or ingrid_mader@brown.edu. We look forward to hearing from you!

On Wednesday, February 6, 2019 at 5:30 PM, the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World will hold an event to highlight graduate work in the field of engaged archaeology. This will be the third in a series of three events around the theme of engaged archaeology that will be held on 1, 4, and 6 February.

The topic of engaged archaeology can be interpreted liberally; examples of relevant work include community archaeology projects, collaborative research, research that focuses on issues of ethics or social justice, and papers dealing with these and related topics. More information regarding engaged scholarship and archaeology can be found on the Joukowsky Institute’s website, and background on engaged scholarship in general can be found on the Swearer Center’s Engaged Scholars Program website (https://www.brown.edu/academics/college/swearer/programs/engaged-scholar...).

David Mixter, a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Binghamton University, will be discussing his research in an informal talk. Pizza and soda will be provided, or feel free to bring a lunch.

For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit http://blogs.brown.edu/archaeology/2018/08/02/brown-bag-talks-for-spring-2019/

Ilaria Patania, a Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, will be discussing her research in an informal talk. Pizza and soda will be provided, or feel free to bring a lunch.

For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit http://blogs.brown.edu/archaeology/2018/08/02/brown-bag-talks-for-spring-2019/

Eduardo Góes Neves is a Professor of Archaeology at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. From 1995 to 2010, Eduardo directed the Central Amazon Project in the Brazilian Amazon. His current area of research is southwestern Amazonia, at the current border of Bolivia and Brazil, where he has been studying middle Holocene occupations on fluvial shell mounds, as well as the archaeology of late pre-colonial mound building societies.

Professor Matisoo-Smith is a molecular anthropologist and Professor at the University of Otago’s Department of Anatomy; she holds her degrees from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Auckland (MA and PhD).  Her areas of specialization are Pacific prehistory and origins of Pacific peoples, ancient and modern DNA analysis, and she has recently begun work on tracking Phoenician expansions across the Mediterranean.  Professor Matisoo-Smith is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of New Zealand and the Society of Antiquities, London, and her publications include DNA for Archaeologists (with K.A. Horsburgh, 2012).

This lecture is co-sponsored with the Narragansett Society, the Rhode Island chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America and is part of the AIA’s Jo Anne Van Tilburg Lecture Series.

Dr. Matisoo-Smith will also be a keynote speaker in the State of the Field 2019: The Ancient DNA Revolution in Archaeology starting on Friday, February 22 at 4:00pm in RI Hall 108.

Logan Kistler is a Curator of Archaeobotany and Archaeogenomics in the Department of Athropology at the Smithsonian Instiution’s National Museum of Natural History. Dr. Kistler studies plant domestication and evolutionary ecology in the human context using ancient DNA and genomics and is particularly interseted in the adaptability of maize and the domestication and movement of gourds and squashes. He also collaborate on issues of biodiversity and endemic ecosystem conservation in eastern Cuba, and on genomic research into Madagascar’s giant, extinct, subfossil lemurs. Broadly, his work deals with human-environment interactions and human impacts on ancient and modern ecosystems.

Dr. Kistler will also be a keynote speaker in the State of the Field 2019: The Ancient DNA Revolution in Archaeology starting on Friday, February 22 at 4:00pm in RI Hall 108.

Christina Warinner is a Presidential Research Professor and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma and holds a W2 position at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany. Dr. Warinner is pioneering the study of ancient human microbiota by using tissue samples from ancient skeletons and mummies to research how humans have evolved to adapt to changing diets, diseases, and environments over the last 10,000 years. Her research focuses on the exploration of calculus, a kind of fossilized dental plaque, as a novel biomolecular reservoir of ancient health and dietary indicators. This long-neglected mineralized biofilm is revealing itself to be a vital source of information about past human infections and a rich substrate for the study of bacterial evolution.

Dr. Warinner will also be a keynote speaker in the State of the Field 2019: The Ancient DNA Revolution in Archaeology starting on Friday, February 22 at 4:00pm in RI Hall 108.

Brown University’s Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World will host a conference titled State of the Field 2019: The Ancient DNA Revolution in Archaeology on February 22-23, 2019. Our gathering builds on a tradition of “State of the Field” workshops hosted by the Joukowsky Institute to reflect upon trends in archaeological research. This year’s conference aims to address the many issues surrounding the development and uses of ancient DNA methods around the world and to promote discussion between archaeologists, anthropologists, and geneticists in order to examine new opportunities and challenges for ancient DNA research in archaeology.

Keynote Panelists:
Logan Kistler, Smithsonian Institution
Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith, University of Otago
Christina Warinner, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and the University of Oklahoma

Find more information at: brown.edu/go/sotf2019

This workshop is free and open to the public.
No preregistration is required.

Sponsored by Brown University’s Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Center for Computational Molecular Biology, Program in Early Cultures, and Department of Anthropology.

Elizabeth Davis is Associate Professor of Anthropology and a Behrman Faculty Fellow in the Humanities. Her research and writing, grounded in the European horizons and the Ottoman history of the Greek-speaking world, focus on the intersections of psyche, body, history, and power as areas for ethnographic and theoretical engagement. Her particular interest is in how the ties that bind people to communities and states are yielded and inflected by knowledge: that is, how certain kinds of truths mediate conceptions of self and conceptions of others – as psychiatric subjects, for example, or as subjects of history. Her first book, Bad Souls: Madness and Responsibility in Modern Greece (Duke University Press, 2012), is an ethnographic study of responsibility among psychiatric patients and their caregivers in the “multicultural” borderland between Greece and Turkey. She is currently working on her second book, The Good of Knowing: War, Time, and Transparency in Cyprus (forthcoming from Duke University Press), a collaborative engagement with Cypriot knowledge production about the violence of the 1960s-70s in the domains of forensic science, documentary film, and “conspiracy theory.”

Elizabeth Davis is Associate Professor of Anthropology and a Behrman Faculty Fellow in the Humanities. Her research and writing, grounded in the European horizons and the Ottoman history of the Greek-speaking world, focus on the intersections of psyche, body, history, and power as areas for ethnographic and theoretical engagement. Her particular interest is in how the ties that bind people to communities and states are yielded and inflected by knowledge: that is, how certain kinds of truths mediate conceptions of self and conceptions of others – as psychiatric subjects, for example, or as subjects of history. Her first book, Bad Souls: Madness and Responsibility in Modern Greece (Duke University Press, 2012), is an ethnographic study of responsibility among psychiatric patients and their caregivers in the “multicultural” borderland between Greece and Turkey. She is currently working on her second book, The Good of Knowing: War, Time, and Transparency in Cyprus (forthcoming from Duke University Press), a collaborative engagement with Cypriot knowledge production about the violence of the 1960s-70s in the domains of forensic science, documentary film, and “conspiracy theory.”

Thomas Tartaron is Assistant Professor with the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also Chair of the Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Graduate Group. His research interests include Greek Bronze Age archaeology, Classical Archaeology, landscape archaeology, ethnoarchaeology, and archaeometry. Dr. Tartaron is currently working on oral history projects among traditional fishing communities in Greece (Thrace) and India (Kerala) as well as archaeological field survey at Molyvoti, Thrace (Greece). He has excavated extensively in Greece, and is the Co-Director of the Saronic Harbors Archaeological Research Project.

Alex Marko, a doctoral candidate in Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University, will be discussing his research in an informal talk. Pizza and soda will be provided, or feel free to bring a lunch.

For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit http://blogs.brown.edu/archaeology/2018/08/02/brown-bag-talks-for-spring-2019/

Lennart Kruijer, a doctoral candidate in Archaeology at Leiden University, will be discussing his research in an informal talk. Pizza and soda will be provided, or feel free to bring a lunch.

For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit http://blogs.brown.edu/archaeology/2018/08/02/brown-bag-talks-for-spring-2019/

Gretel Rodríguez, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art and Architecture at Brown University, and Willis Monroe, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia will present their work on The Database of Religious History in an informal talk. Pizza and soda will be provided, or feel free to bring a lunch.

For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit http://blogs.brown.edu/archaeology/2018/08/02/brown-bag-talks-for-spring-2019/

Robert Tykot is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of South Florida. His research interests include archaeological science, Mediterranean prehistory, Old World archaeology, ancient diets around the world, bone chemistry, exchange studies, obsidian, marble, Sardinia, and Sicily. His most recent work looks at prehistoric obsidian trade in the Central Mediterranean, bone chemistry and ancient diets, and the use of portable XRF on archaeological materials.

Karl Krusell, a doctoral candidate in Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University, will be discussing his research in an informal talk. Pizza and soda will be provided, or feel free to bring a lunch.

For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit http://blogs.brown.edu/archaeology/2018/08/02/brown-bag-talks-for-spring-2019/

Parker VanValkenburgh, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brown University, will present his work in an informal talk. Pizza and soda will be provided, or feel free to bring a lunch.

For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit http://blogs.brown.edu/archaeology/2018/08/02/brown-bag-talks-for-spring-2019/

Martin Uildriks, a doctoral candidate in Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University, will be discussing his research in an informal talk. Pizza and soda will be provided, or feel free to bring a lunch.

For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit http://blogs.brown.edu/archaeology/2018/08/02/brown-bag-talks-for-spring-2019/