Early Social Complexity in Southern Costa Rica

Amanda Suárez Calderón, PhD, Dumbarton Oaks, Pre-Columbian Studies

The archaeological region of Southern Costa Rica is well known for the beautiful gold figurines and the impressive stone sculptures that indigenous populations manufactured there during Pre-Columbian times. Hundreds of these objects are currently exhibited in museums across the world; however, most of them lack contextual information due to the history of how they were acquired and traded during modern times. This talk will be an overview of the archaeological research conducted in Southern Costa Rica over the last century, with special emphasis in the advances of the last decade. Specifically, we will explore the social organization of the indigenous societies who lived in this region between 300 and 1500 AD. Particular attention will be given to the fundamental transformation in social complexity that these societies experienced around 800 AD when the first villages appeared in the region. We will learn about the role of ceremonial activities and monumentalism in these early villages, as well as the intricate relationship between social complexity and hierarchy through times.

 Dr. Amanda Suárez Calderón obtained her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 2023. She holds a bachelor's degree in Anthropology from the University of Costa Rica. Her research interests include the emergence of social complexity and hierarchies in Pre-Columbian Central America, warfare, ethnohistory, GIS and statistics. In addition to directing her dissertation fieldwork, partially funded by a Lewis and Clark grant from the American Philosophical Society, Amanda has participated in several fieldwork projects in Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, and Peru. During her doctoral program at Pitt, Amanda received a Heinz fellowship for Latin American Archaeology, and she was a teaching fellow at the Department of Anthropology. Amanda is currently a Research Fellow in Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC.

The April 2024 monthly lecture will be hosted in person as well as virtually. The meeting will be held in the lecture theatre of the Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives, located at M and 17th Streets, NW, Washington, D.C. Photo ID is required to enter the building. Doors to the in-person meeting will open around 6:30 PM and light refreshments will be available before the lecture. For those of you who cannot make it to the Sumner School in person, the lecture will be live streamed via Zoom but you must pre-register to attend virtually. Click Here to register. All monnthly lecture meetings of the Pre-Columbian Society are free and open to the public.

"My Teeth Are My Finery": Cultures of Oral Care in the Maya World

Joshua Schnell, PhD, Fellow in Pre-Columbian Studies, Dumbarton Oaks

The decorated smiles of the early Maya have been the subject of more than a century of research, but the therapeutic and medicinal components of Maya dental practice – and the extent to which they existed – have remained the subject of speculation until quite recently. In this talk, Schnell will highlight his ongoing research which is bringing to light the oral care practices of the Maya, particularly during the Classic period (~250-1000 CE). Over the course of analyzing more than 300 individuals across 25 archaeological sites in the Maya Lowlands, Schnell has documented evidence for an entire suite of previously undocumented oral care practices including tooth cleaning and polishing, toothpick-use, extractions, fillings, and even oral surgery. This work is part of a larger research program in which Schnell emphasizes the importance of considering human agency in the study of health and disease in the past and pushes the boundaries of how care and care-related practices are traditionally studied. By focusing on oral care and dental practices, he argues for the unique capacity of the human mouth to address a broader definition of care that considers sociality, morality, and aesthetics in addition to health and medicine. Through this work, Schnell combines osteological analyses and paleopathology with detailed visual and material culture studies alongside broader ethnohistorical and ethnomedical research to situate early Maya oral care practices within their cultural and social contexts.  Please Note: this talk will contain images of human teeth.

Joshua Schnell is an anthropological bioarchaeologist whose work explores the intersection of human biology and the visual and material culture of aesthetic and medical practices in the past, particularly among the early Maya. His current research is pioneering this approach in the Maya area through the case study of oral care and the human mouth. He obtained his PhD and MA from the Department of Anthropology at Brown University and holds a BS in Anthropology and a BA in Religious Studies from Michigan State University. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Tinker Foundation, the Sperry Fund, the John Carter Brown Library, and Dumbarton Oaks. He has conducted archaeological fieldwork in Belize, Guatemala, and Mexico at a variety of sites ranging from mortuary rockshelters and caves to large civic-ceremonial dynastic centers. He currently works with the Proyecto Arqueológico Busilhá-Chocoljá in Chiapas, Mexico. 

The March 2024 monthly lecture will be hosted in person as well as virtually. The meeting will be held in the lecture theatre of the Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives, located at M and 17th Streets, NW, Washington, D.C. Photo ID is required to enter the building. Doors to the in-person meeting will open around 6:30 PM and light refreshments will be available before the lecture. For those of you who cannot make it to the Sumner School in person, the lecture will be live streamed via Zoom but you must pre-register to attend virtually.

The Zoom registration link for this meeting is: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_SL9Y6s64TS-Yw-YQIVyNBA

All monthly lecture meetings of the Pre-Columbian Society are free and open to the public.

In Tlamacazqueh, In Tlenamacaqueh: Refiguring the Mexica Priesthood

Anthony Meyer, PhD, Dumbarton Oaks, Pre-Columbian Studies

In the Mexica Empire (c. 1325 – 1521), state ceremonies dominated the landscape with their visual performances, booming sounds, and fragrant smells. Behind these arresting displays were a group of trained religious leaders who made the many sacred works that filled them. To transform and shape materials such as fig bark, amaranth seed, and feathers into artworks, religious leaders required a great depth of artistic skill. Though scholars have positioned religious leaders as imperial agents with sacred knowledge, argues in this presentation, that we also need to situate them as key makers in the Mexica world. Seeing religious leaders as deft makers in their own right forces us to “re-figure” their roles and flesh out the broad applicability of artistry in the Mexica Empire, which goes beyond our current scope of state artisans and elite artworks.

 Dr. Meyer will unpack the historiography on religious leaders in the Mexica Empire, tracing how colonial texts have influenced scholars to position these figures outside of art historical categories. Then, he will explore titles for these leaders that evince the special relationships they had with materials; namely, the two that are used in conjunction to refer to the religious body as a whole: the tlamacazqueh, who were offerers or “givers of things,” and the tlenamacaqueh, who were trained in forms of incensing and sacrifice. Part of this lexical plunge will be to untangle the problems and frameworks that scholarship has placed on these figures in referring to them as “priests,” and Dr. Meyer will argue for a switch to the term “religious leader” to work against these interpretive biases. Finally, he will examine some of the artistic practices and skills that religious leaders were engaged with in the Mexica world, showing how they made things in relational ways that imbued materials with sacred energies while, at the same time, infusing their own bodies with sacredness.

Anthony Meyer holds a PhD in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a focus in the Indigenous Americas. His research, broadly speaking, explores the crossroads between Nahua art, language, and religion in the Mexica Empire (1325–1521 C.E.) and the transatlantic world of colonial New Spain. He is currently working on his first book project, The Givers of Things: Religious Leaders and Sacred Making in the Nahua World, which examines how Nahua religious leaders used artistic skill and knowledge to make and animate sacred artworks in the Mexica Empire and New Spain. For his research, he has received support from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Dumbarton Oaks, the Fulbright Association, the Huntington Library, the John Carter Brown Library, the Renaissance Society of America, the Society for Architectural Historians, and the Social Science Research Council.

The February 2024 monthly lecture will be hosted in person as well as virtually. The meeting will be held in the lecture theatre of the Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives, located at M and 17th Streets, NW, Washington, D.C. Photo ID is required to enter the building. Doors to the in-person meeting will open around 6:30 PM and light refreshments will be available before the lecture. For those of you who cannot make it to the Sumner School in person, the lecture will be live streamed via Zoom but you must pre-register to attend virtually.

The registration link for this meeting is https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_fUBFPklYTCKfqxwWHIrYKQ  

All monthly lecture meetings of the Pre-Columbian Society are free and open to the public.

Exploring Mesoamerican Routes of Travel and Exchange: Least Cost Paths and the Southern Maya Area

Eugenia Robinson, PhD, Research Fellow, Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University

GIS-based Least Cost Path (LCP) analysis provides new insights into interactions among human groups and areas in prehistoric Mesoamerica. Least Cost Path (LCP) analysis models routes of travel for trade or communication, shedding light on the economic, social and political functions of individual sites on the routes.  A recent focus of work has been in the Southern Maya Area. This presentation will explore how LCP analysis amplifies our understanding of dynamic cultural interregional interaction by linking nodes such as the major highland Maya site Kaminaljuyu with key entities on the Pacific coast, the Maya lowlands, Veracruz, and the Mexican highland site Teotihuacan; the routes of trade goods for Copan; and of interregional connections within the Maya highlands as revealed by obsidian distributions.

Eugenia Robinson has her PhD from Tulane University and is now a Research Fellow of the Middle American Research Institute of Tulane.  She is a Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Montgomery College and the Director of the Proyecto Arqueológico del Área Kaqchikel.  Her interests are regional settlement and landscape studies, the use of the GIS-based analyses for modeling routes of travel and interaction, and rock “art” in the Kaqchikel Maya Highlands,  Her recent co-edited publication is a collection of studies titled “Routes, Interaction and Exchange in the Southern Maya Area.”

The January, 2024, monthly lecture will be hosted in person as well as virtually. The meeting will be held in the lecture theatre of the Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives, located at M and 17th Streets, NW, Washington, D.C. Photo ID is required to enter the building. Doors to the in-person meeting will open around 6:30 PM and light refreshments will be available before the lecture. For those of you who cannot make it to the Sumner School in person, the lecture will be live streamed via Zoom but you must pre-register to attend virtually. Click HERE to register.

All monthly lecture meetings of the Pre-Columbian Society are free and open to the public.

The Tonalamatl as Talking Book: Conversing with Time-Persons in the Key of Life

Jim Maffie, PhD, Senior Lecturer, Emeritus and Affiliate, University of Maryland

The Mexica conceived the paint-ink-on-paper figures of the Aztec tonalamatl (or "divinatory codices") as teixiptlahuan, i.e., as living and talking deities. As such they were presentations -- not re-presentations, pictures, symbols, or depictions -- of the relevant deities of the tonalpohualli (or 260-day ritual calendar). The Mexica tonalpouhque (or "diviner") communicated orally with these deity-presences in the courses of understanding the powers in play on any given day of the tonalpohualli. Using the tonalamatl to understand the tonalpohualli thus involved speaking, not reading.

Jim Maffie is Senior Lecturer, Department of History, Emeritus and Affiliate, Departments of Philosophy, Latin American Studies, & Religious Studies, University of Maryland, College Park. He is author of Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion, University Press of Colorado (2014) and numerous articles on Aztec ethics. He is currently working on a book entitled Talking with Time: Rethinking the Aztec Tonalamatl from which tonight's presentation is taken.

The November monthly lecture will be hosted in person as well as virtually. The meeting will be held in the lecture theatre of the Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives, located at M and 17th Streets, NW, Washington, D.C. Photo ID is required to enter the building. Doors to the in-person meeting will open around 6:30 PM and light refreshments will be available before the lecture. For those of you who cannot make it to the Sumner School in person, the lecture will be live streamed via Zoom but you must pre-register to attend virtually. Click HERE to register.

All monthly lecture meetings of the Pre-Columbian Society are free and open to the public.

Protecting the Irreplaceable: The Past, Present, and Future of U.S. Government Efforts to Preserve the Americas’ Cultural Heritage

Andrew Zonderman, PhD, Cultural Heritage Center, U.S. Department of State

For over a half century, the Government of the United States has taken measures independently and with the international community to protect and preserve cultural heritage.  Its earliest and most enduring interventions have been in the Western Hemisphere, notably the 1970 Treaty of Cooperation with the Government of Mexico and the 1972 Pre-Columbian Monumental and Architectural Sculpture and Murals Act. Dr. Zonderman will examine these and other U.S. federal laws, policies, and programs that ensure contemporary and future peoples can engage with the millennia of human history in the Americas.

Andrew Zonderman is a Foreign Affairs Officer and 2020 class Presidential Management Fellow.  At the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs’ Cultural Heritage Center he is responsible for monitoring cultural heritage issues in North America, Central America, and the Caribbean as well as managing bilateral cultural property agreements between the United States and countries within these regions.  Dr. Zonderman received his Ph.D. in History from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia in 2019 and earned his A.B. in History from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where he was a Robertson Scholar.

The October monthly lecture will be hosted in person as well as virtually. The meeting will be held in the lecture theatre of the Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives, located at M and 17th Streets, NW, Washington, D.C. Photo ID is required to enter the building. Doors to the in-person meeting will open around 6:30 PM and light refreshments will be available before the lecture.

For those of you who cannot make it to the Sumner School in person, the lecture will be live streamed via Zoom but you must pre-register to attend virtually. Click HERE to register.

All monthly lecture meetings of the Pre-Columbian Society are free and open to the public.

Paradise, Disaster, and the Ancestors in the Ceremonial Center of Tibe, Puerto Rico

Antonio Curet, PhD, National Museum of the American Indian

The archaeological site of Tibes in southern Puerto Rico, is to date the earliest ceremonial center in the Caribbean. It consists of nine stone structures and includes a variety of archaeological deposits. The information at hand suggests that the site began as a village around AD 500 and it acted as a ceremonial center from AD 900 to 1250, when it was abandoned. Traditionally, this shift has been interpreted by scholars as evidence of the development of social stratification. However, evidence obtained by the current project questions this interpretation. This lecture presents and discusses this evidence in some detail and proposes a new perspective on the social history of the island..

L. Antonio Curet is a Curator of the National Museum of the American Indian. He was born in Hato Rey, Puerto Rico in 1960 and attended the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras where he obtained his B.A. and M.A. in Chemistry. Curet received his Ph.D. in 1992 from Arizona State University.  He was part of the faculty at Gettysburg College (1993-1996) and University of Colorado at Denver (1996-2000).  From 2000 to 2013 he was Curator at the Field Museum and Adjunct Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University, University of Chicago, and DePaul University.  His research focuses on cultural and social change in the Ancient Caribbean, but he has participated also in archaeological projects in Arizona, Puerto Rico, and Veracruz, Mexico. He has directed several projects including Excavations at La Gallera, Ceiba, Puerto Rico and the Archaeological Project of the Valley of Maunabo.  Since 1995 he has been conducting excavations at the Ceremonial Center of Tibes, Ponce, Puerto Rico and in 2013 began co-directing a regional project in the Valley of Añasco in Western Puerto Rico. Curet has published multiple articles in national and international journals, a book on Caribbean paleodemography, and has edited volumes on Cuban Archaeology, the archaeology of Tibes, Puerto Rico, and long-distance interaction in the Caribbean. He is also in the editorial boards of the Journal for Caribbean Archaeology, Revista Arqueológica del Area Intermedia, and Latin American Antiquity, Antípoda (Universidad de los Andes, Colombia) and is the editor of the Caribbean Archaeology and Ethnohistory Book Series of the University of Alabama Press.

The September monthly lecture will be hosted the second Friday instead of the usual first Friday this month. The talk will be given in person as well as virtually. The meeting will be held in the lecture theatre of the Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives, located at M and 17th Streets, NW, Washington, D.C. Photo ID is required to enter the building. Doors to the in-person meeting will open around 6:30 PM and light refreshments will be available before the lecture.

For those of you who cannot make it to the Sumner School in person, the lecture will be live streamed via Zoom but you must pre-register to attend virtually. Click HERE to register.

All monthly lecture meetings of the Pre-Columbian Society are free and open to the public.

The Tonalamatl as Talking Book: Conversing with Time-Persons in the Key of Life

Jim Maffie, PhD, University of Maryland, College Park

The Mexica conceived the paint-ink-on-paper figures of the Aztec tonalamatl (or "divinatory codices") as teixiptlahuan, i.e., as living and talking deities. As such they were presentations--not re-presentations, pictures, symbols, or depictions -- of the relevant deities of the tonalpohualli (or 260-day ritual calendar). The Mexica tonalpouhque (or "diviner") communicated orally with these deity-presences in the courses of understanding the powers in play on any given day of the tonalpohualli. Using the tonalamatl to understand the tonalpohualli thus involved speaking, not reading.

Jim Maffie, PhD, is Senior Lecturer, Department of History, Emeritus and Affiliate, Departments of Philosophy, Latin American Studies, & Religious Studies, University of Maryland, College Park. He is author of Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion, University Press of Colorado (2014) and numerous articles on Aztec ethics. He is currently working on a book entitled Talking with Time: Rethinking the Aztec Tonalamatl from which tonight's presentation is taken..

The August monthly lecture will be hosted in person as well as virtually. The meeting will be held in the lecture theatre of the Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives, located at M and 17th Streets, NW, Washington, D.C. Photo ID is required to enter the building. Doors to the in-person meeting will open around 6:30 PM and light refreshments will be available before the lecture.

For those of you who cannot make it to the Sumner School in person, the lecture will be live streamed via Zoom but you must pre-register to attend virtually. Click HERE to register.

All monthly lecture meetings of the Pre-Columbian Society are free and open to the public.

Archaeological Investigations Under the National Historic Preservation Act

Alexis Clark, MA, Advisory Council on Historic Preservation

Archaeological surveys and excavations performed under the requirements of the National Historic Preservation Act’s Section 106 make up most of the archaeological research performed in the United States today. But what is this piece of legislation, when is it required, and how does it work to protect archaeological sites? This presentation will provide an introduction to the nation’s commitment to archaeological site preservation and an overview of how sites are protected under Section 106.  It will offer an understanding of when it applies and how it compares to other federal laws in place to protect archaeological sites. Following the review of the process, we will look at several case studies that highlight preservation successes through Section 106.

Alexis Clark is a Historic Preservation Specialist at the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. She is responsible for the Section 106 case review for an assortment of agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Air National Guard, Bureau of Reclamation, the Presidio Trust, and U.S. Department of Agriculture agencies providing federal assistance. She is a graduate of The George Washington University with a MA in Anthropology and BA in Archaeology, where her research focused on Mesoamerican archaeology.

The July monthly lecture will be hosted in person as well as virtually. The meeting will be held in the lecture theatre of the Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives, located at M and 17th Streets, NW, Washington, D.C. Photo ID is required to enter the building. Doors to the in-person meeting will open around 6:30 PM and light refreshments will be available before the lecture.

For those of you who cannot make it to the Sumner School in person, the lecture will be live streamed via Zoom but you must pre-register to attend virtually. To register, click HERE.

All monthly lecture meetings of the Pre-Columbian Society are free and open to the public.

The Archaeological Conservancy's Preservation Efforts in the East: from the Paleoindian through 20th-Century Industrial Sites

Kelley Berliner, MA, The Archaeological Conservancy

For the past 43 years The Archaeological Conservancy has been the only national nonprofit organization dedicated to the permanent preservation of archaeological sites across the country. These sites range in diversity from the Thunderbird site, which contains the remains of one of the earliest Paleoindian structures discovered in the country, to the Pamplin Pipe Factory, a manufacturing facility that grew from an early cottage industry of making pipes from local clays. Across the country the Conservancy has preserved Ancestral Puebloan villages, Haudenosaunee/Iroquois sites, petroglyphs, Hopewell earthworks, mounds, prehistoric quarries, Chaco outliers, French and Indian War fortifications, plantation sites, and more. These sites are protected through fee-simple ownership or, less frequently, easements, and are maintained as permanent open-space archaeological research preserves that are open to professional archaeologists and for educational purposes.  This talk will highlight some of the important sites protected by the Conservancy.

Kelley Berliner began working with The Archaeological Conservancy in 2013 and currently serves as the Eastern Regional Director, managing over 70 properties containing prehistoric and historic sites from Maine south through North Carolina, all while working to preserve additional sites. Previously she worked as a field archaeologist in the CRM Industry, educator, and museum interpreter in the Eastern United States, Michigan, and Canada. She has a BA in Anthropology from the University of Toronto and a MA in Historical Archaeology from The College of William and Mary. Her interests include public archaeology, community engagement, preservation, and archaeology of the northeastern United States and Canada.

We are excited to announce that the June monthly lecture will be hosted in person as well as virtually. This will be our first face-to-face meeting since April 2020 and we are looking forward with great anticipation to seeing many of you again at the Sumner School, located at M and 17th Streets, NW, in Washington, D.C.

For those of you who cannot make it to the Sumner School in person, the lecture will be live streamed but you must pre-register to attend virtually. Click HERE to register.

All monthly lecture meetings of the Pre-Columbian Society are free and open to the public. Doors to the in-person meeting will open around 6:30 PM.

The Expansive Lives of Chavin Artists and their Creations across the Ancient Andes

Nicholas E. Brown, PhD

Fellow, Pre-Columbian Studies, Dumbarton Oaks

This presentation explores the spread of Chavin art across the Andean world of the early first millennium B.C. To understand the lives of the people responsible for its spread, in this talk, Dr. Brown will embark on a journey through several sites of Chavin artistic production in Peru, tracing the visual evidence of ancient communication between far-flung regions. Beginning in the north-central highlands, he will discuss the carved stone monuments of Chavin de Huantar to highlight the criteria involved in labeling a work of art as “Chavin”, then shift to the south coast sites of Karwa and Coyungo to consider how Chavin and Paracas design traditions were fused by artists who painted cotton textiles. The talk will conclude with a discussion of the east-central highlands sites of Chawin Punta, Quillarumi, and Kanchan Wanka, which contain an impressive array of carved and painted art that suggests the importance of artistic mobility within the Chavin phenomenon. By considering the influential lived experiences of ancient people who traveled through the central highlands on their journeys to and from Chavin de Huantar, fresh insights can be gained about the diversity of creative inspirations involved in the social movements of Chavin art throughout the Peruvian Andes.

Nicholas E. Brown holds a PhD in Anthropology from Yale University, having received a BA in Archaeology at Stanford University. Brown directs the Chawin Punta-Kunturay Archaeology Project (2016-2023) and the Central Andes-Amazonia Headwaters Survey (2020-2023). Brown's research explores how the interplay between human interaction and social innovation resulted in widespread circulation of symbols and ideas across different parts of South America in ancient times, focusing on the Chavin phenomenon in Peru during the second and first millennium BC. Brown also studies the contemporary mobilization of Andean heritage in Peru, Chile, and Ecuador and its impact around the world in museums, universities, and UNESCO’s World Heritage Program..

This meeting is free and open to the public but you must pre-register to attend. Click HERE to register for this Zoom lecture. A confirmation email and a reminder message will be sent the day before the talk.

Digital Resources for Studying the Nahuatl Language and Nahua Culture

Stephanie Wood, PhD, Kislak Chair, Library of Congress

In this well-illustrated lecture, Dr. Wood will share examples from three open-access digital collections, including the Mapas Project, (about indigenous-authored pictorial manuscripts of New Spain); the Online Nahuatl Dictionary, (which combines early and contemporary Nahuatl, with attestations from manuscripts and publications); and, the Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs, (a database of hieroglyphs from a growing number of manuscripts, all with description, analysis, and the tracking of characteristics of the writing system and culture in the autonomous era and under colonialism).

Dr. Stephanie Wood holds the Kislak Chair at the Library of Congress (2022-2023). She is the Director of the Wired Humanities Projects and a Senior Research Associate at the Center for Equity Promotion, College of Education, University of Oregon. Prior to this position, Wood was adjunct faculty at the same university (1992–2015) and Assistant Professor at the University of Maine (1984–1989), teaching Latin American and U.S. History. Wood is the author of the monograph, “Transcending Conquest: Nahua Views of Spanish Colonial Mexico” (University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), co-editor of five anthologies, and the author of dozens of articles and essays on early Mexican ethnohistory. With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), she has directed six summer institutes for U.S. schoolteachers.

This meeting is free and open to the public but you must pre-register to attend. Click HERE to our Zoom April lecture. A confirmation email, and reminder will be will be sent the day before the event.

Burning Rings of Fire: Ancient Maya Resource Conservation Strategies

Ken Seligson, PhD, California State University Dominquez Hills

The Ancient Maya used burnt lime for everything. From the mortar that held their elaborate temple pyramids together to the processing of corn into a nutritious staple food, burnt lime was literally the glue that held the Maya world together. Yet until recently, archaeologists did not know how the Pre-hispanic Maya made their burnt lime. The amount of wood used in traditional above-ground kilns during the Colonial Period, and more recently, raises the possibility that burnt lime production may have led to rampant deforestation during the Classic Period. In this lecture, Dr. Seligson will discuss the many archaeological methods that he used to identify a fuel-efficient Pre-hispanic pit-kiln technology in the Northern Maya Lowlands–a finding that questions the idea that Classic Maya civilization “collapsed.”

Dr. Ken Seligson is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at California State University Dominguez Hills in Los Angeles County. He earned his AB in Anthropology and History from Brown University and his MA and PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Seligson has been conducting archaeological fieldwork in the Northern Maya Lowlands since 2010, focusing mainly on human-environment relationships and resource management practices, as well as on ancient technology. His first book The Maya and Climate Change, which was written for a broader public audience interested in the ancient Maya, was published by Oxford University Press in November 2022.

This meeting is free and open to the public but you must pre-register. Click HERE to register. A confirmation email, and reminder will be will be sent the day before the event.

Understanding the Maya Codex of Mexico: Meaning and History of the Fourth Maya Codex

Mary Miller, PhD, and Andrew D. Turner, PhD, Getty Research Institute

Prior to the 1960s, only three pre-Hispanic Maya books were known to have survived the humidity of the tropics and the deliberate efforts of Spanish invaders to destroy them. The sudden and controversial appearance of a fourth Maya codex under private ownership sparked decades of debate about its origin and authenticity. Recent collaborative scientific and art historical studies have determined that not only is the Maya Codex of Mexico (formerly known as the Grolier Codex) authentic, but also that it predates the other surviving books by centuries. This presentation explores the importance of Maya books and controversy surrounding the acquisition of the Maya Codex of Mexico, and demonstrates how Maya astronomers used the book to predict the dangerous and complex movements of the planet Venus 900 years ago.

Mary Miller, PhD, is the Director of the Getty Research Institute, where she also leads the Pre-Hispanic Art Provenance Initiative (PHAPI), a systematic study of the 20th century international market for pre-Hispanic art. A specialist in the art of ancient Mexico and the Maya, her numerous publications include The Murals of Bonampak (1986), The Art of Mesoamerica (1986, now in its 6th edition), Maya Art and Architecture (1999, now in a new edition with Megan O’Neil), and The Spectacle of the Late Maya Court: Reflections on the Murals of Bonampak (2013). She is Sterling Professor Emeritus in History of Art at Yale University and the recipient of many national awards.

Andrew D. Turner, PhD, is a senior research specialist at the Getty Research Institute. Trained as both an archaeologist and art historian, Turner’s work focuses on ancient Mesoamerican material culture, symbolism, and cross-cultural interaction. He has authored several scholarly works on ancient Mesoamerican and Andean material culture, and is the editor of the books Flower Worlds: Religion, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest (with Michael Mathiowetz, 2021) and Códice Maya de México: Understanding the Oldest Surviving Book of the Americas (2022)..

This meeting is free and open to the public but you must pre-register. Click HERE to register. A confirmation email and reminder will be will be sent the day before the event.

Gault and the Peopling of the Americas Myth

D. Clark Wernecke, PhD, Director (ret.), Prehistory Research Project, University of Texas at Austin

Recent discoveries, including the Gault Archaeological Site, have triggered a paradigm shift regarding the earliest peoples in the Americas. Though a number of researchers over the years publicly doubted the mainstream idea that the Clovis culture represented the first peoples in the New World the excavations at Monte Verde, Chile in the 1970's changed the nature and tenor of the arguments. For the first time many archaeologists agreed that a site met the rules of evidence showing human occupation in the Western Hemisphere prior to Clovis. As more evidence surfaced and older sites were re-examined, we were forced to revise the story of the peopling of the Americas. Paradigm shifts are messy, and we still have nearly as many questions as answers but it is clear that we need to more closely test new hypotheses for the peopling of the Americas.

Clark Wernecke, PhD, is the retired Director of the Prehistory Research Project at the University of Texas at Austin and the nonprofit Gault School of Archaeological Research. Dr. Wernecke started his academic career with a degree in history from Southern Methodist University followed by an MBA from Northwestern University, a MA in Anthropology from Florida Atlantic, and finally his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. He came back to archaeology after a career in business and has worked in the Middle East, Mesoamerica, the American Southeast and Southwest, and Texas.

This meeting is free and open to the public but you must pre-register. Click HERE to register.

Soul Expressions: Speech and Breath in Archaic Period Rock Art

Carolyn Boyd, PhD, Research Professor, Texas State University, San Marcos

At least 5,000 years ago, Archaic Period hunters-gatherers of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas and Coahuila, Mexico, began painting complex rock art mural along rock shelter walls and cliff overhangs. Polychromatic images of humans and animals populate the murals and display an array of semantically charged visual attributes, such as headdresses, body ornaments, and paraphernalia. Attributes such as these function like a giant vocabulary and their arrangement in the mural, not unlike syntax, conveys meaning. One of the most ubiquitous attributes is the subject of this presentation: speech-breath. Lower Pecos artists often portrayed dots or lines emanating out of or into the mouths of humans and animals. In this talk, Dr. Boyd will discuss patterns in shape, color, and arrangement of this pictographic element and propose that this graphic device denotes speech, breath, and the soul. Artists communicated meaning through the image making process, alternating brushstroke direction to show inhalation vs exhalation or using different paint application techniques to reflect forceful speech. The choices made by artists in the production of imagery reflect their cosmology and the framework of ideas and beliefs through which they interpreted and interacted with the world. Bridging iconographic data with ethnohistory and ethnographic texts from Mesoamerica, our speaker suggests that speech-breath express in the rock art of the Lower Pecos was intimately tied to concepts of the soul, creation, and human origins.

Dr. Carolyn Boyd is the Shumla Endowed Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Texas State University, San Marcos. She is the founder of a non-profit organization, Shumla Archaeological Research and Educational Center, which was established in 1998 to preserve the ancient rock art murals of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands in southwest Texas and Coahuila, Mexico. Boyd is the author of Rock Art of the Lower Pecos (2003, Texas A&M University Press) and The White Shaman Mural: An Enduring Creation Narrative (2016, the University of Texas Press), which received the 2017 Scholarly Book Award from the Society for American Archaeology. Her current projects include Origins and Tenacity of Myth in Archaic Period Rock Art in Southwest Texas and Northern Mexico, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Layers of Meaning: Chronological Modeling and Pictograph Stratigraphy, funded by the National Science Foundation.

This meeting is free and open to the public but you must pre-register. Click HERE to register.

Wari Power and Local Encounters in Middle Horizon, Cusco, Peru

Véronique Bélisle, PhD, Associate Professor, Millsaps College

In the Andes, the Middle Horizon (600-1000 CE) has traditionally been interpreted as a period during which a strong Wari imperial state conquered several provinces and tightly controlled local populations. In the Cusco region of southern Peru, research conducted at large Wari installations has long guided reconstructions of Wari power, leading scholars to argue that Wari presence resulted in the loss of local autonomy and the reorganization of economic activities. In this talk, our speaker uses regional surveys as well as excavation data from the local center of Ak’awillay and from the Wari site of Kaninkunka to test this model. She evaluates Wari economic impact in Cusco and assesses the nature of the relationships between local communities and Wari colonists. Results suggest strong continuity in agricultural production and exchange networks, pointing to a rather weak Wari impact on economic activities. Encounters with Wari were not grounded in violence, and some ritual spaces were a theater for alliances and exchange with select members of local populations.

Dr. Véronique Bélisle is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Millsaps College. She is interested in state expansion, its impact on local lifeways, and the strategies that state colonists develop to interact with the communities they meet. More specifically, her research focuses on the impact of Wari expansion in the Cusco region of southern Peru, where she has directed large-scale excavations. She investigated local settlements for over a decade, and is currently working on a new project at a Wari site in Cusco. She has published her research in English and Spanish in different journals, including Latin American Antiquity, Journal of Anthropological Anthropology, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, Journal of Archaeological Science, Ñawpa Pacha, and Chungara. She is working on a book that uses a bottom-up approach to understand Wari impact in Cusco.

This meeting is free and open to the public but you must pre-register. Click HERE to register.

COLLECTING HUASTEC SCULPTURE BEFORE 1940: HUASTEC CULTURAL PATRIMONY AT THE INTERSECTION OF EURO-AMERICAN IMPERIAL AND INDUSTRIAL AMBITIONS

Kim N. Richter, PhD, Getty Research Institute

Pre-Columbian Huastec sculptures are nearly ubiquitous in private and museum collections of Mesoamerican art. While these sculptures appeal to modern collectors because of their bold forms and sometimes naturalistic style, I argue that it is the region’s location and natural resources that resulted in the dispersal of these sculptures into international collections. The city of Tampico in the Huasteca region of northeastern Mexico—today considered a marginal town on the Gulf coast—was a major international hub during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, following Mexican Independence. The lure of silver mining, the construction of railroads, and discovery of “black gold” first found in the region brought foreign prospectors, geologists, oil executives, industrialists, and diplomats to Tampico, who carried off Huastec sculptures to their home countries as souvenirs and prized ancient collectibles. Eventually, many of these sculptures came to grace the exhibition halls of some of the grandest museums in Europe, the USA, and Mexico. This story of Huastec coleccionismo directly intersects with global politics and, indeed, directly results from Euro-American imperial and industrial ambitions in Mexico.

Kim N. Richter, PhD, is senior research specialist in the Director’s Office at the Getty Research Institute. She received her PhD in art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, specializing in Pre-Columbian art and archaeology. She is author of numerous articles on Huastec art, co-editor of The Huasteca: Culture, History, and Interregional Exchange (2015), co-curator of Golden Kingdoms: Luxury and Legacy in the Ancient Americas (2017), and co-editor of the award-winning accompanying Golden Kingdoms catalogue. She leads the collaborative digital initiative focused on the Florentine Codex, an encyclopedic manuscript about Mexica life and culture created in sixteenth-century Mexico, and co-leads the newly launched Latin American and Latinx Art Initiative.

This lecture is free and open to the public. To attend you, must pre-register and a link will be provided to you prior to the event. To pre-register, click HERE.

Mayapan: Daily Life, Social Diversity, and the Built Environment, AD 1200-1450

Marilyn Masson, PhD, University at Albany SUNY

Residents of the last large regional Pre-Columbian Maya capital of Mayapan experienced daily life in the context of a dense urban landscape and built environment that marked neighborhoods, public places, stone-lined pedestrian thoroughfares, and resources. Life in the city balanced perpetual encounters with other people distinguished by class, occupation, and diverse hometown origins. Urban Mayapan was tied by complex trade and labor dependencies within the city itself as well as to its sustaining area, and subject towns across the northern peninsula. This presentation reviews and compares the features of urban and rural organization and their implications for cultivating a unifying state identity and reconciling social diversity. Further explored are capacities for economic sustainability, and lingering legacies traced into the era of Spanish Contact (until A.D. 1540). Findings at Mayapan draw on twenty years of research in the walled urban zone and rural periphery, including a regional LiDAR survey project.

Marilyn Masson is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University at Albany SUNY. Her Maya area archaeological research focuses on political economies, the archaeology of daily life in urban and rural settings, and the historical anthropology of societal transformations during the Postclassic, Contact, and Colonial periods. Her recent books include Kukulcan's Realm: Urban Life at Ancient Mayapan (2014, with co-author Carlos Peraza, U. Press of Colorado), The Real Business of Ancient Maya Exchange: From Farmers' Fields to Rulers' Realms (2020, with co-editors David Freidel and Arthur Demarest, U. Press of Florida), Settlement, Economy, and Society at Mayapan, Yucatan, Mexico (2021, with co-editors Timothy Hare, Carlos Peraza, and Bradley Russell, Center for Comparative Archaeology, U. of Pittsburgh), and Faces of Rulership in the Maya Region (forthcoming, co-editor with Patricia McAnany, Dumbarton Oaks)..

Because of the long holiday weekend, the next virtual meeting of the Pre-Columbian Society of Washington, D.C. will be held Friday, September 9th rather than the first Friday of the month. This meeting is free and open to the public but you must pre-register. To register click HERE.

Where the Water Is Shallow and the Current Is Strong: Identifying Stone Fish Weirs of the Eastern Woodlands

David J. Cranford, PhD, Office of State Archaeology, North Carolina

Though often overlooked, stone fish weirs are relatively common archaeological features in many swift-flowing rivers and streams above the fall-line across the eastern Unites States. Often seen as V- or W-shaped stone alignments, these highly efficient fishing structures were used extensively throughout the pre-colonial and historic periods, some potentially dating back millennia and represent an important part of our cultural landscape. For a variety of reasons, stone fish weirs have received only intermittent attention from the archaeological community and are rarely the focus of systematic surveys. Improvements in the quality and accessibility of satellite-based imagery, such as Google Earth, have made the identification and recording of fish weir sites possible on a regional scale. This presentation addresses the ongoing efforts to document stone fish weirs in rivers throughout the Eastern United States and to situate these features as part of the cultural landscape. .

David J. Cranford serves as an Assistant State Archaeologist for the North Carolina (NC) Office of State Archaeology (OSA). He provides environmental review and technical assistance for counties in the Southern Piedmont of NC, and he promotes public outreach and archaeological education across the state. In addition, Dr. Cranford manages the North Carolina Fish Weir Archaeological Project and is a member of the Office of State Archaeology scientific diving program. He received a BA at Appalachian State University and an MA from the University of Oklahoma before completing his PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation research is an archaeological examination of community organization and household variability within the Catawba Indian Nation of South Carolina during the late 18th century (ca. 1760 – 1800). Dr. Cranford’s other research interests include the archaeology of North Carolina, public archaeology, ceramic and lithic analysis, and the application of new technologies in archaeology.

The next virtual meeting of the Pre-Columbian Society of Washington, D.C. will be held August 5th, the first Friday of the month. This meeting is free and open to the public but you must pre-register. To register click here.

Birds of the Sun: Scarlet Macaws in the pre-Hispanic U.S. Southwest and Mexican Northwest

Christopher Schwartz, PhD, Environmental Planning Group and Arizona State University

Exchange is a fundamental human behavior. While today, people rapidly exchange goods and information over great distances, in the past, long-distance exchange necessitated the mobilization of vast networks of interaction. Vibrantly colored scarlet macaws, which are native to the gulf coast of Mexico and Central and South America, are among the most engaging and challenging of objects to have been transported through these networks over hundreds of miles. This talk explores the long-distance acquisition, circulation, and use of scarlet macaws in the pre-Hispanic U.S. Southwest and Mexican Northwest, including the reasons for procuring these multifaceted animals, their significance in processes of placemaking and widespread social transformations, and their continued importance to descendant communities in this region.

Christopher Schwartz is a senior staff scientist at Environmental Planning Group (EPG) and a visiting researcher at Arizona State University, where he earned his PhD in Anthropology in 2020. He is an anthropological archaeologist who examines the social impacts of long-distance exchange & long-term human-animal relationships in pre-Hispanic North America. He draws on various lines of evidence, including faunal skeletal material, isotopic analyses, material culture, Indigenous perspectives, & spatial analyses, to understand how interregional interaction & human-animal relationships effected large-scale social transformations in the past. He is also the lead editor of Birds of the Sun.

Because of the long holiday weekend, the next virtual meeting of the Pre-Columbian Society of Washington, D.C. will be held Friday, July 8th rather than the first Friday of the month. This meeting is free and open to the public but you must pre-register HERE to attend.

Rethinking Andean and Amazonian Relations: The Taypi Yungas as Spaces of Encounter, Ethnogenesis and Sociopolitical Transformation

Sonia Alconini, PhD, University of Virginia

The eastern tropical mountains, whether conceived as the yungas, piedmont or ceja de selva, were part of the massive Cordillera spine that run through a sizable portion of South America. It divided the Andes from the Amazonian basin. Even though it is often conceived as a natural barrier or strategic filter, it was also the axis that made possible Andean and Amazonian relations. They were known as the taypi yunga and chaupi yunga, both embodying concepts of centrality. In this presentation Dr. Alconini explores the critical role that ancient trading corridors had in the cultural interregional dynamics. Since antiquity, peoples of different ethnic origins, languages and cultural traditions converged, dwelled and established kindred relations along these interethnic corridors. By zooming in one of these corridors that run to the east of the Titicaca basin in the provinces of the Kallawayas and Chunchos, our speaker highlights the changes in the sociopolitical dynamics, and the forms in which altiplanic valley and Arawak-speaking communities, among others, were articulated into these networks.

Sonia Alconini (David A. Harrison III Professor of Archaeology) teaches in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. Originally from Bolivia, she has conducted archaeological research in different parts of the Andean region and the eastern tropical regions. Multidisciplinary in nature, her research focuses on the nature of frontier interaction, Inka imperialism, and local agency. She has published several articles and books in English and Spanish, including the Oxford Handbook of the Incas (University of Oxford Press, 2018 co-edited with Alan Covey), Southeastern Inka Frontiers: Boundaries and Interaction (University of Florida Press, 2016), and Entre la Vertiente Tropical y los Valles: Sociedades Regionales e Interacción Prehispánicas en los Andes Centro-Sur (Plural Editorial, 2016). Her current research project is in the Inka center of Samaipata (Santa Cruz-Bolivia).

The June 3 meeting of the Pre-Columbian Society of Washington, D.C. will be held virtually using the Zoom platform. This meeting is free and open to the public but you must pre-register to attend. Click HERE to pre-register.

Reconstructing the Fragments of an Inka Imperial Economy

Kylie Quave, PhD, George Washington University

How did the Inkas organize their economy? Whose interests did the Inka economy serve and by whose labor were imperial goods produced? These questions have long been asked and answered, yet without a fuller picture from archaeological excavations in the heartland of the empire (Cusco, Peru). In this talk, Dr. Quave discusses excavations of Inka and non-Inka households in the Cusco region, as well as ongoing laboratory research. These projects focus on daily life among laborers who were partially included in the imperial economy and the daily lives of rivals to the Inkas who were largely excluded from the privileges of Inka life. Through examining their lived realities, we can challenge previous assumptions about Inka power. These results allow us to ask different questions about what makes an ancient empire relevant to humans today. 

Kylie Quave is an assistant professor of writing and of anthropology at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. As an anthropological archaeologist studying imperialism and colonialism in the Andes, she brings together excavations of rural villages with archival documents and archaeometric analysis of material culture. Her interests are in identity formation, social and economic inequalities, and incorporating pluralistic perspectives on the past. Her work has been published recently in Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Advances in Archaeological Practice, International Journal of Historical Archaeology, and Qillqana: Revista arqueológica del Cusco.

The May 6 meeting of the Pre-Columbian Society of Washington, D.C. will be held virtually using the Zoom platform. This meeting is free and open to the public but you must be pre-registered to attend. To register click here.

New Research from Tikal on Maya Agroforestry

David L. Lentz, PhD, University of Cincinnati

Tikal, a major city of the ancient Maya world, has been the focus of archaeological research for over a century, yet the interactions between the Maya and the surrounding Neotropical forests remain largely enigmatic. This study aimed to help fill that void by using a powerful new technology, environmental DNA analysis, that enabled us to characterize the site core vegetation growing in association with the artificial reservoirs that provided the city water supply.  Because the area has no permanent water sources, such as lakes or rivers, these reservoirs were key to the survival of the city, especially during the population expansion of the Classic period (250-850 CE).  Our samples encompassed the time before, during and after the occupation of Tikal (1000 BCE-900 CE).  Results indicate that the banks of the ancient reservoirs were primarily fringed with native tropical forest vegetation rather than domesticated species during the Maya occupation. 

David Lentz is a Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Cincinnati. He is a paleoecologist and archaeobotanist who specializes in the study of Mesoamerican cultures. He has published three books and more than 120 research articles and book chapters. Recently (2021), he was a Fellow in residence at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Museum in Washington, D.C.

The April 1 meeting of the Pre-Columbian Society of Washington, D.C. will be held virtually using the Zoom platform. This meeting is free and open to the public but you must be pre-registered to attend. Check here to pre-register.

Assembling an Architecture of the Ayllu and Interrogating Empire at the Site of Tecapa, Peru (600-1000 AD)

Stephen Berquist, PhD, University of Toronto

The March 4 meeting of the Pre-Columbian Society of Washington, D.C. will be held virtually using the Zoom platform. This meeting is free and open to the public but you must be pre-registered to attend. To register click here .

Common understandings of the Andean Middle Horizon (600-1000 AD) envision an epoch dominated by expansionist empires centered on the highland cities of Huari and Tiwanaku. Since the mid-twentieth century, archaeologists have interpreted a series of large, grid-patterned Middle Horizon sites as administrative centers of the Huari Empire. The fundamental architectural unit of these sites, sometimes called a kancha, appears frequently at both the city of Huari itself and at later Inka centers. This commonality, along with a widespread distribution of “Huari” ceramic styles throughout the Central Andes, underpins the model of a Huari state analogous to the later Inka state (Tawantinsuyu). However, recent excavations reveal that several grid-like sites lack any evidence, other than architectural patterns, linking them to Huari. Other investigations demonstrate that kancha architecture predates the Middle Horizon by several centuries. Drawing from broader histories of urban planning and his own research at the site of Tecapa, in this talk Dr. Berquist argues we should reinterpret these planned sites as political experiments that reorganized the existing social relations into what would later become the dominant Andean political tradition: the ayllu, a model of political organization grounded in kinship relations and reciprocity.

Dr. Stephen Berquist recently completed his dissertation at the University of Toronto, where he continues to teach and conduct research. He has excavated across a wide range of contexts in the South American Andes and worldwide, with ongoing archaeological projects in Peru and Cambodia. His research interests pertain primarily to the intersections of politics, climate, and architecture.

New Discoveries at Monte Albán’s Main Plaza: Buried Buildings and Busted Myths

Marc N. Levine, PhD, (Sam Noble Museum, University of Oklahoma)

The February 4, 2022, meeting of the Pre-Columbian Society of Washington, D.C. will be held virtually using the Zoom platform. This meeting is free and open to the public but you must be pre-registered to attend. To pre-registration click HERE.

Monte Albán was founded on a set of hilltops at the center of the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, around 500 BCE. Many consider it one of Mesoamerica’s first urban centers, and it has been the focus of archaeological research for more than a century. At Monte Albán’s center lies the Main Plaza, an open, rectangular area framed by stone platforms, temples, and palaces. This presentation highlights the results of multi-sensor geophysical prospection on the Main Plaza and the discovery of at least three previously unknown buried buildings, including what appears to be a temple. These and other discoveries provide the opportunity to “bust” a number of myths or misconceptions about the nature of the Main Plaza. Furthermore, the evidence suggests that there was a profound shift in political authority at the Zapotec capital during the Pe to Nisa phase transition (300-100 BCE).

Marc N. Levine is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma and Associate Curator of Archaeology at the Sam Noble Museum. He has carried out archaeological research in Oaxaca, Mexico for over twenty years and has directed fieldwork projects at two regional capitals: Monte Albán and Tututepec. His current research interests include household archaeology, political economy, urbanism, metallurgy, and digital archaeology. As a curator, Levine is deeply engaged in repatriation projects and works collaboratively with several Tribes in Oklahoma and beyond.

The Sacred Site of Copacabana and the Imperial Inca State

Tamara L. Bray, PhD, Wayne State University

The December 3, 2021, meeting will be held virtually using the Zoom platform. This meeting is free and open to the public. To pre-register for this event click here.

The site of Copacabana has been a pilgrimage destination and a place of extraordinary reverence from Formative times to the present. Together with the Islands of the Sun and Moon, Copacabana formed a part of one of the most sacred ceremonial complexes in the Inca Empire. Recent archaeological excavations at the site aimed to investigate the nature of Inca engagement with this powerful locale as evidenced through spatial and material patterns and practices. Findings from our first field season offer significant insights into imperial Inca strategies of appropriation and interaction with sacred landscapes and places.

Tamara L. Bray is Professor of Anthropology at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. She is recognized nationally and internationally for her contributions to the study of Inca imperialism and the archaeology of food. Dr. Bray received her PhD. from SUNY-Binghamton in 1991 and began her professional academic career at Wayne State University in 1995, after four years at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History where she helped to establish the Office of Repatriation. As an anthropological archaeologist, she specializes in the study of the Inca Empire and late pre-Columbian societies of the northern Andes. She has over 25 years of field and research experience in Andean South America where she has conducted significant research into long-distance trade, imperial frontiers, Inca architecture, and comparative studies of Inca ceramics and iconography in Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Peru and Bolivia, and directed long-term interdisciplinary projects at the sites of Pimampiro, Caranqui, and Copacabana. In 2019, she initiated a new field project in southern Ecuador focused on imperial pottery production and mitmaqkuna relocated to this region by the Inca in the late precolumbian era. Dr. Bray is the author of several books and edited volumes, including most recently The Archaeology of Wak’as: Explorations of the Sacred in the Pre-Columbian Andes, as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters.

The Intimacy of Impression in Mesoamerican Art

Bryan R. Just, PhD, Princeton University Art Museum

The November 5, 2021, meeting will be held virtually using the Zoom platform. This meeting is free and open to the public. To register for this event click here.

This talk will contemplate the meaning of artist technology, focusing on the use of molds in ceramic production. The leitmotif is a style of ceramic vessel known as Rio Blanco, produced in the Mixtequilla region of Veracruz, Mexico (circa AD 600-1000). The vessels present only a few pictorial themes, but with notable variations of each within the corpus. The use of molds was not for mass production of identical objects. Instead, artists used existing vessels as the model for each subsequent work, creating single-use molds each time. Dr. Just will consider this technique in relation to other artistic acts in Mesoamerica involving direct, intimate engagement with existing objects, such as the modification of sculptures over time and the use of stamps.

Bryan R. Just is the Peter Jay Sharp, Class of 1952, Curator and Lecturer of the Art of the Ancient Americas at the Princeton University Art Museum. Just received a B.A. in Archaeological Studies and the History of Art from Yale University (1995) and an M.A. (1999) in Art History and a Ph.D. (2006) in Art History and Linguistics, both from Tulane University. A specialist ancient Maya art history, his publications include Dancing into Dreams: Maya Vases of the Ik’ Kingdom (2012) and “Printed Pictures of Maya Sculpture” (2012). He served as in-house curator for the exhibition Gifts from the Ancestors: Ancient Ivories of Bering Strait, co-curated by William Fitzhugh and Julie Hollowell, from October 2009 – January 2010 at Princeton. His 2012 exhibition Dancing into Dreams: Maya Vases of the Ik’ Kingdom was one of five finalists for the Association of Art Museum Curators 2012 Outstanding Exhibition in a University Museum. In 2015, he reopened the completely refurbished ancient Americas galleries at the Princeton University Art Museum. Just’s teaching at Princeton includes seminars on Maya and Olmec art, as well as introductory lecture courses on the art of Mesoamerica. Just chairs Princeton University’s NAGPRA committee. He is currently writing a handbook of the Museum’s collections from Mesoamerica and developing the galleries for the new Princeton University Art Museum, scheduled to open late 2024.