Of Software and Ceramics:  3D Digital Modeling and Visual Narrative at Monte Albán, Oaxaca, Mexico, Ellen Hoobler, PhD, The Walters Art Museum

This meeting will be held at the Charles Sumner School, 17th & M Streets, N.W., Washington, D.C. NOTE: Photo ID is required to enter the building.

The meeting starts with refreshments at 6:45 pm and the lecture begins at 7:15 pm.

The site of Monte Albán in Oaxaca, is one of the most impressive sites in the pre-Columbian world, but remains poorly understood, in part because its central plaza was so extensively excavated in the 1930s and ‘40s by the archaeologist Alfonso Caso, who never fully published his finds at the site. This talk discusses how archival research can rescue lost archaeological data and therefore salvage content.  I will also discuss how 3D digital modeling can help us better understand context at previously excavated sites such as Monte Albán.

Ellen Hoobler is the William B. Ziff, Jr., Associate Curator of Art of the Americas at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, MD.  Prior to joining the Walters, Hoobler was Assistant Professor of Art History at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, IA. Hoobler holds a doctorate from Columbia University in Art History and Archaeology.  A specialist on pre-Columbian art and its historiography, she most recently was the co-editor of Visual Culture in the Ancient Americas: Contemporary Perspectives (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017.) She also has recently published or in-press contributions to the Walters Art Museum Journal and the Journal of Interactive technology and Pedagogy.