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Graduate Colloquium

Recent Excavations and Botanical Investigations at La Blanca

MALLORY MELTON, Graduate Student, UC Santa Barbara

Ancient Mesoamerica is often known for its states and empires, such as the popularly recognized Aztec Empire. However, less is known about the everyday practices that characterized the earliest Mesoamerican urban centers during their development, height, and decline. My dissertation will use plant remains (carbonized macrobotanicals, starch grains, and phytoliths) to gain insights into elite and commoner foodways over the course of early urbanization and state formation on the Pacific Coast of Guatemala. I plan to collect and analyze data from two sites: La Blanca (900–600 B.C.E.), an early urban center, and El Ujuxte (600 B.C.E.–100 C.E.), argued to represent one of the earliest state centers in Mesoamerica. From January to April 2017, I participated in excavations led by Michael Love (CSUN) that focused on the Esquivel, Joyas, and Vacas Districts of the La Blanca site. In this paper, I present an overview of these investigations with specific emphasis on botanical recovery efforts and preliminary results.

Graduate Student Accolades

Elizabeth Weigler received the Graduate Division Dissertation Fellowship (The Graduate Division Dissertation Fellowship is intended for doctoral students from all academic disciplines who have advanced to candidacy and who are in the final stages of completing their dissertation.

Professor Gurven Receives Grant

Mike Gurven was awarded a new 5-year NIH/NIA grant entitled: "Brain atrophy, cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's in a low CVD-risk population", $3.1 million. The collaborators on this grant are Greg Thomas (Memorial Health), Tuck Finch (USC), and Hillard Kaplan (UNM). Congratulations!

Professor Harthorn & Researcher Partridge in the Current

The Fracking Debate

U.S. and U.K. share a similar mindset when it comes to horizontal drilling for shale energy, say UCSB researchers and colleagues

While an entire ocean separates the United States from the United Kingdom, when the issue of fracking arises, the great divide — philosophically speaking — narrows considerably.

Concerns about short-term and long-term impacts of horizontal drilling for shale energy are prevalent in both countries.

An Archaeological Exploration of Black Schooling in the Rural South

Few archaeological studies of Black schools in the South have been conducted despite the importance of schooling in the everyday life of Black southerners. This talk presents data on excavations conducted at Antioch Colony's school and church site; and compares the data with two other Black schools located in the rural South. In comparing the data, current findings echo what others have found to generally be true for archaeological analyses of later period church and school sites: an assemblage dominated by architectural and domestic refuse with a small number of artifacts that speak to educational or religious activity.

JANNIE SCOTT
Post-Doctoral Scholar, UCSB Center for Black Studies Research

Professor Gamble to be Editor

Lynn Gamble has been chosen as the editor of American Antiquity by the Society for American Archaeology at their annual meeting in Vancouver. She will be helping the current editor during fall quarter 2017, then taking over all responsibilities in January 2018. Congratulations!

Pursuing Peace and Life in the Korean Demilitarized Zone

With the discovery of rare and endangered species in areas around the Korean Demilitarized Zone, and inspired by the paradoxical flourishing of nonhuman nature in the context of unending war, a wide network of scientists, bureaucrats, journalists, natural scientists, citizen ecologists, and others have become captured by a utopian vision in which nature, peace, and life constitute a tightly-wound bundle of naturalized associations. Especially since the late 1990s, in the context of increasingly dire planetary futures presented by global climate change and mass extinction, as well as with the deteriorating prospects of national reunification or reconciliation between the two Koreas, the DMZ’s nature has offered the conceptual ground for mainstream and marginal imaginaries of peace in South Korea and beyond. While it would be easy to dismiss these hopeful discourses as naive and romanticizing, this paper seeks to take them seriously as empirically-grounded logics in which the existence of biodiversity of the DMZ offers potentially alternatives to the present political impasse. How is the DMZ’s nature temporally operationalized as transhistorical and universal, connecting a pre-division, yet national, space to a “context yet to come” of a post-division Korea? What imaginative possibilities does it offer beyond state-centric and nationalist frameworks for unification?

Eleana Kim is a sociocultural anthropologist and Associate Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Irvine. Her research and teaching focuses on kinship, nationalism, political ecology, and posthumanism. Her current research on the Korean DMZ has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the ACLS. Her first book, Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging, received the 2012 James B. Palais Prize from the Association of Asian Studies and the 2012 Association of Asian American Studies Social Science book award.

This is an East Asia Center event, cosponsored by the departments of Anthropology, Asian American Studies, History, and East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies as well as the Reinventing Japan Research Focus Group and the Center for Cold War Studies.

Staff Members, Dennis and Marin, Receive Awards

Ms. Louisa Dennis received a 2017 Staff Citation of Excellence award. Louisa has been working with us in Anthropology for many years. She has distinguished herself as an amazing resource with vast knowledge of how the UC works, excellent editorial and time management skills, and a high capacity for leadership when called upon to serve. She will be honored in an official ceremony during Staff Celebration Week in May.

Ms.