Presenting…

The STARC website!

Yes, we finally have a website for the Society of Trojan Archaeologists. It’s still being modified, but here’s the link!

STARC

Check it out!

~Sarah Hawley

 

USC ARC in the news!

So over the past week we seem to have become marginally famous! Not that we weren’t famous before, of course…

The USC College website ran two articles this week about the ARC lab and the research being undertaken here. Check out the links below!

Beaming with Joy: This article discusses the research being undertaken at the Argonne National Laboratory by Professor Lynn Swartz Dodd. She won “beam time” for the second year in a row, allowing her and her team to use a high intensity X-ray to study the makeup of ancient artifacts. The artifacts are the oldest objects ever to be studied with the synchrotron beam.

Exploring the Rise and Demise of Empires: This article is about the research presented by undergraduate Sarah Hawley at the  2010 joint meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) and the American Philological Association (APA) in Anaheim. The research focuses on ancient figurines from Tell al-Judaidah and the ways in which the modification of forms reflects empire transition.

Also, Lynn Dodd and our very own archaeology alumna Ashley Sands introduced Polynomial Texture Mapping (PTM) imaging technology to the Alalakh excavation in Turkey this summer. This photographic technique allows for high quality imaging of object surfaces in which light can be moved around the photograph. This technique allows researchers to view objects in ways that are impossible using normal photographic equipment or the naked eye. Senior field supervisor Murat Akar published Ashley’s description of the USC team’s contributions on the official Alalakh website, located here.

We are immensely proud of everything that the ARC lab has accomplished. Hopefully you’ll be reading even more about us in the months and years to come!

 

Presenting at the AIA

Wow!

What a busy week! Jenny and I finally got to present at the AIA annual meeting, after much preparation and a great deal of stress. And it went great!

Jenny presented her poster on the gilding of an ancient Egyptian bronze figurine, and I read my paper about the Tell al-Judaidah terracotta figurines. Overall, we received very enthusiastic responses, and multiple comments on how rare it is for undergraduates to present at these conferences. I am honored to have been selected, and glad to represent a much younger generation of archaeologists. I know so many bright, talented, passionate students who truly represent the future of the discipline, and it’s a shame that so few have the opportunity to present at academic conferences. The empowerment of student archaeologists is a primary goal of USC archaeology, in our student group (The Society of Trojan Archaeologists), our planned outreach programs to surrounding schools, and our endeavors to promote discussion and freedom of ideas between students worldwide (Check out “The Next Generation: Students discuss archaeology in the 21st century” on facebook, a group dedicated to encouraging the voices of young archaeologists across the world).

Jenny and I are proud to have taken our first steps into the world of professional archaeology, and we hope to participate in more conferences in future!

Oh yeah, and we won a bottle of wine in the raffle at the carbon dating booth… which wasn’t so bad either.

Sarah at the podium before her presentation

Jenny with Professor Dodd in front of her poster

Jenny and Sarah at the AIA, preparing to present!

 

Come support Jenny and Sarah at the AIA!

The AIA/APA joint annual meeting is “the largest and oldest established meeting of classical scholars and archaeologists in North America.” From January 6-9, scholars will present research from around the world in posters and lectures.

This year, the Archaeological Institute of America selected two USC undergraduates to present their research at the conference! This is a tremendous opportunity for both of us, as well as being utterly terrifying. In order to reduce the blind panic, we request that you come see us present–we need the support!

Jenny Crawford will be presenting at Poster Session 2G from 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM on Thursday, January 7 in Marquis Ballroom South. Her presentation, “Deconstructing and Recreating a Rare Ancient Egyptian Gilding Technique,” represents years of research on the gilding of a shabti figurine housed at USC.

Sarah Hawley will be presenting during Session 2F on Thursday, January 7, 12:30 PM – 2:30 PM in Platinum Ballroom 5. Her paper, “The Iconography of Empire: Figurines from Tell al-Judaidah,” discusses figurine design and production during the Persian and Hellenistic time periods at an important site in southeastern Turkey.

The sessions intersect, but Sarah will only be talking for 10 minutes, so you can pop in for that and then pop back out to see Jenny!

Please come support us as we represent USC archaeology!

Location:
Anaheim Marriott
700 West Convention Way
Anaheim, CA
http://www.archaeological.org/webinfo.php?page=10096

Jenny and Sarah, not yet in a state of blind panic.

 

‘Tis Art!

Somewhere, archaeologists are hard at work, doing important things. There is currently one right next to me, in fact, creating a 3-D model of his site in ArcScene.

So what am I doing? Making strange graphics for the blog using obscure internet applications.

'Tis Art, I say!

It’s beautiful. And there’s a bigger version here.

~I really shouldn’t sign my name

 

The Death of Archaeology?

Think of everything that’s ever made you want to do archaeology - lost shipwrecks, Stonehenge, a golden Moche lord gracing the cover of National Geographic, Lara Croft and Indiana, the thought of coming up a rise and seeing at your feet an ancient city.  Probably not ambitions of wearing a lab coat and counting granules under a microscope.  Hence the challenging question mark Brian Fagan stuck at the end of his editorial’s title, “So You Want To Be An Archaeologist?“ in the 1996 summer issue of Archaeology.  Wait, don’t we?

If whiskey is the genial beverage, Intro to Archaeology is the genial class.  Where else do you daydream for ninety minutes watching smiling archaeologists tramp across a desert landscape (probably after a night of whiskey) and contemplate portraits of bearded white men?  It usually provides a pick-me-up.  Usually.  This morning I walked out of class shaken, having heard as scary a lecture as any in my experience - and I’ve sampled USC’s departments voraciously, from Math (do numbers exist?) to Philosophy (do WE exist?) and even the classic doomsday discipline, Environmental Studies.

The panic was two-pronged; Dr. Boytner first planted the fear that archaeology is going to be so overladen with big business and data crunching that no one will care about it anymore, and then actually uttered the word “death” as he collated our insecurities into a snazzy blue slide featuring the ever-prescient Brian Fagan.  Yes, he said gravely, many scholars are of Fagan’s opinion that archaeology is going the way of geography – a thriving discipline with no audience.  “How many articles have you read in National Geographic that are actually about geography?”  Looks around.  Silence.

Which means, other than diminished hopes of appearing in the pages of a national magazine, that the resources and public support vital to eager young archaeologists taking up the quest for knowledge might, by the time we get out of Ph.D. school, have shriveled up like a charqui in the Tarapaca sun.

NOOOO!

It’s not that archaeology is actually rock-stopped, flatlining, clinically dead, but the discipline as we know it may not exist in the future.  We might be digging under freeways instead of into temples, going through old excavation records instead of drawing new ones.  The search for buried treasure will have to bow down before the search for climate-controlled storage rooms to hold decades of thoughtlessly dug up treasure.  To a serious archaeologist, these concessions sound okay.  It’s still artifacts and theories, immersion in the past.  But can you seriously imagine a murder mystery centering on the priceless diadem of Ruler X being conserved, pockmark by bronze disease pockmark, in the flourescent-lit basement of some chemical lab?

 

A fellow ARC lab alum…

I officially graduated from the ARC Lab two and a half years ago (oh my gosh–it doesnt feel like that long ago!) But, I have been lucky enough to remain involved in the research, events, and friendships that I started while I was technically still a good ole USC student.

One of the people I met while researching in the lab, and then got to know even better while in the field with Professor Dodd at Kenan Tepe in Turkey, is Jon Vidar. I feel like we all take our undergraduate archaeology training in different directions when we graduate. Jon has used his undergraduate experiences of meeting Kurdish populations in Turkey and joined that with his masters degree in communication and love of photography.

Jon is now a member of the Tiziano Project. In their own words, “The Tiziano Project creates self-sustaining, multimedia, online citizen journalism in conflict zones and areas of the world neglected by the established press with a vision and goal of job creation for those we serve. We achieve these aims through collaborative media creation by pairing working professionals with local citizen journalists.”

Well, you may have heard that Chase is doing a philanthropy competition on Facebook. The organizations with the most fan votes received funding. Tiziano could really use our votes! It only takes a minute, so if you have the chance, here are the step by step instructions:

1) Go to this page on facebook: http://apps.facebook.com/chasecommunitygiving/charities/1228604

2) “Become a Fan” of Chase Community Giving (You must be a fan for your vote to count!)

3) Select “Vote for Charity” and make sure that the vote count went up so that you know your vote counted!

4) Please, please pass this along to all of your friends on facebook! We need all the votes we can get! You must have a Facebook account to participate.

fight on,

ashley

 

What We Did Last Friday

Friday, November 20, as you can see in the second and fourth respective posts below, was a day for reliving the lost langour of summer.

Let us qualify that: on Friday we powerpointed through a summer’s worth of field school/internship/conference photos and for a brief, heady seven minutes were transported back to languors of a mosquito cloud embalming us alive and of dirty ash flying into our eyes while we kept them trained on the ground for eight hours of surveying sun-cracked ashy ground.

O, how beautiful summer is!

There were eight members of the Society of Trojan Archaeologists and one Environmental Studies professor talking about what they did last summer in our long-awaited event.  WIDLS went off with only two hitches: 1) the rather amusing incident of DPS showing up at the lab upstairs, a hand on her gun but afraid to take any serious action on our lightweight classmate (we’re mostly girls, you know) because she was “waiting for backup,” and 2) a un-reschedulable yearbook photo in the middle of our presentations which had us sprinting back from PED after two or three awkward teeth smiles.  Amazingly, our audience was still there!  We were so gratified and humbled by their attendance that we gave them a tour of the ARC lab afterwards.

The people who spoke were

1. Dr. Haw – ENST 499, Collapse of the Ancient Maya
2. Sarah Hawley – AVRP survey in Turkey w/ Prof. Dodd and pottery illustration
3. Sarah Butler – Getty Multicultural Undergraduate Internship, conserving things in Decorative Arts
4. Cara Polisini - Cultural heritage studies and excavations on the island of Menorca
5. Tiffany Tsai – excavation of Paleo-arctic kill site in Alaska
6. Aaron Muller – excavating Tel Dor, Tel Bet Yerah, a site that USC had previously been to in Israel
7. Miriam Mollerus - XRD of Ancient Egyptian artifacts at the Argonne National Laboratory
8. Jacob Bongers - GIS work in Peru
9. Ashley Sands - chairing a session at the World Archaeology Conference in Ramallah, Palestine

We hope that if you came you enjoyed it and if not, that you can join us next year!

 

Cultural Change

For thousands of years, the Venus of Willendorf was thought to have been worshiped as the pinnacle of beauty. The emphasis on breasts, hips and the in-your-face voluptuous gut are obvious symbols of fertility and the importance thereof. Many people disdain the current emphasis on thinness and ask where we went wrong, how our perception of beauty has been altered by the ~media~. I say this is quite simple from a values perspective– fat= food = survival + fertility. Being skin and bones was not a desirable thing for the better part of human history, mostly because it was a sign of malnutrition, an obvious lack of resources, and possibly bad genetics. If there is anything I have learned in my anthropology class, I have learned that propagation of species (“fitness”) works in mysterious ways. It’s deeply rooted in our subconscious sometimes, and sometimes criteria for sexual selection is even selected against… “Golddigger”, for example. If thought about objectively, is it really so awful to have a partner (male, as this term is generally ascribed to women) who is wealthy with resources?

But, then again, I ask you this: maybe this is simply a Paleolithic centerfold? An ancient Claudia Schiffer?

 

VERY EXCITING EVENT

It’s that time again! Time for WHAT I DID LAST SUMMER, a great event where USC students share information about summer archaeological opportunities.

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What did YOU do this summer? Archaeology students drew pottery in Turkey, excavated Maya sites in Belize, knapped flint points in Alaska, surveyed the Lake Titicaca basin, and restored bronzes at the Getty, among other things. Come and hear about the various opportunities available to USC students who want to dip their feet in the past. From paleoclimate research to field school, a wide variety of regional and disciplinary topics will be explored by faculty and students as they talk about their summer experiences. What they did this summer just may be what you do next summer.

Free food, homemade by members of the Society of Trojan Archaeologists, will be available. Come one, come all.

Friday, November 20, 2009

2:00-3:00 PM

ACB 238

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EVERYONE COME!!!!!!!!!