UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology

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UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology

We seek to change the social context in which archaeological research and training is conducted through the promotion of interdisciplinary research. Join us!

https://spark.ucla.edu/archaeology

07/23/2026

Sqoyaw Archaeology Project
PEMSEA archaeological field school in Taiwan 2026
This field school is a collaborative project between the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the Department of Ethnology at National Chengchi University (NCCU), and the Department of Anthropology at National Taiwan University (NTU).

06/23/2026

AARCAEOLOGY SPOTLIGHT: Meet Stephen Acabado Stephen Acabado who is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Acabado is a strong advocate of an engaged archaeology where descendant communities are involved in the research process. His archaeological investigations in Ifugao, northern Philippines, have established the recent origins of the Cordillera Rice Terraces, which were once thought to be at least 2,000 years old. His work revolves around agricultural systems, indigenous responses to colonialism, subsistence shifts, landscape archaeology, and heritage conservation. He directs two archaeological projects in the Philippines: the Ifugao Archaeological Project and the Bicol Archaeological Project. In 2020, he is collaborating with Taiwanese colleagues in launching the Taiwan Indigenous Landscape and History Project. He received his PhD and MA in Anthropology from the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa and his BA in Anthropology from the University of the Philippines-Diliman.

06/08/2026

What happens when a 12,000-year-old archaeological site becomes fodder for TikTok videos, and the subject of pseudoscientific theories? That’s the sort of question Lara Fabian asks students to wrestle with in a new Fiat Lux seminar.

Fabian developed the course, “ : The Ancient Near East Goes Viral,” in response to the growing spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories — largely fueled by social media videos — about the ancient world. It’s a trend that, thanks to the rise of hyper-realistic AI-generated content, stands to worsen in the years ahead.

So Fabian’s class explores how misinformation, or “pseudo-archaeology,” is created and spread online, and it prompts students to consider how they can discern fact from fiction.

Fabian is a professor of Iranian archaeology in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and a member of the UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. In a video interview, she offers the example of an ancient site called Göbekli Tepe in modern-day Turkey, which has been the subject of questionable theories online, before explaining why misinformation can spread so easily and suggesting how her students might apply lessons from the course to their other studies and even their lives outside of academia.

Fabian argues that those dealing with viral misinformation about ancient studies — or any other field of study, for that matter — shouldn’t abandon the internet but rather should use it more critically. She said she hopes her students take away from the class “a way of thinking about history and a way of thinking about information about history as it circulates in popular culture that’s maybe a little bit more rich, and a little bit more textured, than the versions that we often get through social media.”

-Sean Brenner | June 3, 2026

06/01/2026

WEDS TALKS 6/3/26
ABSTRACT: Cult in the Late Bronze Age southern Levant is characterized by worship in temples, most notably in temples of the “Midgal” type that are famously found in places like Megiddo, Pella, and Shechem. In the Iron Age, a diversity of cult places is attested, with typologies in the past tracking various types of cultic contexts known to us from the archaeological record. While cult in the Iron Age notably differs in many ways from Bronze Age traditions, certain aspects of worship continue from earlier periods. Corntinuities can be seen, for instance, in the types of cultic paraphernalia found in both Bronze Age and Iron Age contexts. Shrine models, ceramic altars, and cult stands are some examples of paraphernalia in continuous use. The primary aspects of worship, including animal sacrifice, incense offerings, “idol” veneration, libation, and feasting also carry on from earlier periods. On the other hand, many have argued that temple-based worship ceased in the Iron Age. Drawing from previous work, my goal is to explore cultic buildings in the northern Kingdom of Israel in the late Iron Age IIA—a period that experienced a “boom” in cult activity. The differences between Bronze Age temples, typically referred to as “houses of the deity”, and Iron Age cultic buildings is thus explored. It is argued that, based on the similarity of certain building types to domestic houses, that the concept of “God’s dwelling” changed in the Iron Age. It is also stressed that some aspects of Canaanite worship continued into the late Iron Age IIA in the north, but that this ceases in the Iron Age IIB after Hazael’s destructions.

BIO: Prapti Panda is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Northwestern University. Trained as a historical archaeologist, her research focuses on colonial urbanism, heritage politics, and architectural history in coastal western India. Her ongoing doctoral research has received support from institutions including the Luso-American Development Foundation and the American Philosophical Society.

05/29/2026

ARCHAEOLOGY SPOTLIGHT: Meet Kristine Martirsoyan-Olshansky, Director of the Armenian Archaeology Lab, and graduate student researcher Katrina Kuxhausen, and undergraduate students Emma Bertoutian and Vera Mkhsian.

05/26/2026

WES TALKS 5/27/26
ABSTRACT: Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, port-cities in the Indian Ocean became critical nodes in expanding trade networks linking Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Europe. Among these were emerging European colonial settlements, where imperial regimes attempted to order large and mobile populations of merchants, artisans, fishermen, religious communities, and landholders whose labor sustained global exchange. Scholarship on these early colonial cities in South Asia has largely emphasized forts, churches, and administrative architecture, drawing on colonial archives that foreground elite European perspectives. This talk revisits colonial urbanism in South Asia through the archaeological landscape of Chaul, a Portuguese port-city on India’s western coast (occupied 1510-1740). Drawing on ongoing archival and archaeological work, I explore how the built environment can offer new ways of approaching social difference and inequality during colonial expansion, focusing on the configuration of domestic architecture and neighborhoods. Although imperial regimes often aspired towards ordered and legible urban landscapes, the cities that emerged through colonial settlement were by no means homogenous. Through the case of Chaul, I explore how historical archaeology can illuminate the plural resident communities and everyday spatial negotiations that shaped colonial urban life in early modern South Asia.
BIO: Prapti Panda is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Northwestern University. Trained as a historical archaeologist, her research focuses on colonial urbanism, heritage politics, and architectural history in coastal western India. Her ongoing doctoral research has received support from institutions including the Luso-American Development Foundation and the American Philosophical Society.

05/19/2026

WEDS TALKS 5/20/26:
ABSTRACT: Roman archaeological material played a central role in Italian Fascist propaganda: Mussolini presented his regime as an extension or rebirth of the Roman empire and sponsored major excavation and restoration projects in and beyond Rome. Italian colonial archaeology in Libya extended this project and archaeological remains were positioned as Italian cultural heritage and mobilized to justify colonial occupation by drawing explicit parallels between ancient Roman and modern Italian expansion. This talk examines the important role photography played in this Fascist appropriation of the Roman past in Libya; by tracing histories of the production, circulation, reception, and assembly into archives of such images, I argue that archaeological photographs were not merely documentary objects but rather functioned as political tools which transformed Libya’s archaeological heritage into monumental symbols of Italian Fascism.
BIO: Taylor Carr-Howard is a Ph.D. candidate in Archaeology at UCLA. Her dissertation, “Archaeological Photographs and the (De)Colonial Imagination,” examines the role that archaeological photography played in the history of French and Italian colonial archaeology in North Africa and, drawing on this history, explores the ways in which this photographic archive can be used to decolonize the discipline of classical archaeology. Her research has been supported by the Archaeological Institute of America.

05/12/2026

WEDS TALKS 5/12/26
ABSTRACT: Over 500 dōtaku (銅鐸) bronze bell-shaped objects, traditionally dated to the late-middle Yayoi until the beginnings of the Kofun period (ca. 200 BCE-250 CE), have been excavated predominately from the central Kinki region of the Japanese archipelago. However, this number does not include so-called “small dōtaku” (小銅鐸) or pottery miniatures (銅鐸形土製品), seldom included in analyses of larger examples. Adopting a macroscopic geographic and chronological perspective on a historically circumscribed topic, this presentation and (re)considers dōtaku of all sizes and materials within the framework of early East Asian skeuomorphism, as related to the development of the broader Bronze Age economy.
BIO: Kirie Stromberg completed her PhD at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA in 2023 and currently serves as the Rand Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian Studies at Pomona College. She was a recipient of the US Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship for her dissertation (“Music and Political Authority in Early China and Japan: Pre- and Protohistory”), for which she was was based at Kyushu University in Itoshima, Japan. Her work elucidates the relationship between musical material culture and the formation of complex society across early East Asia. She is currently writing the first monograph in a Western language about Yayoi period (ca. 900 BCE-250 CE) dōtaku bronze bells, as well as their reception in medieval and early modern Japan.

05/06/2026

WEDS TALKS 5/6/26🪏Come join us and our guest presenter in Fowler A222. Hope to see you there!

04/20/2026

Come join us and our guest presenter in Fowler A222 on Wednesday 4/22 !!! 🌊 Hope to see you there!

Address

UCLA Fowler Museum Of Cultural History, Cotsen Institute Of Archaeology, Room A148
Los Angeles, CA
90095

Website

http://www.ioa.ucla.edu/

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