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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!

WEDS TALKS 10/14/26: Flash TalksPlease join us for a special Weds “FLASH” Talks at our annual Fall Open House! Get the p...
10/13/2026

WEDS TALKS 10/14/26: Flash Talks
Please join us for a special Weds “FLASH” Talks at our annual Fall Open House! Get the pulse on what is happening at the Cotsen. We will have mutiple speakers, facutly, students and staff, give rapid fire talks about current research, projects, and summer travels.

Cotsen Staff Bowling 2026
10/09/2026

Cotsen Staff Bowling 2026

10/07/2026

ARCHAEOLOGY SPOTLIGHT🪏Meet Jo Anne Van Tilburg who is an American archaeologist best known for her research on the statues of Easter Island (Rapa Nui). Her primary specialty is rock art. Dr. Van Tilburg graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1965, receiving her Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1986. She is currently Research Associate of The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA and Director of the UCLA Rock Art Archive.

Dr. Van Tilburg is also director of the Easter Island Statue Project. She has conducted seasonal fieldwork in the Pacific since 1982, including in the Republic of Palau and on Easter Island. She is considered one of the world’s leading experts on Easter Island statues, and has worked closely with the Easter Island community to inventory, describe and catalog nearly 900 statues.

WEDS TALKS 10/7/26 🪏Mirroring the Gods: Symmetrical Scenes in Kush*te Royal ArtABSTRACT: This presentation examines the ...
10/07/2026

WEDS TALKS 10/7/26 🪏Mirroring the Gods: Symmetrical Scenes in Kush*te Royal Art

ABSTRACT: This presentation examines the frequent use of symmetrical offering scenes in Kush*te royal art
from the Napatan Period. In this artistic arrangement, a scene is divided in half vertically, and the section on
the right reflects that on the left with mirrored symmetry. However, certain visual and textual elements are
intentionally differentiated from their counterpart on the other side. I argue that this arrangement is intended
to depict and describe the two complementary halves of each Kush*te ruler and the kingdom itself, an idea
arising during the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty’s control over both Nubia and Egypt as one “Double Kingdom.”
These pieces suggest a new kind of dual kingship, where one Kush*te ruler embodies both “ruler of Kush”
and “ruler of Egypt” and envisions each land as equal constituent partsin one kingdom.

BIO: Christopher Cox is an Egyptologist and Nubiologist who studies the ancient Nubian Kingdom of
Kush, Nubiansin ancient Egyptian society, and the reception of ancient Egypt and Nubia by Black people
since the 18th century. He obtained his PhD in Egyptology from Brown University in 2025, MA in Africana
Studies from Brown in 2022, and BA from Whitman College in 2018. He is currently a President’s
Postdoctoral Fellow atUCLA.

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

WEDS TALKS 6/3/26ABSTRACT: Cult in the Late Bronze Age southern Levant is characterized by worship in temples, most nota...
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.

WES TALKS 5/27/26ABSTRACT: Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, port-cities in the Indian Ocean became critic...
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.

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