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Kristen Wroth is the 2012/13 Teaching Fellow Excellence Award Winner
Congratulations to Kristen Wroth, she is the recipient of the 2012/2013 Teaching Fellow Excellence Award.
Kristin was the Teaching Fellow for Professor John Marston’s course, CAS AR307, Archaeological Science.
Chair, Professor Mary Beaudry, Kristen Wroth, and Professor John Marston.
Contribute to the Chad DiGregorio Fund
To contribute to the Chad DiGregorio Fund, please click here.
More information about this fund can be found here.
John J. Shea (CAS’1982) has a new book
Professor John J. Shea, awarded BA of Archaeology from BU CAS 1982 has just published another book. Professor Shea is a full professor at Stony Brook University, Anthropology Department & Turkana Basin Institute.
Stone Tools in the Paleolithic and Neolithic Near East: A Guide, published by Cambridge Univ. Press.
Professors Roosevelt and Luke make headlines with Hexacopter test
Professor Christopher Roosevelt tested his latest research tool: a remote-controlled hexacopter. The small six-rotor flying tool, equipped with a camera, will be used in Turkey by the Central Lydia Archaeological Survey, a Boston University archaeological project under the co-direction of Christopher Roosevelt, associate professor of archaeology, and Christina Luke, senior lecturer in archaeology.
Click here for Video
BU Arts and Science article, March 28, 2013 click for more
e Science News on PHYS ORG article, March 29, 2013 click for more
Professor William Saturno CAS Faculty Spotlight
Professor William Saturno is the CAS Faculty Spotlight on the March 20, 2013 CAS News.
He Who Controls the Past—with Bill Saturno
In this new student-produced video, Assistant Professor of Archaeology William Saturno discusses how Maya leaders used their culture’s intricate understanding of time to solidify their hold on power. Watch the video
Professor David Carballo awarded the Junior Fellowship from the Center for Humanites
Congratulations to Professor Carballo!
Center for Humanities Junior Fellowship awarded to Professor David Carballo for academic year 2013/14 to do his research.
Religion and Urbanization in Ancient Central Mexico.
Five centuries ago Hernán Cortes and the conquistadors encountered teeming Aztec cities that served as the centers of ritual spectacles for a religious system that to Spanish eyes was simultaneously baffling, terrifying, and remarkable. Yet it was over a millennium before the Aztecs that central Mexico became one of the most urbanized places in the world, as it continues to be today. While the relationship between religion and urbanism during the Aztec period has been studied at length, this initial phase of urbanization and the crystallization of religious traditions of the later Formative period (ca. 600 BCE – 100 CE) remains poorly understood. The aim of my project is to elucidate the intersection of religion and urbanization in early central Mexico by combining elements of my own archaeological investigations at urban and rural sites of the period with a synthetic overview of the increased settlement nucleation and religious formalization that culminated in Classic period (ca. 100 – 600 CE) cities such as Teotihuacan, the largest city in the Americas in its day, and continued through the Spanish conquest.
Archaeological investigations of ancient urbanism strive to balance consideration of variables such as environment, population, politics, and architectural grammar in developing empirical urban theory for prehistoric contexts. In the absence of texts, however, many studies of prehistoric periods tend to undervalue the generative role of religion in shaping the world’s first cities, both in terms of their built environments and the social accommodations necessary for increasingly urbanized landscapes. By moving judiciously between sixteenth century textual sources and the prehistoric archaeological record I hope to provide a more comprehensive perspective on urbanization and religious formalization in central Mexico from the vantage point of early urban or proto-urban centers as well as more peripheral and rural areas.
Professor Curtis Runnels awarded a Cotsen Fellowship in Archaeology
Professor Curtis Runnels was awarded a Cotsen Fellowship in Archaeology at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe for June-July to work on the following topic: “The Early Palaeolithic in the Aegean Islands.”
Congratulations!
Christina Luke’s New Book Cited in LiveScience Article
Christina Luke, co-director of the Boston University based Central Lydia Archaeology Survey, co-authored the book, U.S. Cultural Diplomacy and Archaeology: Soft Power, Hard Heritage (2012) with Morag Kersel. In the article in LiveScience the authors describe U.S. Government attempts to preserve archaeological sites oversees. (Read more)
Stephanie Simms Archaeology Magazine article
Archaeology Magazine (Vol. 66 No. 2: 68)
Feb 11, 2013 … When archaeologist Stephanie Simms of Boston University uncovered dozens of fired clay balls at the site of Escalera al Cielo in Yucatán, … Click here for more.
Professor Mary C. Beaudry and Travis G. Parno have published an edited volume “Archaeologies of Mobility and Movement”
Prof Mary Beaudry and PhD candidate Travis G. Parno have published an edited volume, Archaeologies of Mobility and Movement (Springer, 2013). The book features chapters based on papers delivered at the 2011 CHAT Conference at Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Authors drew inspiration from the conference’s theme, “People and Things in Motion,” and presented fourteen case studies from around the globe that explore issues of mobility in compelling ways.
From the Book Description:
Essays in this volume build on new approaches, confronting issues of movement from a variety of perspectives. They are divided into four sections, based on how the act of moving is framed. The first section, “Objects in Motion,” includes case studies that follow the paths of material culture and its interactions with groups of people. The second section of this volume, “People in Motion,” features chapters that explore the shifting material traces of human mobility. Chapters in the third section of this book, “Movement through Spaces,” illustrate the effects that particular spaces have on the people and objects who pass through them. Finally, there is an afterward that cohesively addresses the issue of studying movement in the recent past. At the heart of Archaeologies of Mobility and Movement is a concern with the hybridity of people and things, affordances of objects and spaces, contemporary heritage issues, and the effects of movement on archaeological subjects in the recent and contemporary past.
A more detailed description can be found at Springer’s website.