Kathryn Bard and Norman Hammond honored in China
Two members of the Department of Archaeology were honoured in China recently. At the Second Shanghai Archaeology Forum, organized by the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing but held at the University of Shanghai, Professor Kathryn Bard was the first of eight scholars invited to speak in the SAF World Archaeology Keynote Lecture Series. Her talk on “The Archaeology of Contact and Cultural Diversity: Egypt, Nubia and Punt” was followed by others on prehistoric Libya, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia, together with colonial impacts on archaeology in South America, India and southern Africa.
Emeritus Professor Norman Hammond was presented with one of ten SAF Research Awards for his long-term study of the economic and social origins of Maya Civilization in Central America, based on more than a quarter-century of excavation and analysis of the Preclassic village site of Cuello in Belize (where many BU students obtained their first fieldwork experience). The projects selected from the 93 nominations included work at Çatal Höyük in Turkey, several studies of agricultural and population dynamics and urban origins in Eurasia by scholars from Russia, Denmark, Britain and the USA, early farmers in the US Southwest, and discoveries in the Templo Mayor of Aztec Tenochtitlan.
Several hundred archaeologists from across the world, including many from China, attended three days of presentations and visits to Shanghai’s museums; a third Forum will be held in 2017.
