Archaeology at UCL

UCL-Arts & Social Science

Archaeology on the Air

Archaeology

King And God

Talk by Patrick Russell (Senior Curator, British Film Institute)

The Elephant Will Never Forget? Film archiving, archaeology and historiography

UCL is consistently ranked as one of the world's top universities. Across all disciplines our faculties are known for their research-intensive approaches, academic excellence and engagement with global challenges. This is the basis of our world-renowned degree programmes. Visit us at www.ucl.ac.uk.

Introduction to UCL Institute of Archaeology Collections

Inaugural Lecture - Professor Dorian Fuller

Full title - Growing Societies: the Archaeobotany of Food Production and Globalization of Agriculture

The origins of agriculture irrevocably changed the relationship of humans and the earth, literally transforming earth at local scales of cultivation, and over the long-term, promoting population growth and economic specialization globally.While archaeologists have long investigated this “Neolithic revolution”, the ways in which humans changed plants through domestication and reordered their use of the vegetative world has come to be appreciated more recently through advances in the archaeobotany, the study of archaeological plant remains. This lecture considers recent insights on the transition from wild plant gathering to farming, drawing on examples from India, Southwest Asia, China, and Africa.

Dorian Q Fuller grew up in San Francisco, California, received a BA from Yale University in Anthropology and Biology, and a PhD from Cambridge. After his PhD on the origins of agriculture in South India, he began teaching archaeobotany at UCL in 2000. His archaeological fieldwork has included India, Sri Lanka, China, Thailand, Sudan, Ethiopia, Morocco, Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan. He has authored more than 170 papers and is a founding editor of the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.

Growing Societies - Professor Dorian Fuller (UCL Institute of Archaeology)

Lunch Hour Lectures on tour at The Guardian, June 2014

This summer series of Lunch Hour Lectures marks the centenary of the start of the First World War and is introduced by Guardian experts.

Renata Peters, UCL Institute of Archaeology

Staff and students at the UCL Institute of Archaeology have been involved in the investigative conservation of objects excavated from Western Front trenches. Some of these objects were associated with unidentified human remains thought to be of soldiers killed in battles between 1914 and 1918, and provided important information for their identification. Others provided more questions than answers, but also shed light on the reality of life and death in the trenches.

You can also watch this lecture on the UCLLHL YouTube channel at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClGW_oDUhv0


Investigative conservation and the archaeology of the Western Front (19 June 2014)

Hear how archaeology connects people across time and space using examples from nationally important museums and pioneering outreach projects. Join Drs Carenza Lewis and Jody Joy to explore highlights and legacies of the last ten years’ work inspiring thousands of members of the public to unearth new discoveries to advance knowledge and enjoyment of local heritage. In association with Access Cambridge Archaeology and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology with Curating Cambridge - See more at: http://www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk/events/time-team-archaeology-all#sthash.XGzqFVMV.dpuf

From Time Team to Archaeology for All

Lunch Hour Lecture on tour at the British Museum: Science meets art: investigating pigments in art and archaeology

Professor Robin Clark CNZM, FRS (UCL Chemistry)

Professor Robin Clark has used pigment analysis to reveal the secrets of the Lindisfarne Gospels, Gutenberg Bibles, Greek icons, forged papyri and the '36th Vermeer painting'. In this lecture Professor Clark explains and explores how the technique of Raman spectroscopy has helped in the restoration, conservation and dating of artwork along with the detection of forgeries.

UCL is consistently ranked as one of the world's top universities. Across all disciplines our faculties are known for their research-intensive approaches, academic excellence and engagement with global challenges. This is the basis of our world-renowned degree programmes. Visit us at www.ucl.ac.uk.

Science meets art: investigating pigments in art and archaeology (30 June 2011)

Professor Mary Fulbrook & Professor Robert Hazell introduce Professor Meg Russell's inaugural lecture entitled 'Politics, Academia and the Real World', which took place Tuesday 3 March 2015 in the Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre at UCL.

Professor Mary Fulbrook & Professor Robert Hazell - Introduction

Lunch Hour Lectures - Autumn 2014

Professor Sue Hamilton, UCL Institute of Archaeology

Easter Island is famous for its colossal statues (moai), which were quarried and sculptured c. AD 1200–1500 and are the product of a prehistoric society. Study of this society has focused on its demise, but the neglected mystery is why the statues were put up in the first place.

You can also watch this lecture on the UCLLHL YouTube channel at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sl4R94NJa0

The archaeology of Easter Island (25 Nov 2014)

 Professor Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski (UCL SSEES) pitches for Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz. 

Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski (Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz)

The Means of Exchange in Viking England – Jane Kershaw (12 October 2015)

Jane Kershaw (British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow) is currently undertaking research on the Viking bullion economy, in which weighed silver was used as a means of exchange, rather than coin. She is the author of Viking Identities: Scandinavian Jewellery in England, published by OUP.
Further details: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/calendar/articles/2015-16-events/20151012

UCL Institute of Archaeology Research Seminar Series: Vikings

Past and Future Earth: A Case Study from Ambergris Caye, Belize - Elizabeth Graham et al (19 October 2015)

Elizabeth, on behalf of the research team, discusses the results of the 2013-14 excavation, soil, and vegetation studies at the site of Marco Gonzalez on Ambergris Caye in Belize, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. 
Further details: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/calendar/articles/2015-16-events/20151019


UCL Institute of Archaeology Research Seminar Series: Past and Future Earth

by writer and teacher Ashraf Jamal.

In The Waiting Country: A South African Witness, published in 1995, Mike Nicol arrives at the core of this paper. ‘We lie to accommodate’, he says. ‘We lie because we think it does not matter. We lie because we think that in the face of so many years of misery, a lie that is for the good is not a lie at all. And we lie because we have no self-respect. We lie because we are victims. We lie because we cannot imagine ourselves in any other way’.

Nicol wrote these words in the immediate aftermath of South Africa’s first free election, intuiting then, as we all do now, the era of post-truth, and the subsequent bankruptcy of global democracy. It is all the more ironic, therefore, that it is now, in this era of fakery, that South African art, or ‘Contemporary African Art’ more generally, should assume its global ascendancy.

I will deliver this paper at the same time as 1-54, the largest trade fair committed to African Art in the northern hemisphere, is underway in London. What does this fascination with African art mean today? How real, or how cynical is its current appropriation and commodification? And what relevance does it possess today? Is it merely a new-fangled fetish, profoundly disingenuous in its inflation of the Idea of Africa? Is it a new cool exercise in miserabilism? Or is it a genuine attempt to overcome an inherited pathology?

Ed Young’s barbed word-works – BLACK IN FIVE MINUTES and ALL SO FUCKING AFRICAN, exhibited at Frieze in New York in 2016 – suggest the fake instantaneity of a new consciousness, at the root of which lies a smug inflation of identity politics. Smug because – despite Pankaj Mishra’s just observation of ‘a widening abyss of race, class and education’ – it has assumed an unthinking, inviolable, and declamatory righteousness as it modus operandi.

Art is not an exercise in art direction, it is not the sum of a problem but its displacement and overcoming. Art does not mirror existing pathology, it re-configures the possibility for its understanding. The best African art, therefore, rewires prevailing prejudices and needs, it alters the state of play and conditions for being – it emphatically refuses to lie. To do so it must challenge its relevance, refuse its commodification, rout out its cynical neo-liberal accommodation, junk its victimhood, and radically re-imagine itself differently.

Lungiswa Gqunta’s exhibition, ‘Qwitha’ – first shown at Whatiftheworld in Cape Town in 2018 – is a brilliant instance of this shape-shift. For while it reflects the on-going fatal South African human condition, it asks us to distance ourselves from pain and suspend inflammatory rage. Aberrant and chilling, hers is the kind of conceptual-and-visceral art which institutes a radical moment in this corrupt time. For Gqunta the black body in pain is not, perforce, the oracle of truth. Hers, therefore, is precisely the kind of art which refuses the ubiquitous and unscrupulous persistence in lies.

Find more information at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ias-lies-public-lecture-series-ashraf-jamal-on-art-lies-tickets-47297710726#

IAS Lies: Art & Lies

An inclusive exercise in cultural analysis, this book deals with the gravitas and folly of identity politics, the boom of so-called African art, and the fetish and fascination with a global Esperanto. Designed to provoke thought and feeling, it is hoped that this collection of essays on South African art will reach a wide audience. The book’s strength lies in its diversity of focus and cultural frameworks. It offers no defining system or divining rod. Rather, it is hoped that this book will provide a healthy contribution to an already thriving debate regarding the value and purpose of contemporary art, the on-going significance of the decolonising project, and the importance of art from Africa in the global pantheon.

In the World by Ashraf Jamal - in conversation with Tamar Garb

by Simon Constantine, Steve Edwards, Jonathan Stafford, and Andrew Witt. Responses from Tamar Garb. Moderated by Stephanie Schwartz.

First published in 1995, Allan Sekula’s Fish Story offers one of the most important and stunning critiques of the economic logic of global capital. The book, which was produced over seven years, and combines text and photographs into an ‘experimental essay’, tackles many of the myths driving globalization, including the immateriality of labour. The sea, Sekula demonstrates in photographs and words, not the ‘information superhighway’, still moves vast amounts of goods and people around the globe. Importantly, Fish Story provides its lessons in how to negotiate contemporary mythologies through an account of documentary’s history. Throughout it builds a cogent narrative about how and why the sea came to figure as one of documentary’s main protagonists. This symposium, which celebrates the launch of a new edition of Fish Story (MACK, 2018) seeks to address the book’s continued relevance.

Find more information at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/events/2018/oct/ias-book-launch-approaching-sea-allan-sekulas-fish-story

IAS Book Launch: Approaching the Sea - Allan Sekula’s Fish Story

The IAS is a space dedicated to intellectual freedom where disruptive thinking is not only allowed but encouraged and supported. It is a centre of advanced research, debate and dialogue across any kind of boundary, intellectual or institutional. It’s a forum where difficult, even intractable, social questions can be exposed to the scrutiny of rigorous critical enquiry from a variety of perspectives

This Soundcloud channel showcases content produced by the Institute of Advanced Studies and its research centres.

Note on the logo: the blue and green background is a detail of a banner (300x120cm; oil paint, oil pastel and compressed charcoal on canvas) that artist Lucile Haefflinger produced for and which is on display at the IAS.

Growing Societies - Professor Dorian Fuller (UCL Institute of Archaeology)

UCL Institute of Advanced Studies