About the Archaeology Centre
The Archaeology Centre is a community that brings archaeologists and people interested in archaeology together across the University of Toronto and beyond. We aim to provide a centralized hub of information about opportunities (e.g., field schools, scholarships, etc.) and events (e.g., lectures, interest groups, symposia, etc.) related to archaeology. We are not an academic unit at the university and do not offer courses for credit or degree programs. If you are interested in academically pursuing archaeology at the University of Toronto, please see the following departments for more information and contacts:
- Department of Anthropology
- Department of Art History
- Department of Classics
- Department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations
- Department of Earth Sciences
Regular Interest Groups
The Faunal Interest Group
The group has convened by-weekly (times TBA; in the Archaeology Centre boardroom AP140 at 19 Ursula Franklin Street) since September 2007. The group discusses new and old issues of zoo archaeological method and theory. For more information, please contact Alicia Hawkins at alicia.hawkins@utoronto.ca.
Friday, October 11th at 12:00 pm. The Faunal Interest Group (FIG) is happy to welcome everyone to our first meeting for the academic year scheduled for Friday, October 11th, at 12 pm. We are starting with an interesting talk by our own Dr. Genevieve Dewar. Please mark your calendar! Details: Human Adaptive Plasticity: the view from the drylands of South Africa Research suggests that early dispersals of Homo sapiens out of Africa and into novel environments were rapid despite the extreme climatic variability during the Pleistocene. While the earliest forays were not always successful, by 60-50 ka, early human populations moved into marginal environments, regions with low productivity and low predictability of resources, that previous species of Homo had been unsuccessful in permanently colonizing, suggesting a unique ecological plasticity. It is precisely in these difficult environments that humans would have had to develop clever innovations in order to survive. In this talk, I discuss some of the evidence for adaptive flexibility with a view from the southern Namib Desert, South Africa. Venue: AP140 (Arch Center Board room), Department of Anthropology. Zoom link: https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/9432759873?omn=81864511046 Meeting ID: 943 275 9873. For more information about the meeting, please contact Alicia Hawkins (alicia.hawkins@utoronto.ca).
NEW: The Collections Interest Group
Join the Collections Interest Group and discuss a wide array of topics regarding the care, preservation, and public education of artifacts and histories in a collections setting. Whether you are interested in a career in the museum world, plan on interacting with collections in some capacity, or simply find an interest in the curation and preservation of histories, this group is for you. Topics of discussion look to explore the relationship between ‘the institution’ which houses objects and the communities which interact with its stories, the role of ever-evolving technology in a collections/museum setting, and sustainable collections management that serves present, past, and future generations. Interested? Please contact Savanna for more information (s.buehlmanbarbeau@mail.utoronto.ca).
October Talks
The Archaeology Centre presents: “The Angkor Vihara Project: Buddhist Archaeology and Urban-Religious Development along Angkor Thom’s East Gate Road/Thvear Khmoch,” by Dr. Andrew Harris (Postdoctoral Research Fellow, National University of Singapore). Friday, October 18th in AP140 (Anthropology Building, ground floor, at 19 Ursula Franklin St.), from 3:00-5:00 pm. Archaeological research investigating the society-wide adoption of Theravada Buddhism during the final centuries of the Cambodian Angkorian Empire (c. 13th-15th centuries CE) has emphasized the critical role of prayer halls (vihara/preah vihear) in spreading new religious practices, fostering community, and shaping urban development, while also replacing earlier Hindu temple-complexes as pivots of Cambodian religious and social life. Work within the 12th-century civic-ceremonial centtre of Angkor Thom by the Angkor Vihara Project, a collaboration between the University of Toronto’s Archaeology Centre and Cambodia’s APSARA National Authority, has revealed a dense, multifaceted landscape of over seventy monastic substructures (“Buddhist Terraces”) alongside converted Hindu temples and Buddhist reliquaries/stupa. A series of four field campaigns between 2019-2024 have demonstrated that these complexes are essential not only for understanding religious transition and continuity between architectural traditions, but also for assessing the evolution of Angkor Thom’s urban space over time during a critical period of geopolitical and environmental collapse. This lecture will present new excavation data from three “Buddhist Terrace” sites along Angkor Thom’s eastern artery between the Bayon and Thvear Khmoch/“Gate of the Dead,” illustrating broader trends in changing religious and urban practices during Angkor’s final centuries and beyond.
October Talks
The Archaeological Institute of America and the Archaeology Centre present: “Lost at Sea in the First Century BCE: Reconstructing People from Shipwrecks,” by Dr. Carrie Atkins (Assistant Professor, Classics). Tuesday October 22nd at 6:10 pm in room AP130 (19 Ursula Franklin St.). Join in person or online. For more details please visit the AIA events website. Although prior scholarship has shown that people would have arranged for passage on merchant ships, little attention has been given to collectively studying shipwrecks to understand what passengers or crew brought aboard and broader patterns in mobility. Here, I examine the assemblages of first-century BCE shipwrecks to identify personal items and reconstruct the identity of individuals aboard, distinguishing also cargo items from personal items. In addition, aspects of individual identities can be ascertained, such as the sex of the women aboard two shipwrecks as known by their skeletal remains, or the profession of the medical practitioners aboard three shipwrecks as known by their instruments. Finally, the evidence emphasizes long-distance travel in the first century BCE with the women travelling from the eastern Mediterranean to Italy, and one of the medical practitioners from Italy to Hispania. The jewellery, figurines, instruments, amulets, and clothing found in these wrecks attest to the entangled networks of people and goods coming together for a brief moment aboard the ship as they move around the Mediterranean and allow a glimpse at those who otherwise remain hidden in antiquity.
October Talks
The Mediterranean Archaeology Collaborative Specialisation (MACS) presents: “Hybridity, Innovation, and Exchange in the Earthwork Theatres of Roman Gaul,” by Dr. John Sigmier (PhD, Penn 2024), A&S Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Toronto. Thursday October 24th at 4:00 pm, in LI 205 (Lillian Massey). In this presentation, I discuss the use of earthwork substructures in Roman theatre buildings, an architectural approach that was distinctive to Rome’s northwestern provinces during the first two centuries CE. Scholars have historically treated the decision to build with earth rather than with stone or concrete as an architectural simplification, motivated by costs of materials and a lack of technical expertise at provincial construction sites. Based on a comparative analysis of mound building in pre-Columbian North America and Iron Age Europe, I argue instead that earthworks were a sophisticated structural solution that applied an established local tradition of monumental constructions to an imported Mediterranean architectural form.
November Talks
The Archaeology Centre presents “Taming the Flow: Migration, Negotiation, and the production of hydropolitical knowledge in the Late Pre-Hispanic Andes,” by Dr. Stephen Berquist (postdoctoral fellow at the University of Warsaw). Friday November 1st 2024 in AP140 (19 Ursula Franklin St) at 3:00-5:00 pm. Temperature and precipitation fluctuations, frequent flash floods, volcanic eruptions, and devastating El Niño events makes the Andean region one of the most unstable environments in the world. To mediate these conditions, Andean peoples have developed what I term “anticipatory infrastructures,” that include a range of mechanisms to stabilize the effects of climatic fluctuations. To contemporary Indigenous communities, such fluctuations manifest the terrakuna and apukuna, earth beings and sacred peaks. Quechua peoples in southern Peru thus refer to irrigation practices as “teaching water,” emphasizing the necessity of socializing a capricious earth-being before entering into relations with it. My research suggests that the majority of anticipatory infrastructures postdate 900 A.D., the terminal Middle Horizon (600-1000 A.D.). Rather than assume a timeless Andean orientation towards climactic uncertainty, I propose that such practices emerged through a specific political sequence. Many contemporary and historic Andean communities contain two moieties, discursively rendered as warlike, masculinized, pastoralist “invaders” and peaceful, feminized, agriculturalist “ancestors.” The ritual unification and meditation of these groups requires modes of socialization and domestication similar to those employed in the teaching of water and other earth-beings. Recent work indicates that such segmentary collectives – sometimes known as ayllu– coalesced in the 8th and 9th century, in a period of increased migration, exchange, and political turmoil. Here, I suggest that the political negotiations and experimentations that shaped ayllu structure generated new forms of social relation and ways of being-together that extended to the non-human world.