UCL Institute of Archaeology

The diversity of Institute research has been  showcased by staff and students at the Society for American Archaeology's 77th Annual Meeting in Memphis, USA.

Institute staff and students joined friends and colleagues, including a large number of Institute alumni, at the SAA Annual Meeting being held in Memphis, TN from 18-22 April 2012.

• The Institute's NERC-funded Early Rice project exhibited their research in a session on Ethnobotany and Plant Use with a poster by Eleanor Kingwell-Banham, Dorian Fuller, Alison Weisskopf, Emma Harvey and Rabi Mohanty on 'The domestication and development of rice (Oryza sativa) in India. New results from Golbai Sasan, Orissa, East India'.
• Rebecca Beardmore presented her research on 'Perspectives on Iron Age agropastoralist landscape use in Semirech’ye from phytolith and geoarchaeological analysis: a comparison of two different ecological zones' in the symposium on Archaeological Investigations of Pastoral Landscapes.
• In the symposium entitled Frogs Crossing the Pond: New Frontiers in Regional Archaeology, former Institute staff member James Conolly and Andrew Bevan's research on 'Spatial and ecological modelling of archaeological survey data: an analytical example from the Antikythera Survey Project' was presented.
• Elizabeth Graham and colleagues presented an update on 'Recent Research at Marco Gonzalez and Lamanai, Belize' in the session on Current Trends in Belizean Archaeology. Elizabeth also participated in the symposium entitled Four Decades of Belize Archaeology: Honoring the Work of Norman Hammond.
• Sue Hamilton and collaborative partner Colin Richards on the AHRC-funded Rapa Nui Landscapes of Construction project gave a presentation entitled 'Dreaming of Hawaiki: rethinking the Hare Peanga of Rapa Nui (Easter Island)' in the symposium on Holy Houses.
• Gail Hammond displayed a poster entitled 'Continuing research using landscape archaeology and GIS at Nojol Nah, Belize' in the session on Research on the Maya.
• Isabel Rivera-Collazo, who recently completed her PhD research at the Institute, presented her work on 'Angostura: a case study on coupling landscape change with multiscalar human ecodynamics in the Caribbean' in the session on Recent Research in Pre-Colonial Greater Antilles.
• Arlene Rosen and Jago Cooper submitted papers for the symposium on the Archaeology of Sustainability with presentations on 'Wetlands, Adaptive Cycles, and Sustainability among Foragers in the Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene Levant' and 'Constructing Sustainable Island Communities: Comparative perspectives from the Pacific and Caribbean Islands' respectively.
• Bill Sillar contributed to the symposium in honour of Dean E. Arnold on his supposed "retirement" giving a presentation entitled 'Supply on Command: The development of Inka pottery production in the Cuzco area' and was also invited as discussant to the session on Andean Archaeology in Global Perspective.
• David Wengrow was invited to be one of the discussants in the forum on the Impact of Special Purpose Institutions on the Future of Archaeology.

Research activity at the Institute of Archaeology is on a global scale with projects across 5 continents and the Pacific. Further information about the immense diversity of staff research is available on the Institute's Research Directory. Read more about student research on their student profile pages.

The Society for American Archaeology (SAA) is an international organization dedicated to the research, interpretation, and protection of the archaeological heritage of the Americas.