Good Ontologies gone Bad? Andean Animism as an imperial ideology

UCL Institute of Archaeology Thematic Research Seminars Programme | Term II, 2024-25

The Term II seminar series will highlight thematic research looking at 'Material Worlds' and 'Power and Difference'. These are scheduled to be in-person events.

Seminars on 'Material Worlds' will explore research related to areas including artefact typology and beyond to technology and practices of production; movement and mobility of objects through trade and exchange; cultural memory, archaeologies of contextual meaning, sociologies and anthropologies of art as well as materials analysis of lithics, metals, glass, ceramics and other artificial materials; imaging of organic remains (environmental, artefactual, and for conservation treatments) and the interface between materials analysis and conservation science.

Those seminars on 'Power and Difference' will highlight research related to the origins of humanity and the dynamics of civilizations; the emergence, rise, persistence and collapse of complex societies; inequality and political organisation; early Empires, including Assyria, the Roman Empire, the early Islamic empires, the Inca empire, and the post-classic Maya; the archaeology of slavery; the symbolic significances of places, the construction and use of ritual and funerary landscapes and burial rites as well as critical perspectives on the interpretation of cultural heritage, underlying ethics and philosophy of past and present cultural conservation; the relationship between heritage, museums and the development of concepts of race and culture; contemporary racial and social inequalities; post-conflict heritage policy, conflict archaeology, and the politics of heritage in disputed territories and in former colonial societies and decolonising conservation,

Wednesdays, doors open 4pm for a 4.10pm start

• 22 January: Developments in iron provenance analysis - Michael Charlton (UCL)
• 29 January: The role of Palermo in the central Mediterranean: a pottery perspective - Viva Sacco (UCL)
• 5 February:  The material culture of Qaryat al Faw, a late antique oasis in Arabia - Juan de Lara (University of Oxford)
• 12 February: Southern Africa and the Indian Ocean world: rethinking ports, trade routes and object itineraries in the global Middle Ages (500-1500 CE) - Abigail J. Moffett (University of Cambridge)

[19 February: Reading Week - no seminar]

• 26 February: Biopolitics and Psychopolitics in Ancient Peru: Towards an Archaeology of Pre-Hispanic Technologies of Power - Henry Tantaleán (Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos)
• 5 March: Good Ontologies gone Bad? Andean Animism as an imperial ideology that justified Inca conquest and coercion - Bill Sillar (UCL)
• 12 March: Ritual Re-representation and the Making of Sociality: Rethinking Elite Burials in the Late Shang Yinxu - Zhengyuan Wang (Zhejiang University/UCL)
• 19 March: Power and difference at the dawn of the Bronze Age: the case of Başur Höyük, a “royal” cemetery at the margins of the Mesopotamian world - David Wengrow (UCL)