Lee Clare, Istanbul Department of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI)

“Göbekli Tepe in chronological, cultural, and palaeoclimate context: Reassessing its place in the longue durée of Neolithisation”

Wednesday, December 3, 2025, via Zoom 12 pm (EST)

You can find an abstract of the Lee Clare’s talk on the Columbia University Seminar’s website. Further information on the 2025-2026 Columbia Seminars on the Ancient Near East series will be posted there as well.

The event will take place by Zoom: to receive the Zoom link, please rsvp to gilbert@fordham.edu. For any questions, feel free to get in touch with me at gilbert@fordham.edu. The seminar rapporteur, Shannon O. White (sw3857@columbia.edu) will send a Zoom link to all email addresses on the RSVP list the day before the meeting so that you can log in. Once the meeting has started, please email the rapporteur for assistance.

Dr. Michelle Young

(American Museum of Natural History) 

“Mastery on the Move: Mobile Specialists and the Making of the Chavín Phenomenon”

Friday, December 5, 4:10 PM to 6:10 PM

951 Schermerhorn Extension

Register Here

Please note that campus access is restricted for those not affiliated with Columbia University. Although registration will remain open until the time of the event, unaffiliated visitors are strongly encouraged to register by 1:00 p.m. on Thursday, December 4 to ensure timely access to campus. A QR code for entry will be sent via email after 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, December 4. For any questions or concerns, please contact the Center for Archaeology at the address below.

Abstract

Chavín was once considered the earliest civilization in the Central Andes. Today it is recognized as a widespread cultural, artistic, and/or religious phenomenon that developed in the Peru between 850 and 550 BCE. This phenomenon is identified primarily through shared material patterns of temple construction, iconography, and ceramics. The intensification of long-distance trade and the development and spread of new craft technologies also suggest that this period was one of widespread cooperation and interaction. This talk will reconsider previous approaches to the study of the Chavín Phenomenon – as a mother culture, horizon style, and complex society – to demonstrate how epistemic artefacts from culture-history and neoevolutionary schemas have limited archaeologists’ ability to interpret the Chavín phenomenon into the present. An exploration of archaeological evidence from the Chavín center of Atalla, located in the highlands of Huancavelica, Peru, produces a vision of the Chavín Phenomenon as the result of pericentric and translocal processes. This new framing highlights the agency of mobile artisans and ritual specialists in the creation of a dynamic and interconnected Andean World.

Mi Querencia: A Narrative Cruise Through the Manito Homeland

A poetry reading by

Levi Romero

(Professor Emeritus of Chicana/o Studies, University of New Mexico)

Wednesday, December 10, 6:00-7:30pm

457 Schermerhorn Extension

All are warmly invited to attend a special evening of Chicanx poetry by Levi Romero, inaugural Poet Laureate of New Mexico and author of In the Gathering of Silence (1996), A Poetry of Remembrance (2008), and Sagrado: A Photopoetics Across the Chicano Homeland (2013). In stark and loving detail, Romero’s writing traces the tangled histories of Spanish and U.S. imperialism in New Mexico, as well as the powerful connection to place (querencia) that has emerged among the region’s Indo-Hispano communities. Increasingly, Romero’s heritage work has placed him at the center of interdisciplinary conversations, including with archaeologists at Columbia University. Join us as Romero embarks on a cruise through the backroad stories of Nuevomexicano culture and history.

Co-sponsored by the Departments of Anthropology, American Studies, and Spanish and Latin American Studies, the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, and the Columbia Center for Archaeology.