EVENTS
PAST EVENTS
For video recordings of past events please check out our Vimeo site
april, 2026
10apr12:00 pmELSI Friday Forum Event

Event Details
ELSI Friday Forum- Uncovering the Past Responsibly: Ethical Challenges and Recommendations of Ancient DNA Research Friday, April 10th at 12 p.m. ET/9 a.m. PT Featuring:
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Event Details
Time
(Friday) 12:00 pm
Location
Zoom (Virtual)
Organizer
ELSI Resources and Analysis (CERA) and the Division of Ethics at CUIMC
10apr4:30 pm- 6:30 pmBrian Boyd & Mazen Iwaisi, "From Memory to Place: An Archaeology of the Nakba"

Event Details
Brian Boyd & Mazen Iwaisi "From Memory to Place: An Archaeology of the Nakba" Friday, April 10, 2026, 4:30 PM - 6:30 PM 807 Schermerhorn
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Event Details
Brian Boyd & Mazen Iwaisi
“From Memory to Place: An Archaeology of the Nakba“
Friday, April 10, 2026, 4:30 PM – 6:30 PM
807 Schermerhorn Hall
Register Here
Please note that all non-Columbia University affiliates must register for a QR campus access code.
The seminar will also be available on Zoom
Abstract
There has been extensive research into what Palestinians call the Nakba (catastrophe) in a number of academic disciplines, including history, oral history, memory studies, and cultural studies. Palestinian archaeologists have rarely focused on the material remains of – the material evidence for – the historical and contemporary processes of the Nakba. To address the reasons for this, and to offer a way forward, we have recently instigated the project “From Memory to Place: An Archaeology of the Nakba”, an interdisciplinary endeavor that focuses on the fundamental changes in the materiality of landscape inhabitation in the processes of the ongoing Nakba. Using archaeological methodologies that explore the spatial reordering (and destruction) of material conditions – through forced displacement, abandonment and movement – the project aims to demonstrate the importance of contemporary archaeological perspectives to Nakba Studies.
Bios
Mazen Iwaisi is the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University. He is working on his first book project, Anticolonial Archaeology? Epistemic Precarity and Palestinian Archaeology. He earned his PhD from Queen’s University Belfast (2023), examining the concept of Archaeopolitics in the Making of the Palestinian National Spatial Plan. Mazen is currently working with Brian Boyd, Jamal Barghouth, and other scholars on the Archaeology of the Nakba project.
Brian Boyd is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology, Director of Museum Anthropology, and Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University. His research focuses on the prehistoric archaeology of southwest Asia, the politics of archaeology in Palestine and Israel, and critical human-animal studies. His articles have appeared recently in the journals Jerusalem Quarterly and American Anthropologist. He is currently co-writing a book with Mazen Iwaisi and Jamal Barghouth entitled From Memory to Place: An Archaeology of the Nakba.
Time
(Friday) 4:30 pm - 6:30 pm
Location
Columbia University, 807 Schermerhorn Hall
807 Schermerhorn

Event Details
The History and Climate Change Workshop invites you to: Prolonged Drought and Socioecological Transition on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in the 16th-17th Centuries
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Event Details
The History and Climate Change Workshop invites you to:
Prolonged Drought and Socioecological Transition on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in the 16th-17th Centuries
A talk and discussion by Dr. William J. D’Andrea, Lamont Associate Research Professor
Tues., April 14 at 4:30pm
513 Fayerweather Hall
Abstract
Rapa Nui is often presented as a microcosmic example of societal failure driven by environmental overexploitation; a narrative that has been discredited by ethnographic, archaeological, and demographic evidence. The true “collapse” history of Rapanui society is anything but mysterious and was instead the consequence of well-documented European and Peruvian slave raids in the 1860s and exploitation of island resources by European ranchers. For approximately 450 years prior to first European contact in 1722 and for more than 100 years thereafter, Polynesian settlers maintained a rich society on one of the most remote islands in the world.
Beginning in the 13th century, the people of Rapa Nui engaged in megalithic monument construction, crafting hundreds of ahu platforms and moai statues from volcanic bedrock. An apparent decline of this tradition occurred centuries later, prior to European contact and coincident with land-use changes and the emergence of new ritual practices on the island. I will present new paleoclimate evidence for a transition to persistent drought conditions on Rapa Nui beginning in the mid 16th century. The drought reconstructions are based on two independent records of hydrogen isotopes in rainfall inferred from leaf waxes preserved in wetland sediments. Consistent with observational data and model simulations, we interpret the hydrogen isotopes in precipitation to reflect the frequency of large storms and the total rainfall amount over Rapa Nui. We show that 16th–17th century changes in human geography on Rapa Nui coincided with a sustained, multi-century decrease in annual precipitation of ~600mm, which is of even greater magnitude than the drying observed in recent decades. This scenario does not require increased clan warfare or demographic collapse, and provides a reasonable explanation for socioecological reorganization as a resilience strategy in response to environmental change.
Time
(Tuesday) 4:30 pm
Location
Columbia University - 513 Fayerweather Hall
1180 Amsterdam Avenue, New York
24apr4:30 pm- 6:30 pmSonya Atalay,"Braiding New Research Worlds: Archaeology, Storywork & Wellbeing"

Event Details
AIA-Westchester Sponsored Annual CCA Lecture Presents: Sonya Atalay (Provost Professor, UMass Amherst Department of Anthropology) "Braiding New Research Worlds: Archaeology, Storywork & Wellbeing"
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Event Details
AIA-Westchester Sponsored Annual CCA Lecture Presents:
Sonya Atalay
(Provost Professor, UMass Amherst Department of Anthropology)
“Braiding New Research Worlds: Archaeology, Storywork & Wellbeing”
Friday, April 24, 2026, 4:30 PM – 6:30 PM
807 Schermerhorn Hall
Register Here
Please note that all non-Columbia University affiliates must register for a QR campus access code.
The seminar will also be available on Zoom
Abstract: In this talk, Dr. Atalay presents her work on a series of land-based research projects with Indigenous communities. Centering Anishinaabe epistemologies and concepts of well-being, she explores how reclaiming traditional knowledge, ancestral remains, Indigenous language, and sacred cultural places can contribute to well-being and healing from historical trauma. Dr. Atalay discusses Indigenous arts-based research and knowledge mobilization methods — such as collaborative comics, storybaskets and counter mapping, and virtual reality applications — as part of Indigenous storywork, demonstrating how lessons drawn from reclaiming tangible and intangible heritage provide a model for imagining decolonized research futures.
Bio: Sonya Atalay is Professor of Anthropology at MIT and Provost Professor in UMass Amherst’s Anthropology Department. She is a public anthropologist and archaeologist who studies Indigenous science protocols, practices and research methods carried out with and for Indigenous communities. Dr. Atalay is the Director and PI of the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science (CBIKS), a National Science Foundation funded Science and Technology Center. She has expertise in the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and served two terms on the National NAGPRA Review Committee, first appointed by the Bush administration and then for a second term by the Obama administration. Dr. Atalay has produced a series of research-based comics in partnership with Native nations about repatriation of Native American ancestral remains, return of sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony under NAGPRA law.
Time
(Friday) 4:30 pm - 6:30 pm
Location
Columbia University, 807 Schermerhorn Hall
807 Schermerhorn
