From the Director

Margaret Conkey

The past few months have been increasingly active ones for the Archaeological Research Facility, including recruitment for a historical archaeologist who will join the faculty in the Department of Anthropology, as well as numerous exciting lectures. Of course, I am particularly proud of the "smashing" success of our lecture on March 8 which featured my French colleague, Jean Clottes, speaking to a crowd of at least 600 people about the new cave art discovery, the Grotte Chauvet, in the Ardèche region of France. The lecture was preceded by a press conference that led to articles in The San Francisco Chronicle, The Oakland Tribune, The Contra Costa County Times, The Berkeleyan, and The Daily Cal, most with photos as well! The lecture was attended by the French Consul and several attachés, who themselves had to sit on the floor! Jean Clottes was at his best, with an impassioned and throughly engaging description of how one gets into the cave through the narrowest of passages, and with his own magnificent photos of hundreds of paintings and engravings that appear to be as old as 20,000 years. We were all thrilled that Jean's time here at Berkeley in 1991, as a Visiting Research Professor thanks to the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science, had generated a feeling of Berkeley loyalty and friendship such that he was moved to give the first North American showing of the slides here at Berkeley. It is also a wonderful and reassuring thing to know that an archaeology lecture can bring out nearly 600 equally impassioned people as an audience. Our thanks goes to the French Cultural Studies, the Departments of Anthropology and of the History of Art, and the Center for Western European Studies for their support of the event. I personally want to thank both the ARF staff for working on the arrangements and Bill Whitehead (archaeology graduate student, Anthropology) for several hours of dedicated work to set up the slide screen, the mike and for overseeing the slides from a tiny booth where he could not hear much of the lecture. For those who are still interested in obtaining the four color photos of some of the cave paintings that are available on the internet, World Wide Web, the web site is: http://www.culture.fr/gvpda.html.

In addition to the 5 archaeology lectures for the historical archaeology position in Anthropology, we have been treated to numerous other lectures of archaeological interest over the past few months: Dr. Evgeni Chernyk (Russian Academy of Sciences) spoke on the ancient metallurgy of Russia and the Bronze Age; Dr. Jeanine Davis-Kimball (Near Eastern Studies) spoke on "Burial Practices Among the Indo-Iranian Samatians;" Dr. Matthew Johnson (University of Durham) spoke on the Georgian Order; Otis Parrish (a new archaeology graduate student in 1995 in Anthropology) spoke as part of series offered by the Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and presented an engaging account of his native California heritage and its influence on his now-renowned jewelry making; and Dr. Payson Sheets (University of Colorado) presented the spring Archaeological Institute of America lecture on his research at the Ceren Site (southern Mesoamerica) - and these are just a few of the many offerings!

While it is hard to believe that the 1994-95 academic year will come to a close in little over a month from now, there are a number of ARF projects still in process that we hope to be able to report on in our Fall Newsletter. I have been asked to begin a 5 year term as Director of the ARF as of July 1, 1995, and I look forward to a challenging but productive tenure in such a position. I appreciate the support of the Directorship Search Committee and of Vice-Chancellor Cerny and his staff, and encourage you all to join with me in the coming years in the many and diverse projects of the ARF and in promoting and encouraging archaeology at Berkeley!