Graduate Achievements
(continued)
ceramic finds from the UCLA project at Lofkënd in Albania. In June 2015, current UCLA student Jacob Bongers was hired as a curatorial consultant for a new exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History called Mummies: New Secrets from the Tombs. Students still finishing degrees in archaeology have also put their names and that of the Cotsen Institute in lights, with an article on urbanism in second-millennium B.C.E. Iran by Evan Carlson in Iran (2014) and an article on the use of analytical chemistry in archaeology coauthored by Ben Nigra in Analytical Chemistry (2015). Recently, graduate students have teamed up with faculty for think-tank seminars that resulted in publications in major journals. Lana Martin, Katelyn Bishop, Brittany Jackson, Myles Chykerda, and Professor Richard Lesure reevaluated the Mesoamerican Neolithic Demographic Transition in Current Anthropology (2014). Meanwhile, Scott Sunnell, Ben Nigra, Katelyn Bishop, Terrah Jones, Jacob Bongers, and Professor Jeanne Arnold tackled evolutionary thinking and complex hunter-gatherers in Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory (2015). Farther south, Cotsen student Karl La Favre coauthored a book on survey of the Huancane-Putina drainage in the Titicaca Basin, Peru (2014). Another student on the verge of her Ph.D., Christine Johnston, has had her presentation at the annual Chacmool conference (University of Calgary), on a distributional analysis of the economy of Late Bronze Age Ugarit (Syria), accepted for publication in the next proceedings of the conference. Finally, a number of our students are working toward the next level by winning competitive grants at UCLA and beyond. Evan Carlson, Chelsey Fleming, Hannah Lau, and Karl La Favre received dissertationyear fellowships through the UCLA Graduate Division. Ben Nigra received a Dissertation Research Improvement Grant through the National Science Foundation, and Katelyn Bishop won a National Geographic Young Explorer’s Grant to further her research goals. We are proud of our outstanding students and their successes during their UCLA years, as well as after they complete their degrees, and we look forward to future generations of excellence. — Sarah Morris and Ben Nigra
Cotsen Institute faculty and affiliates join in congratulating our six new Egyptologists.
Egyptology at UCLA
T
he Egyptology section of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA consists of three faculty members: Kara Cooney, Jacco Dieleman, and Willeke Wendrich. Together they study, publish, and teach the art and architecture, language, and archaeology of ancient Egypt, from the Epipaleolithic up to the advent of Islam in the seventh century C.E. Recently, much public interest was generated by Kara Cooney’s book The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut’s Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt. UCLA Egyptologists oversee two large ongoing online projects: the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology (UEE, http://uee.ucla.edu/) and, together with the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Ancient Egyptian Architecture Online (AEGARON, http://dai.aegaron.ucla. edu/). Their work also includes two field projects: one comprises excavation of the Greco-Roman city of Karanis (Kom Aushim) in the northern Fayum Oasis, just southwest of Cairo, combined with the study of Epipaleolithic remains in the deserts in the vicinity; the other project studies and publishes coffins held in museums throughout Europe. Another research focus is philology, in particular the intersection of ritual and scribal culture in the first millennium B.C.E. and the Hellenistic and Roman periods. By editing unpublished liturgical and magical papyri, the Egyptologists investigate social dynamics of ritual practice and the interaction of Egyptian and Greek language and culture. All these activities have attracted and facilitated a growing number of graduate students, six of whom received the doctoral hood in June 2015. In alphabetical order these were: Anne Austin, Emily Cole, Sonali Gupta-Agarwal, Bethany Simpson, Angela Susak Pitzer, and Eric Wells. — Hans Barnard
6 | BACKDIRT 2015