Archaeological Research Facility - Berkeley

Join us for our ARF Lunch Talk on Oct 7 at noon
Jomon Baskets: Versatile Tools and Links Between People and Plants
ARF (2251 College Bldg), UC Berkeley
Speaker: Kaz Nishihara
In person and on Zoom
For the full list of upcoming events subscribe to our weekly Events emails
http://bit.ly/ARFevents

Enjoy this interesting interview with David Schmidt the author of a new book about Bay Area environmental history.

eastbayyesterday.com

Join us in-person or online for our upcoming Lunch Talk by the director of the ARF!
Props & Stops: non-pottery ceramics at Petsas House, Mycenae
Speaker: Kim Shelton, Professor and ARF Director
Wed. Sept 30, 2026 12:10 p.m.
Archaeological Research Facility, 2251 College
This talk will take place in person at the ARF and on Zoom.
This talk will explore the variety of ceramic objects produced and used at Petsas House, Mycenae, a pottery workshop from the 14thc. BCE. This allows for a discussion of workshop demographics, including tasks by gender and/or age, and the more holistic output of those producing pottery at scale.

Join us tomorrow at 9:30am PST for the first lecture in our 2026-2027 "Affordability in the Iron Age: Household, Regional, and Interregional Economies in the Levant" lecture series. Dr. Erin Hall will present "The Economy of the Northern Israelite Kingdom in the Iron Age IIA." This lecture series is co-hosted by Pacific School of Religion and the Archaeological Research Facility - Berkeley.

Watch live on zoom. To join the zoom presentation, in your zoom account click on the “join” an existing zoom meeting button in the upper right, and enter the zoom meeting ID: 841 9220 2457. Enter the passcode (638502) when prompted.

New book about the late UC Berkeley Professor David Stronach authored by Sabrina Maras, "David Stronach and British Archaeology in the Middle East", 2026 published by Bloomsbury - British Institute of Persian Studies.

Join us in-person on Wednesday for the ARF Lunch Talk!
A chronicle of the Museum of Anthropology at Berkeley
Paolo Pellegatti, Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology
Wed, Sept 23, 2026 @ 12:10 PM
ARF 2251 College Building, Room 101 (in person only)
A chronicle of the Museum of Anthropology at Berkeley
Location: 2251 College Building, Room 101
Abstract: The Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley recently turned 125 years old, remaining the oldest and largest museum of its kind west of the Mississippi. It served as the academic home to seminal figures in the field, including Alfred Kroeber, Edward Gifford, Robert Heizer, William Bascom, and James Deetz. From its time as the UCMA to the Lowie Museum and now the Hearst Museum, it has spent over a century providing the campus and the public with glimpses of its collections through hundreds of exhibitions while supporting vital research and coursework across many departments.
In the last decade, however, the museum has undergone a series of changes that have arguably resulted in a fading presence for the public. Many generations of Berkeley undergraduates have passed through campus with limited opportunities to engage with the museum’s functions. This long-overdue presentation offers a chronological narrative of the museum’s history from 1901 to the recent past, illustrated through images from the institutional archives.

ARF researchers contribute to research on scrolls

To read 2,000-year-old burned scrolls, scientists burn their own - Berkeley News Charred papyrus scrolls from a library inundated by volcanic ash in 79 C.E. are largely unreadable. UC Berkeley scientists teamed up to create and burn their own scrolls to test a new way to decipher them.

Today at noon!
Who Should Train Tomorrow's Archaeologists? Cultural Resource Management, Universities, and the Future of Archaeological Education
Speaker: William A. White, III, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology University of California, Berkeley
Date & Time: Wednesday, September 16, 2026 @ 12:10 PM
Location: This talk will take place in person at the ARF (2251 College Bldg., Room 101) and on Zoom. Register for online attendance here.
https://bit.ly/ARFtalks-2627
Sponsor: Archaeological Research Facility
Abstract: Cultural resource management (CRM) archaeologists in the United States have been asking university professors to adequately prepare archaeology students for careers in CRM for over 60 years. Academia has been slow to respond despite the reality that over 90 percent of archeologists work in CRM or for government agencies, and the funding for CRM archaeology vastly outstrips funding for academic archaeology. This talk explores one archaeologist’s opinion on the industry’s plan to build programs designed to prepare young archaeologists for careers in CRM. What would this program look like? How would it work? What is the industry’s capability to carry through on this plan? How can universities respond? I also highlight examples of existing programs that use ongoing public-private collaborations to prepare students for careers in CRM archaeology.

Join us today at Noon for the first Lunch Talk of the semester!
The manufacture and distribution of pottery at Pompeii
Wed, Sept 9 @ 12:10 PM
Speaker: J. Theodore Peña, Professor Emeritus, Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies University of California, Berkeley
Sponsor(s): Archaeological Research Facility
This talk will take place in person at the ARF and on Zoom. Register for online attendance here.
https://bit.ly/ARFtalks-2627
Abstract: The archaeological site of Pompeii provides an unparalleled wealth of evidence regarding the production, distribution, and consumption of craft goods in a Roman town. This talk reviews some of the more recently obtained evidence regarding the manufacture and distribution of pottery. It first considers the two pottery workshops known to have been active at Pompeii at the time of the town’s destruction, focusing on spatial aspects of how these facilities operated and what this suggests about the persons who labored at them. It then discusses compositional evidence for the clay sources exploited by Pompeian potters, considering how the geology and geography of the Bay of Naples region conditioned their choice of raw materials and their output. Finally, it employs two on-line interactive models that calculate transport distances, times, and costs to evaluate the mechanisms and routes whereby imported pottery likely was distributed to Pompeii, elucidating certain aspects of the long-distance supply of craft goods in the Roman world.

Speaker: J. Theodore Peña, Professor Emeritus, Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies University of California, Berkeley

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