UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS TO PRESENT ARCHAEOLOGY LECTURE SERIES

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - The University of Arkansas will host the Robert L. Stigler, Jr., Lectureship in Archaeology 2001-2002 Lecture Series: The Archaeology and History of Cultural Landscapes, Oct. 3 and Oct. 4.

The Vanderbilt University Colloquium presentation, "Modeling Land Forms and Behavior: GIS in the Maya Region," will feature Belli Francisco Estrada Belli, department of anthropology assistant professor, Wednesday, Oct. 3, in Giffels Auditorium, Old Main, at 3:30 p.m. The evening lecture: "Sites, Landscapes, and Shipwrecks: GIS Analysis in Action," will begin at 7:30 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 4, in Giffels Auditorium.

Estrada Belli has extensive experience in studying Maya civilization and landscape use, and he also focuses on settlement patterns, remote sensing, computer applications in archaeology and maritime archaeology. He received his doctorate degree in 1998 from Boston University, where he also served as lecturer. He joined the faculty at Vanderbilt University in 2000, and he has carried out archaeological fieldwork, beginning in 1983-1984, in Italy, Guatemala and New England.

The National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society and various university sources have funded Estrada Belli's research. He has authored or co-authored two dozen professional articles and chapters covering a variety of topics - including ritualized landscapes, preclassic, classic, and postclassic Maya archaeological sites, ceramic trade patterns, Maya burial patterns, and geographic information systems (GIS) and computerized analytical methods.

Examples of his writing include "The Archaeology of Complex Societies in Pacific Coastal Southeastern Guatemala: A Regional GIS Analysis (British Archaeological Reports, International Series 890, 1999);" "Late Preclassic Ceramic Interaction Spheres: The Pacific Coast as Core, Not Periphery" (with L. Kosakowsky and H. Neff; Journal of Field Archaeology, 2000); and "GPS and GIS as Aids for Mapping Archaeological Sites" (Archaeological Computing Newsletter, 1997).

Cultural landscapes are the perceived settings in which human events and circumstances are experienced, and they consist of places altered to suit human needs along with places left unchanged but recognized for important qualities. Cultural landscapes influence and reflect the personal, social, political, economic, religious and mythic dimensions of human knowledge.

Anthropologists, archaeologists, geographers, historians and many others in recent years have discovered that the study of cultural landscapes, past and present, may reveal new insights concerning the organization and development of human communities and their relationships with the environment. As people act on the potentialities offered by their environments, they transform their surroundings and encode in the terrain such diverse qualities as knowledge and belief systems, social and political orders, land-use patterns, community identities and relationships with other groups.

The variable perspectives that accompany the study of cultural landscapes, from site to region and from individual to community, make use of new methods and techniques. Remote sensing from orbiting satellites, archaeogeographical prospecting using technologies such as ground penetrating radar, locational plotting using global positioning systems (GPS), and the application of GIS for spatial analysis and interpretation are now commonplace in cultural landscape investigations.

As these technologies join other social and environmental science methods that cross disciplinary boundaries, cultural landscapes become an interdisciplinary endeavor, with scholars representing a variety of academic fields that bring their special talents to a shared topic of interest.