Discussion of the field of archaeology often conjures up images of Indiana Jones and unimaginable treasures hidden in exotic locales.
But archaeological research is quite a bit closer to home than one might realize. In the bottom of the UCLA Fowler Museum is the university’s Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.
The Cotsen, founded in 1973, takes a unique interdisciplinary approach to archaeology. The faculty is drawn from a number of departments, from anthropology to classics to botany; all of which contribute to the interdisciplinary nature of the institute and the wide variety of research.
Despite the array of projects, everyone at the Cotsen is working toward answering the same question: what can the remains of past human life teach us?
“I think the thing that archeology has to offer is a sense of the deep past and looking at how human behavior from the past can be similar or different to what we see today,” said Elizabeth Klarich, assistant director of the institute. “We compare so many different prehistoric cultures that it can offer a sense of deep history and change over long periods of time, versus something like history where we’re confined by the documents we have.”
To find an answer outside of books and recorded history, researchers work on projects ranging from studying animal bones or preserving rock art to leading field excavations around the world. The Cotsen offers a doctoral program in archaeology in addition to a masters in the field as well as a new masters program in ethnographic conservation.
In the zooarchaeology lab, led by lab director and senior museum scientist Tom Wake, researchers study animal remains to look at how humans have interacted with their environments throughout history.
These remains reveal what humans ate in the past and the environmental impact they had on their surroundings, Wake said. For example, the bones of these animals can reveal patterns of overhunting and evolutionary pressures.
“I can pick up one of these bones and tell a whole story about it. That’s what any good archaeologist should be able to do,” Wake said, gesturing to 3,000-year-old fish vertebrae.
The Cotsen’s endowment has been growing recently, and the institute has expanded it’s field program from one location in Chile to a total of 10 locations around the world.
“The vision was to transform the way that archaeology is done in the 21st century. Among the many initiatives the team began was a field school program,” said Ran Boytner, director of international research at the Cotsen. “The vision was to put a number of these field schools together at a top notch institution such as UCLA.”
Roughly 140 undergraduate students will be participating in the expanded field program this year, Boytner said, working on projects from excavation to conservation.
“These are research programs. … They are doing hands on working in the field,” he said. “There is a lot of work and a lot of learning that takes place. Students are being exposed in a safe environment to a new culture.”
Charlene Collazzi is a fourth-year anthropology student who did field work in Chile last summer excavating a settlement site. She volunteers in labs at the Cotsen, and she will be doing two more field programs in Panama and Egypt. Collazzi hopes to open her own field school someday.
She said she loves her work at the Cotsen and would like to continue her studies there as a graduate student.
“It’s amazing there’s so many different facets to it. Anything you’re interested in, you can pretty much go after it,” Collazzi said. “To understand our present and where we want to go in the future, you have to understand the past.”
Though the field of archaeology is all about studying the past, the Cotsen continues to look toward the future, using cutting edge technology to conduct their research and founding the one-of-a-kind UCLA/Getty Master’s Program on the Conservation of Ethnographic and Archaeological Materials in Fall 2005.
The program is a joint effort between the Cotsen and the Getty Villa Conservation Institute, and the first class to complete the program will be graduating this year.
“We are delighted to combine the resources of both institutions to provide a unique and outstanding training program in the conservation of cultural materials,” said Charles Stanish, director of the Cotsen Institute, in a statement. “This program will contribute to the preservation and protection of vanishing cultural heritage. As scholars with a mission to study the past, we have an obligation to be stewards of this heritage for the future.”
Though real-life archaeology may not be quite as romantic as popular culture portrays, the researchers at the Cotsen maintain that their field still has much to offer.
“I think there’s a sort of sense of discovery can be really incredible, even if it’s related to something like excavating a 2000-year-old kitchen or finding pottery where it was left behind,” Klarich said. “I don’t think any of us would deny that we have exciting jobs.”