Tulane Maya Symposium Speakers

Speakers

Biographies

M. Charlotte Arnauld
Professor Emerita, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Archéologie des Amériques

M. Charlotte Arnauld earned her doctoral Degree at the Université de Paris-Sorbonne and is currently Emeritus Research Director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Laboratoire Archéologie des Amériques, France). As a Mesoamerican archaeologist she has directed or co-directed five long-term projects in Maya highland Verapaz and northwest lowland La Joyanca, Petén, Guatemala, Balamku and Río Bec in Campeche, Mexico, and Zacapu in Western Mexico. She has interests and experience in joint work with ethnographers, ethnohistorians, and ethnolinguists. She specializes in Maya urban studies, exploring neighborhood dynamics and related population mobility as part of her broader work in social archaeology. Her publications include several books, among which Archéologie de l'habitat en Alta Verapaz (Guatemala) and various co-editions on the archaeology of Michoacán, Mexico. Her co-edited volumes include The Neighborhood as a Social and Spatial Unit in Mesoamerican Cities (with L. Manzanilla and M.E. Smith), Mobility and Migration in Ancient Mesoamerican Cities (with C. Beekman and G. Pereira), Rupture or Transformation of Maya Kingship (with T. Okoshi, A. F. Chase and P. Nondédéo), as well as Building an Archaeology of Maya Urbanism (with D. Marken). She has published papers in Journal de la Société des Américanistes, Ancient Mesoamerica, and Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.

Michael Callaghan
Department of Anthropology, The University of Central Florida

Dr. Callaghan is an anthropological archaeologist who studies Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican societies to understand the origins of social complexity. Dr. Callaghan specializes in the study of the ancient Maya with an emphasis on ceramic analysis. His research on ceramics informs the study of how technology and production contribute to changes in social structure. Dr. Callaghan graduated with his BS (1998) and PhD (2008) from Vanderbilt University. His work on archaeology and ceramic analysis have been published in the journals Ancient Mesoamerica, Latin American Antiquity, Journal of Archaeology Science: Reports, Economic Anthropology, and PLosOne among others. He is also author of The Ceramic Sequence of the Holmul Region, Guatemala (University of Arizona Press). He is the co-author of the Open Educational Resource (OER) Exploring our World through General Anthropology (UCF STARS) and co-editor of The Inalienable in the Archaeology of Mesoamerica (Archaeological Publications of the American Anthropological Association). Dr. Callaghan's research also appears in book chapters of edited volumes published by university presses. Dr. Callaghan is currently co-director of the UCF El Mirador LiDAR Project, which uses Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) to identify cultural features in a 500 square km area of the Mirador region (including the site of El Mirador), for purposes of mapping, ground-truthing, and excavation. Prior to his work at Mirador, Callaghan was co-director of the Holtun Archaeological Project, where he investigated the development of social inequality as it relates to crafted objects, public ritual, household activities, and monumental architecture at the site of Holtun, Guatemala. In the past ten years, Dr. Callaghan has received over 1 million dollars in research grants from multiple institutions including the Fundación Patrimonio Cultural y Natural Maya (Pacunam), the National Science Foundation, National Geographic Society, National Geographic Society/WAITT Program, and University of Central Florida. At UCF, Dr. Callaghan directs the research of post-doctoral scholars, PhD students, and undergraduate honors students. He teaches courses for graduate and undergraduate students in the areas of general anthropology, ceramic analysis, ethics in anthropology, archaeological pseudo-science, gender in archaeology, and the anthropology of Walt Disney World Theme Parks in Florida.

Arianna Campiani
SARAS Department (History, Anthropology, Religions, Art, Performing Arts), Sapienza University of Rome

Arianna Campiani is an assistant professor at the Department of History, Anthropology, Religion, Art, and Performing Arts (SARAS) at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. She received her Ph.D. in Architecture from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 2014. Arianna specializes in Mesoamerican urbanism and architecture, and since 2003, she has collaborated in several archaeological projects in southern Mexico, focusing on the Classic Maya period. She has worked at Palenque and its region since 2008. Her research interests span pre-industrial urban planning, placemaking, environment-behavior studies, digital archaeology, and heritage preservation. Before her position at Sapienza, she was a Postdoctoral fellow at UC Merced, at UNAM, and a European Marie-Skłodowska Curie fellow between Sapienza and UNAM.

Adrian S.Z. Chase
Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University

Adrian S.Z. Chase is an anthropological archaeologist studying urbanism among the ancient Maya through the use of lidar datasets, excavated materials, and computational methods. His current research focuses on urbanism at the Maya city of Caracol, Belize – and its extensive database deriving from forty years of archaeological investigation – to better understand urban life in Mesoamerica. He is currently the Doris Stone Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Middle American Research Institute at Tulane University. Prior to this, he spent one year at Boston University as a visiting assistant professor and two years in a postdoctoral position with the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago as part of a transdisciplinary urban research program. His undergraduate degrees were in Archaeology and Computer Science from Harvard College and focused on the computer analysis of lidar data in combination with archaeological data to study reservoirs at the site of Caracol, Belize. His graduate research for both his MA and PhD at Arizona State University involved investigating ancient Maya urbanism and combining lidar and archaeological data to reconstruct and test neighborhoods, examine urban services and their provisioning, and analyze collective and autocratic governance at Caracol, Belize. In addition to archaeological investigations at Caracol, he has participated in field research at Hirbemerdon Tepe in Turkey and at both Chichén Itza and Teotihuacan in Mexico. His publications are available for download at https://caracol.org/drs-chase/publications/.

Francisco Estrada-Belli
Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University

Francisco Estrada-Belli, (Ph.D. Boston University), is Research Professor at the Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University, specializing in Maya archaeology, Remote Sensing, and Geographic Information Systems. He is the author of the book "The First Maya Civilization. Ritual and Power Before the Classic Period", Routledge (2011), and co-author of journal articles and book chapters on themes related to the Preclassic Maya, the Teotihuacan-Maya interaction, and the emergence of the Kaanu'l hegemony in the Classic period. In 2012 he began teaching GIS in Archaeology at Tulane University. In 2014 he created the MARI-GISLAB, a computer facility for the analysis of archaeological lidar data and other mapping technologies, which he currently manages. In 2016 he co-led the Pacunam Lidar Initiative, a consortium of scholars for largest archaeological lidar survey in the world at that time. The results of that study where published in "Ancient Lowland Maya complexity as revealed by airborne laser scanning of northern Guatemala", (Science, 2018), which he co-authored 17 other scholars. Since then, he has been involved in several collaborative lidar projects with outside scholars. He has been active in the field excavating at Holmul since 2000, and recently at Chochkitam, in northeastern Peten, as well as Dzibanche/Kaanu'l, in Quintana Roo, Mexico.

Travis Stanton
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Riverside

Travis Stanton is a Mesoamerican archaeologist and Full Professor at the University of California Riverside. With a Ph.D. from Southern Methodist University (2000) he has worked in Mexico since 1995, primarily directing projects in the states of Yucatan and Quintana Roo; his current field research is heavily focused on Chichen Itza, the great Early Postclassic city of the Maya and UNESCO World Heritage site, for which he has co-created the working 3D model of the site. For nearly a decade (from 2004-2013), Travis was a professor at the Universidad de las Américas Puebla, located among the ruins of the ancient city of Cholula in Central Mexico, and has spent extensive periods of time in Central Mexico, where he engages in iconographic, digital archaeology, and oral history projects. Among numerous journal articles and book chapters, Travis has published ten books, including a fundamental pedagogical text on the workings of archaeology and a wide-sweeping edited volume covering the Early Postclassic across Mesoamerica.

Alexandre Tokovinine
Department of Anthropology, University of Alabama

Alexandre Tokovinine is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alabama, where he specializes in Maya archaeology and epigraphy. He received his BA degree in History from Lomonosov Moscow State University in 2000 and his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard University in 2008. In his research and teaching, Tokovinine explores the intersection of hieroglyphic writing, monumentality, landscape, and sociopolitical power. His interests include the visual and material culture of Classic Maya rulership, the dynamics of identity and memory in ancient Maya polities, and the application of advanced digital methods (particularly 3D scanning and photogrammetry) to archaeological documentation and analysis. Fieldwork and epigraphic projects have taken Dr. Tokovinine to important Classic Maya sites such as Holmul and Naranjo in Guatemala, Copán in Honduras, and Yaxchilán and Dzibanché in Mexico.