Archaeological Research Facility - Berkeley

10/12/2026

Join us tomorrow for our special ARF Fall Panel!
Archaeological Knowledge Under Threat
Tues Oct 13, 4:30 - 6:30 p.m.
Archaeological Research Facility, 2251 College, UC Berkeley
This talk will take place in person at the ARF and on Zoom.
Doors will open at 4:30 PM for light refreshments. The program will start at 5:00 PM.
Speakers:
Morag M. Kersel (DePaul University)
Eric C. Kansa (Open Context )
James C. Wright (Bryn Mawr College)

Abstract: Knowledge of how people interacted with each other and the environment in the past can inform our understanding of the future and help us address current challenges facing human populations, such as migrations, resource depletion, and climate change. Knowledge generation in archaeology relies on vast amounts of information collected through excavation, survey, laboratory analysis, community engagement, and archival research to name a few. Destruction of information sources, thus, has far-reaching impacts on our understanding of the past, present, and future.
This event will explore contemporary threats to archaeological knowledge production and knowledge curation. Some threats, such as looting and climate change-driven disruptions, can have obvious destructive impacts. Looting of sites causes widespread physical damage and loss of context for the stolen objects. Climate change, whether erosion, sea level rise, fires, or displacement of populations, also causes physical damage to archaeological remains. Other threats to our understanding of the past can be much more abstract and less visible. These include regulatory changes, financial disruptions, professional incentive systems, and even the algorithmic processes behind generative AI. Even if sites are spared from physically destructive impacts, the information they contain may still be at threat even after careful excavation.
Three speakers will reflect on these dramatic shifts in the physical and intellectual landscape of archaeological knowledge production and discuss approaches to mitigating the loss of information in archaeological research.

10/12/2026

ARF Lunch Talk
Wed Oct 14, 2026 @ 12:10 PM
On the Margins? Neolithic Expansion in the Black Desert, Jordan
Speaker: Yorke Rowan, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC), University of Chicago
Sponsor: Archaeological Research Facility
Location: This talk will take place in person at the ARF and on Zoom.
About: At first glance, the Black Desert of eastern Jordan might appear to be a landscape that only archaeologists, film crews, and Bedouin crews could love, but recent research demonstrates that prehistoric people occupied the region in far greater concentrations than previously thought. Aerial archaeology, including satellite imagery, piloted flyovers, and unpiloted aircraft (drones) dramatically changed our perspective on how many people lived and worked in the region. In this lecture we explore these new perspectives by critically examining the evidence for the built environment on the landscape, including the buildings, wheels, and the animal traps known as desert kites. Coupled with data from excavation, our analyses suggest that the Black Desert Neolithic was exploited intensively by people who hunted gazelle using the thousands of desert kites as well as tended flocks of domesticated sheep. Rather than a marginal zone with only temporary and ephemeral human visits, the past decade of field investigations demonstrates how prehistoric people moved through and occupied the region, with connections to Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Arabia.

10/05/2026

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
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09/29/2026

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

09/26/2026

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.

09/23/2026

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.

09/22/2026

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.

09/21/2026

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.

09/18/2026

ARF researchers contribute to research on scrolls

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.

09/16/2026

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.