Incoming Students

Willeke Wendrich1

sAiful BAKhri

sAiful BAKhri is an incoming PhD student in the UCLA/Getty Conservation Program. He seeks to address the importance and production of conventional materials for conservation treatment to meet the environmental, social, and cultural needs of non-Western communities and how other, more appropriate materials and methods can be incorporated into Western practice. Saiful previously worked as a conservator at the Bali Cultural Heritage Preservation Office in Indonesia. Having completed his master’s degree in cultural materials conservation at the University of Melbourne, Australia, he has expertise in place-based conservation and disaster management for heritage sites and museums.

Alex CAsteel was born in southern Indiana and has long been exploring new ways to think about the past and the present. After his first field school in 2013 in Huari-Ancash, Peru, he volunteered at nearby Chavín de Huántar and subsequently accepted a commercial archaeology position in Colombia. Although his archaeological career started in precolonial South America, his interest shifted to the Viking and early medieval period in Iceland. Alex attended Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. In working toward his BA in archaeology, he combined written texts with material culture. In 2020 he earned an MA/MPhil in Viking and medieval Norse studies from the University of Iceland and the University of Oslo. In his thesis, he used an Old Norse kenning (figure of speech) to explore how the self might have been conceived of at the time of writing and how differences might bear ontological weight. During his time at the Cotsen Institute, Alex hopes to make use of his language skills, his knowledge of archaeological methods, and his obsession with archaeological theory to engage critically with the built landscape in Mosfellsdalur, Iceland, the research focus of the Mosfell Archaeological Project. He is motivated by a desire to bring human pasts into dialogue with affirmative presents and futures and to disrupt unfounded projections of similarity derived from the twenty-first century. He wonders what ancient buildings can convey in modern times. Such material lenses into worlds as dynamic and full of life as the present might well shed light on the subjective and singular experiences of individuals in the past. Alex CAsteel

R e P o R t s f R om the C h A i R s

GABriel silVA Collins

GABriel silVA Collins has spent the majority of his life in New York City, but he was born in Michigan and also lived in Brazil. In 2019 he earned a BA in anthropology from Williams College. His first archaeological fieldwork focused on the Peruvian coast, where he helped excavate the Ichma site of Panquilma with Enrique López Hurtado. This experience initiated his long-standing interest in pre-Hispanic archaeology of the Americas. Gabriel expanded upon this as an undergraduate student while working with Antonia Foias studying Aztec religious statues and their forms of gender representation. He returned to the Andes for an undergraduate thesis, in which he surveyed and examined a series of roads and accompanying structures between the former Inca capital of Cusco and the imperial palace of Huchuy Qosqo. This project enhanced his interest in using archaeology to examine intercommunity relations between different pre-Hispanic peoples across differences in political control and environmental space. It also resulted in an awareness of interactions between human constructions and nonhuman environments, an area he studied with Megan English through ethnographic and biological research on contemporary Cambodian human–elephant conflict. Gabriel hopes to pull these interests together at UCLA by examining non-elite pre-Hispanic interactions across the simultaneously political and environmental borderlands of the Inca Empire. He is excited to work with Stella Nair and Jason de León to study the archaeology of space and place, and how human communities shaped and were shaped by those factors, along the Inca frontier, in ways that continue to influence the Andes today.

eArl John Cedo hernAndez is an anthropological archaeologist from Bikol, the Philippines. He received his BA in political science from Ateneo de Naga University in 2015 and an MA in anthropology from the University of the Philippines–Diliman in 2022. As a Bikolano anthropologist, he is interested in the anthropology of religion, the archaeology of Spanish colonialism, and engaged museum programs. As a curator of the Museo de Isarog at Partido State University, Earl advocates for co-creation and co-curation programs, working with colleagues, scholars, students, and the community. Since 2018 he has been working with the Bicol Archaeological Project, an interdisciplinary archaeological and heritage program aiming to understand Indigenous and local responses to Spanish colonialism during the early modern period. At the Cotsen Institute, he is interested in using remote sensing to understand human–environmental interactions during the Spanish colonization of Bikol and other regions. eArl John Cedo hernAndez

AriAdin Jones

AriAdin Jones started her research trajectory as an undergraduate student at the University of British Columbia, where did a major in Asian area studies and a minor in archaeology, with a focus on bioarchaeology. Looking to combine these interests, she attended the UCLA Yangguanzhai field school in 2018, excavating a Neolithic village from the Middle to the Late Yangshao period (4000–3000 BCE). This introduced her to Chinese archaeology and kindled her interest in understanding the creation of urban centers during the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age periods. Between 2017 and 2019 she also worked alongside the curators of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, helping design and execute events showcasing Indigenous performance artists and lecturers. In 2020 Ariadin graduated with an MPhil in applied biological anthropology from the University of Cambridge. Her thesis explored how paleoparasitology can inform on subsistence patterns and hygienic practices and how urban planning is reflected in pathologies manifested in the archaeological record. At UCLA, Ariadin will pursue an interdisciplinary project that consolidates her temporal and geographic areas of interest, focusing on intersections of ritual and quotidian life and how these relate to the intraregional flow of people. With funding from the Huayu Enrichment Scholarship, Ariadin took courses in the Chinese Language Department of National Taiwan University to prepare for this next phase of her academic career.

ChonGwen liu received his BA in chemistry with a second degree in conservation of cultural relics at Peking University in 2021. During his undergraduate studies, he engaged in both the practical and academic sides of conservation. He completed a summer internship at the Research Centre for Cultural Heritage Protection at the Chinese Academy of Social Science, where he participated in the conservation treatment of iron Han Dynasty agricultural tools from the Tongzhou District, Beijing. His thesis focused on a batch of lacquerware excavated from Dongshan West Han Dynasty tombs in Taiyuan, with a highlight on the distinctive deterioration mechanisms of lacquer films. Chongwen obtained an MSc in archaeological science at University College London. His graduate research there focused on Byzantine glass mosaic tesserae and shed light on the glass technology of a critical transition period in the Mediterranean world. During his UCLA journey, Chongwen hopes to dig into the deterioration mechanisms and weathering properties of both photo- and taphonomic-degraded lacquerware. He is interested in developing specific guidance for the conservation and restoration of lacquerware with regard to its distinctive characteristics. He is excited about having opportunities to develop improved analytical methods for conservation based on instrumental chemistry.

R e P o R t s f R om the C h A i R s

ChonGwen liu

luis rodriGuez-perez

luis rodriGuez-perez was born in Cuba and moved to Miami at a young age. He earned a BA in archaeology and history, with a minor in classics, at the University of Southern California. He has participated in several excavation and survey projects in Italy and Greece, including at Pompeii, Vergina, and the Cyclades. He has also done ethnographic investigations on the Colombian islands of Old Providence and Ketlina, where he served as a field supervisor for the 2022 field season. As an undergraduate student he used three-dimensional modeling techniques to reconstruct and subsequently reaccess artifacts in their original find spots (in virtual reality contexts) in Tomb II in Vergina, Greece, and Tomb KV62 in the Valley of the Kings, Egypt. While working at the Archaeology Laboratory at the University of Southern California, he also participated in the Pimu/Santa Catalina Archaeological Project, which photogrammetrically captured and digitally reconstructed the historic hunting lodge on the island during two distinct time periods in a virtual reality museum space. At UCLA Luis hopes to continue to apply visual technologies to different archaeological approaches in Mediterranean archaeology and beyond.

ziChAo wAnG received his BA in culture and arts management at Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, followed by an MA in comparative and public history at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and another MA in East Asian studies at McGill University. His research covers the history and civilization of early China, especially political and cultural transformations in the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age. In the past eight years, he has expanded his academic interests and knowledge in various subjects and disciplines, which resulted in his BA thesis on the preservation of intangible cultural heritage and his MA thesis on law and geography in China during the Warring States period. His academic interests also include historical geography, early Chinese epigraphy, Confucian classics, Chinese intellectual history, ancient Chinese architecture, Chinese ritual history, and cultural theories. Although Zichao has no formal training as an archaeologist, he has been fascinated by the discipline for a long time. He believes it is essential to rescue history from being forgotten. At UCLA he intends to combine written records with archaeological information available in his fields of interest. ziChAo wAnG