Lecture Series

LECTURE SERIES 2010-11

December 4, 2010
Dr. Kent Lightfoot, Professor of Archaeology, University of California, Berkeley
“California Colonial History: New Perspectives from Archaeological Research”

Biography:
Dr. Kent Lightfoot is a professor of Archaeology at the University of California, Berkeley. He grew up in Santa Rosa, CA and received his BA from Stanford University.

Dr. Lightfoot’s general research interests include North American prehistory, coastal hunter-gatherer societies, the emergence of early village communities, and culture contact between Native peoples and European explorers and colonists. His current work focuses on how indigenous peoples responded to European contact and colonialism, and how the outcomes of these encounters influenced cultural developments in postcolonial contexts. This work involves the study of long-term culture change and persistence among coastal Native peoples that transcends prehistoric and historic boundaries. He employ multiple lines of evidence drawn from archaeological materials, ethnohistorical accounts, ethnographic observations and Native oral traditions to consider the implications of early contacts with European explorers and later interactions in multi-ethnic colonial communities. He is currently experimenting with an approach that incorporates a long-term diachronic perspective for comparing and contrasting the spatial organization of daily practices and cultural landscapes of coastal hunter-gatherer groups before, during, and after culture contact episodes.

The summer of 1998 marked the beginning of archaeological investigations at the Metini Village site, one of the principal villages inhabited by the Kashaya Pomo in the early and mid 1800's (possibly earlier as well), located in the heart of the multi-ethnic colonial community of Fort Ross. It offers an exceptional opportunity to examine Kashaya Pomo interactions and encounters with the Russian, Creole, and Native Alaskan workers at Fort Ross during the period of 1812 to 1841. The Metini Archaeological Project is supported by the National Science Foundation, the California Department of Parks and Recreation, and UC Berkeley.

Dr. Lightfoot is also working with several faculty and graduate students in comparing the Russian colonial experience with contemporaneous Spanish and Mexican encounters with Native peoples in the greater San Francisco Bay area. Fieldwork in the summer of 1998 involved excavations at the Petaluma Adobe State Historic Park and the Presidio of San Francisco (Golden Gate National Parks).

Recent Publications:
Book: 2005. Archaeology of Colonial Encounters: Comparative Perspectives (School of American Research Advanced Seminar). Kent Lightfoot, et.al.

Writings: 1997. The Archaeology and Ethnohistory of Fort Ross, California (edited with Thomas Wake and Ann Schiff). Volume 2, The Native Alaskan Neighborhood: A Multiethnic Community at Colony Ross. Contributions of the University of California Archaeological Research Facility No. 55.

1991. The Archaeology and Ethnohistory of Fort Ross, California (edited with Thomas Wake and Ann Schiff). Volume 1. Introduction. Contributions of the University of California Archaeological Research Facility No. 49.

1989. The Sociopolitical Structure of Prehistoric Southwestern Societies (edited with Upham, Steadman, and Roberta Jewett). Boulder: Westview Press.

LECTURE SERIES #2

March 19, 2011
Professor Andrés Reséndez, University of California, Davis
“The Journey of Cabeza de Vaca and the Problem of First Encounters”

Biography:
Andrés Reséndez is a professor of History at the University of California, Davis. He received his BA in International Relations at El Colegio de México in Mexico City and his MA and PhD in History at the University of Chicago. His main academic interests revolve around how people construct their ethnic and national identities in North America. His first book, Changing National Identities at the Frontier (Cambridge University Press, 2005), explores how Spanish-speakers, Native Americans, and Anglo-American settlers living in Texas and New Mexico came to think of themselves as members of one ethnic/national community or another. His most recent book, A Land So Strange (Basic Books, 2007), looks at North America at the dawn of European colonization and through the eyes of the last four survivors of a disastrous expedition to Florida in the 1520s.

LECTURE SERIES #3

May 14, 2011
Professor Virginia Scharff, University of New Mexico
“Going Public with Western Women’s History

Biography:
Virginia Scharff, Professor of History at the University of New Mexico, and serves as the director of the Center for the Southwest, which sponsors programs and events to promote understanding of Southwestern history, culture, landscape, and environment. Professor Scharff offers courses including the history of women in the United States and the American West, environmental history, social theory, and writing as a historian.

She was a Beinecke Research Fellow at Yale University, holds the Women of the West Chair at the Autry National Center in Los Angeles, is a Fellow of the Society of American Historians, and is the former president of the Western History Association. Her scholarly publications include Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (1991); Twenty Thousand Roads: Women, Movement, and the West (2003); two textbooks, Present Tense: The United States Since 1945 (1996); and Coming of Age: America in the Twentieth Century (1998). Her most recent publication is The Women Jefferson Loved.