I'm Jeffrey Quilter, director of the Peabody Museum.

And welcome, tonight, to The Origins of Maya Civilization,

New Insights into Ceibal.

It is the Gordon R. Willey Lecture.

It's one of our two most prestigious lectures

of the year.

And it's presented this year by the Peabody Museum

of Archaeology and Ethnology, as well as the Museum of Science,

with its new exhibit on the Maya.

I'd also like to note, thanks to the Harvard Museums of Science

and Culture, with whom we partnered,

and who enables our public programs.

You can pick up a flyer on the Harvard Museums of Science

and Culture events, which include Peabody events, as well

as events at the Museum of Natural History at the table.

There should be a table over there.

Tonight, anthropologist Daniela Triadan

of the University of Arizona, as well as Takeshi Inomata,

will discuss their joint work at the sight of Ceibal,

a Maya site in Guatemala, and what this work is revealing

about Maya culture and society.

At the table, you can also sign up, by the way,

to join our mailing list and receive

regular updates about our lectures and other events.

We also have information about how

you can become a member of the Harvard

Museums of Science and Culture.

It gets you admission to all of our museums.

It also helps support our museum mission

to bring you public educational programs like this one.

Also, after the talk, there will be a reception in the Peabody

Museum on the third floor.

Please join us there.

I'd also like to invite you to join our museum's upcoming

events.

On March 12 at 6:00 PM, Stanley Ambrose,

Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois

Urbana-Champaign, will deliver the annual Hallam L. Movius

lecture, the second of our two prestigious talks.

Dr. Ambrose's talk will focus on human evolution,

and in particular, on the behaviors that

contributed to competitive advantage of modern humans

and the demise of the Neanderthals.

On Thursday, March 26, at 6:00 PM, Don LaRocca,

Curator of Arms and Armor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,

and consultant to our exhibit The Arts Of War,

also on the third floor, will review how and why

armored weapons have been acquired, studied,

and preserved since the 16th century

by both private collectors and by museums.

And on Tuesday, March 31, Peabody curators Diana Loren

and Patricia Capone will discuss the findings of the Harvard

Yard Archaeology Project, an initiative that

seeks deeper knowledge of 17th century Harvard College

and the lives of its Native American and English students.

I'm now delighted to introduce William Fash, Charles P.

Bowditch Professor of Central American and Mexican

Archaeology, former Director of the Peabody Museum,

who will introduce our speakers tonight and tell you more

about them.

Thanks very much.

[APPLAUSE]

Good evening, all, and welcome.

Thanks for coming out on a less than ideal might.

Ceibal in the tropics this is not.

But we are happy to see you all, and I

know that we can count on some terrific questions

after the presentation.

So this evening's lecture, as Jeffrey mentioned,

will be given by Professor Daniela Triadan

of the University of Arizona, who

is also a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution.

The Gordon Willey Lecture is made

possible by the generous gift of his former student,

Richard Leventhal, now at the University

of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology,

who wanted to do honor to Gordon by sponsoring

an annual public lecture, as well as a seminar

presentation to members and students

of the Department of Anthropology.

So tonight, our good friend Daniela-- Dani to one and all--

will present the findings that she and her partner,

in life and in work, Takeshi Inomata,

also a professor at Arizona and Director

of Graduate Studies at the School of Anthropology there,

have been making through their research

at the archaeological site of Ceibal in Guatemala.

Takeshi, by the way, presented the seminar talk to us

earlier this afternoon.

So Takeshi and Dani are seated right here in the front.

And Takeshi has agreed to also help answer questions

after the presentation.

Dani received her PhD from the Free University of Berlin

in 1995, and her research interests

focus on the study of the sociopolitical development

of small sedentary societies and more hierarchical ones, as well

as prehistoric economic systems, with a specialization

in ceramic technology, provenance

studies, and the integration of material analyses

into archaeological research.

She's conducted extensive field and laboratory

research in the American Southwest,

as well as Mesoamerica.

In the Southwest, she works on two large scale

studies of late prehistoric polychrome ceramic production

and distribution, one centered on White Mountain redware

from East Central Arizona, and the implications

of that for transformations of the Pueblos

in the 14th century, and the other on Chihuahua polychrome

from the Casas Grandes region in Chihuahua, Mexico.

She was delighted to see the Casas Grandes

collections in the storage areas of the Peabody.

Her research in the Maya area includes

work in Belize and Guatemala, where

she co-directed the Aguateca Archaeological

Project with Professor Inomata.

The investigations at Aguateca have

been one of the most innovative and informative research

projects in lowland Maya archaeology for the past two

decades.

The many articles, book chapters,

and the technical monographs from that project

have addressed many significant research questions

of broad anthropological interest,

with a level of accuracy and attention to detail

that make them models for our field.

Dani has a well deserved reputation

for meticulous excavations and recording standards learned

and earned at the University of Arizona's Grasshopper Fiend

School, where I understand she was the TF for our very

own Bill Saturno, that bring great credibility

to the research and its presentation in published form.

She's the series coeditor with Takeshi

of the Monograph series, volume three of which

came out last year, entitled Life and Politics at the Royal

Court of Aguateca.

And the important 2010 volume, also,

Burned Palaces and Elite Residences of Aguateca.

Professor Triadan's research there

is geared toward examining social, political,

and economic organization, and its

changed through the analysis of domestic assemblages.

Excavations of elite residential structures

at the epicenter this rapidly abandoned

city-- amazing place-- have revealed

the richest in situ floor assemblages

found to date at a classic Maya site,

providing a unique opportunity for reconstructing

classic Maya household organization.

Presently, as co-director, with Takeshi,

of the ongoing Ceibal project, she works and directs

an international team investigating

the processes of the foundation of that important site,

and its political disintegration during the Terminal Classic.

It's providing new information on the foundation

of Maya civilization, the subject of tonight's talk,

as well as the so-called collapse or reorganization

at the end.

She's the author of numerous important publications

on the Maya and the southwest in the major peer reviewed

journals of our profession, a marvelous teacher and mentor,

and a very personable and popular colleague

in both Mesoamerica and the southwest,

sought after at meetings and any gathering of friends.

The list of her accomplishments goes on and on,

but let's cut to the chase.

Please join me in welcoming Professor Daniela Triadan.

[APPLAUSE]

Thank you so much, Bill.

I hope I can actually live up to the reputation

that you kind of laid out there for me.

It sounds like a person that I don't know, somehow or other.

But thank you so much, Bill, for your very kind words

and, really, major exaggerations in those accolades,

I have to say.

And thank you for coming out and braving the weather.

I have to say that maybe for the one time in my life,

I'm actually glad for my pack rat tendencies.

I was actually able to find winter clothes somewhere hidden

away before we came here.

We live in Arizona, as you've heard.

Let's just say today, it was 82 degrees.

I'm glad.

I'm glad I found my winter coat that

was still somewhere left over from our New Haven days early

on.

So we were actually fairly well equipped to get here and talk

to you tonight.

You can also see that we have slightly changed the title.

We have made it longer.

This is kind of a tendency, I guess, of professors.

But the point was we really wanted

to do honor to Gordon Willey, not just because it's

the Gordon Willey Lecture, but as Bill mentioned,

Gordon Willey was, of course, the uber archaeologist

when it comes to Maya archaeology.

And he and Harvard University had a long term project

at Ceibal in the 1960s.

So they've done very important work at Ceibal,

and our work there is really building

on what Harvard and Gordon Willey has done in Ceibal.

When we decided to go there, we could thankfully really

look at Harvard's research results,

and we didn't have to basically reinvent the wheel.

It was amazingly helpful to us.

So we came out with a good idea, and we

could develop a very specific research design

when we came in to work, again, at Ceibal,

after about 40 years when Harvard had been there.

And in this photo, just to cue you in,

we have Gordon Willey in the center right

here, Ledyard Smith.

I was informed, Dick Adams in the back.

And we have a very handsome and young Jerry

Sabloff on the left side of Gordon Willey, I have to say.

So some of the main protagonists of the Ceibal project.

So today, I'm going to talk about new ideas

that we're developing about origins of Maya civilization

based on our research in Ceibal.

The origins of Maya civilization,

as you probably know, and how the Maya became

what we call the Maya, is really one

of the big research questions of Mesoamerican archaeologists,

right?

I mean, this is one of the big things,

and people have been thinking about this

and researching this question for a long time.

So we're not the first ones, obviously.

And as I said, Harvard did a lot of work.

But we, building on Harvard, have come up

with some very interesting new data

that we would like to share with you today.

So just to orient you, Ceibal is in the southwestern part

of the Maya lowlands.

And the Harvard Project had shown

that it was one of the sites with the earliest occupations

for the Maya lowlands.

So that was one of the really important results that came out

of the Harvard project.

So we already knew that there were

early occupations at Ceibal.

Just to orient you timewise, when

we talk about origins of lowland Mayan civilization, most of you

are probably familiar with the classic period of the Maya.

This is where we have the big stelae.

We have kings.

We have nice buildings.

This is a stelae from Ceibal and a building from Ceibal

from the Classic period.