The upcoming B.R.A.G guest speaker this coming Wednesday at 6pm is Dr. Nicola Sharrat from Georgia State University. Her talk is based on her work at the highland Andean site of Tiwanaku, Peru.

For 500 years the Tiwanaku, one of the earliest states in South America, held cultural, economic, and political influence over large areas of what is now Peru and Bolivia. But around AD 1000, the Tiwanaku state began a process of political collapse and violent turmoil during which cities were abandoned, elite authority was rejected, and symbols of the state were destroyed.

This talk describes recent archaeological work in southern Peru that explores how people were affected by and responded to this massive socio-political upheaval. Drawing on evidence from burials, houses and ceremonial structures, it examines how members of post-collapse communities maintained many elements of daily and ritual practice but also modified earlier customs as they responded to the turbulence of violent political breakdown.

Dr. Nicola Sharratt trained as an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Before joining the faculty at Georgia State University in 2014, she held positions at the Field Museum in Chicago and the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. She has worked on excavations in South America for the past 15 years and directs an ongoing archaeological project in Peru that explores the aftermath of Tiwanaku state collapse.

The Archaeology Guild meetings are free and the public is welcome to attend.  They begin at 6:00 pm in the Dahlonega Parks and Recreation Building.

Posted online on Monday, August 6th, 2018