Named Lecture Series

Hallam L. Movius, Jr. Lecture Series Lecture by Jean-Jacques Hublin, Professor at the Collège de France (Paris), Emeritus Professor at the Max Planck Society The arrival of Homo sapiens in the mid-latitudes of Eurasia 48,000 to 45,000 years ago and the...

2025 Tatiana Proskouriakoff Lecture When the looting and illicit trade of cultural artifacts surged In the 1960s, one voice rose in defense of archaeological sites in the Americas—Clemency Coggins. A pioneering art historian and legendary figure in Maya...

Humans are the only animal species that bury their dead, and this practice is preserved in Paleolithic sites as early as 120,000 years ago. The emergence of burial traditions in this time period implies that both Neanderthals and early humans had already...

In the first century CE, Teotihuacan became the capital of the area known today as Central Mexico. The city grew to include 100,000 people, drawing immigrants from Western Mexico, the Valley of Oaxaca, Veracruz, and the Maya region. Deborah Nichols will...

In the 1960s, Gordon Willey and a team of Harvard archaeologists led the investigation of Ceibal, a Maya site in Guatemala. Their research revealed that Ceibal was a very early settlement, one that predated the cities constructed in the heyday of Maya...

A rigged election and a political crisis among competing elites, middle classes, and rural workers: What could go wrong? The Mexican Revolution of 1910 began as a multilocal revolt against the 35-year regime of dictator Porfirio Díaz and evolved into a...

Ancient Maya civilization—known for its cities, monumental architecture, ceramics, hieroglyphic writing, and advanced understanding of mathematics and astronomy—suffered a major demise between the tenth and eleventh centuries. The causes continue to be...