As part of the 4th Eurasian Archaeology conference, held October 11-13 at Cornell, the LOL hosted a welcoming reception for guests from across North America and around the world, including visiting scholars from Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, England, Georgia, Germany, and Mongolia.  You can find the full program at: http://eac.arts.cornell.edu/

This week, the LOL hosted “artifacts” from the Civilization of Llhuros as part of Adam Smith’s course “The Rise and Fall of ‘Civilization'”.  Students were confronted with truly unfamiliar objects and asked to provide basic descriptive information and preliminary interpretive suggestions.  For more information on the Civilization of Llhuros, see: http://civilizationofllhuros.org/.

As part of Adam Smith’s course “The Rise and Fall of ‘Civilization'”, students are examining the historical and archaeological assumptions embedded within the algorithms of one of the most popular video games of the last decade: “Civilization”.  Over the course of 3 game sessions, students will examine the elements of what makes a Civilization, according to contemporary game designers, and compare this to archaeological studies of ancient civilizations from around the world.

Ezra Magazine has published a profile of Lori Khatchadourian and the LOLaboratory in their summer 2012 issue.

The new Landscapes and Objects Laboratory in McGraw Hall, built for Near Eastern studies assistant professor Lori Khatchadourian and anthropology professor Adam T. Smith, is serving as a hub for archaeological conversation across the university. The lab builds on Cornell’s strengths in archaeology and offers a new resource for the interdisciplinary work of archaeology, which bridges the social, humanistic and natural sciences.

Read the full text here.