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September 2020
Karen R. Adams – “Food for Thought: The Deep History of Your Dinner”
Any five-year old will tell you where our food comes from...the grocery store! But behind that simple truth is an extremely long history of human efforts to modify wild plants to make them more manageable, better tasting, and eventually highly productive. Human efforts at plant domestication began over 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent and elsewhere. People on most of the world's continents domesticated a wide range of above-ground and below-ground plant parts, ranging from the stalk a leaf…
Find out more »October 2020
Kelsey Hanson – “Technologies of Capturing Color: Paint Practice and its Analysis in the U.S. Southwest”
The American Southwest is brilliantly colored. However, naturally occurring colors are not easily imparted into the material world. The ability to capture color from the natural world through paint requires deep cultural knowledge of geologic sources, processing requirements, and application techniques that remain severely understudied. In this lecture, I will contextualize paint practice as a technology. The production of paint is a sequence of combining colorants and binders—the recipes for which are remarkably diverse. Few have ventured to investigate…
Find out more »November 2020
Jeffrey H. Altschul – “Using the Past as a Bridge to the Future”
There is a rising call for science to confront head-on problems facing society. Discussing the COVID-19 pandemic, Marcia McNutt (2020), President of the National Academy of Sciences, stated simply “Society is depending on science to deliver us from this health, social, and economic crisis.” She went on to argue that science needs to be actionable—provide results to policy makers in a timely and understandable manner—and strategic—focused not just on the immediate crisis but the long term. Many sciences have answered…
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