The Kolb Junior Fellows Spring Colloquium, featuring talks by Autumn Melby (ANTH) and Bryce Heatherly (EALC), took place on Friday, April 11, 2025, from 3:00 to 5:00 pm in Widener Lecture Hall, Penn Museum.
Senior Fellow Tom Tartaron, Associate Professor of Classical Studies Executive Director of the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials, Penn Museum introduced the colloquium and the individual speakers.
Autumn Melby (ANTH)
Collapse in Cahokia’s Countryside: Everyday Rural Life and Negotiations of Societal Change in 14th-century Illinois
While scholars have most often interpreted collapse through the lens of urban life and the decentralization of elite networks, studies of rurality emphasize the diverse roles and social experiences of rural peoples who are separated by both physical and social distance from more urban centers. In this presentation, I consider the collapse of centralized sociopolitical systems through a rural lens; specifically examining how broader societal transformations were experienced and uniquely negotiated in the everyday lives of diverse rural household groups in the Greater Cahokian countryside of 14th century southwestern Illinois. I reflect on the journey so far, discussing preliminary findings from new geophysical survey and residential excavations the Hawkins Hollow (11MO855) site, on-going analyses of collector-donated legacy collections from the Schaefer site (11MO100), as well as outcomes and future directions of public education programming with local Scouting youth groups. By treating rural settlements as social centers in their own rights, with distinctive people, memories, and traditions, I strive towards a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of societal collapse that allows for multiple trajectories of change, persistence, and presence.
Bryce Heatherly (EALC)
Patterns of Time: Pagodas and Relic Deposits in the Lower Yangzi, ca. 900–1100
In this talk, I will examine the close connections between relic pagodas and concepts of time during the tenth and eleventh centuries. My focus will be on the Lower Yangzi region surrounding the city Hangzhou, in southeastern China. Throughout this period, Lower Yangzi pagodas were at the center of widespread changes in social life and building practices, as monks and laypeople began to collaborate closely on the construction of pagodas and deposited large collections of offerings inside them. Since the mid-twentieth century, excavations of more than twenty pagodas have uncovered thousands of these offerings—statues, books, mirrors, and jewelry—hundreds of which bear inscriptions. Many of these inscriptions engagingly record the concerns of those involved in the building of pagodas and relic deposits, revealing otherwise unattested concepts of time.
In examining these inscriptions, the objects on which they are inscribed, and the architecture of relic pagodas, I argue that relic pagodas became sites where the monks and laypeople of the Lower Yangzi region theorized two distinct “patterns of time”—dynastic and karmic. On one hand, pagodas were understood as sites with histories that overlapped with Chinese dynasties. In this time frame, the building or repair of a pagoda constituted a historical event to be placed in a narrative of dynastic transition. On the other hand, pagodas were also taken as nodes within a Buddhist system of cause and effect, or karma. In this time frame, people regarded a pagoda not as a dynastic event, but as a point of karmic connection that extended into past and future lives. To acknowledge that these two frames intersected at pagodas, I show, allows us to reconsider these buildings as the temporally dynamic entities that they are known to have been socially.
After the talks Senior Fellow Tom Tartaron introduced the newly elected Kolb Junior Fellows for 2025 Grant Bruner (AAMW), Alessandra Dominguez (AAMW), and Julieta Vittore Dutto (CLST).
