exploringtheantelopevalley

Digging into history
Archaeology student to talk about burial moundThis story appeared in the Antelope Valley PressFriday, December 28, 2007.
By BONNIE D. STONE Special to the Valley Press
LANCASTER - For Lyssa C. Stapleton, a graduate student at University of California, Los Angeles' Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, working on summer digs in Albania to which few Westerners have been privy allowed her to study firsthand the burial rituals of a prehistoric society.
Stapleton will speak on "Death and the Maiden: Age and Gender in an Iron Age Burial Mound" for the Antelope Valley branch of the American Association of University Women's meeting, at 10:30 a.m. Saturday, Jan. 12, in Antelope Valley College's Board Room (SSV 151), 3041 West Avenue K. The meeting is open to the public and refreshments will be served.
For details, call (661) 947-2947 or (661) 942-7533.
"My talk will focus on the special treatment of infants, children and young women," Stapleton said. "Many reconstructions of social organization through mortuary analysis present the primacy of the male role in prehistoric society. But at this site the richest burials are that of juvenile females, children and infants. These findings raise several interesting questions about the population who interred their dead there and the wider society in which they lived."
Between 2004 and 2007, the UCLA team excavated the early Iron Age site, Lofkënd tumulus (burial mound), belonging to the Illyrians, in central Albania. The project is a joint endeavor of the Institute of Archaeology in Tirana, Albania and the UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.
The Lofkënd burial mound is in the archaeologically rich Mallakastra region of Central Albania and was apparently in use between 1100 and 600 B.C. It is one of several burial mounds in the area.
"Our excavation seasons were six weeks long and we worked six days a week," said Stapleton, who grew up in the Antelope Valley and graduated from Quartz Hill High School.
"It is very hot and humid in Albania, which is right on the Adriatic. The temperature during the day often got up to 105 degrees, with 100% humidity. We lived in a dig-house located several kilometers from the site. I went back to graduate school to pursue what I had always wanted to do, to study mortuary ritual and material culture, that is to say, how grave goods convey the ritual behavior of a society and what those goods can tell us about the structure of that society.
"I was always particularly interested in Central Europe, so when I found that UCLA had started a project in Albania, I decided that was close enough. In fact, my experience at Lofkënd has made me change my focus slightly; I am now interested in studying the prehistoric Illyrian cultures of modern-day Albania, Croatia and Montenegro."