Across the Horn and Into the Rift: A Two-Hour Journey Through Ethiopia’s Natural and Cultural Histories with Matt Curtis

Ethiopia possesses one of the world’s oldest archaeological records dating back more than two and a half million years, extraordinary cultural diversity, and some of the most dramatic and varied landscapes in Africa. It is a land of towering mountain peaks and vast highland plains, deep rift valley gorges and expansive lakes, dense tropical forests and arid lowlands, small rural villages and large and rapidly expanding urban centers.

In this presentation, Matt Curtis, a lecturer in anthropology at California State University, Channel Islands, and College of the Canyons, will provide an overview of Ethiopia’s natural and human legacy with a focus on the archaeology and environmental histories of the last 10,000 years and insights from his three decades of research and travel in this diverse nation in the heart of the Horn of Africa.

Curtis is a broadly trained anthropological archaeologist specializing in the Holocene archaeology of Eastern Africa. He holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Florida and is a former National Science Foundation grant awardee, a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellow, a Fulbright grantee, and is the founder and director of Eastern African Archaeology Online, a website devoted to cultural heritage advocacy, news, and information concerning archaeology in Africa.

Curtis has carried out archaeological research in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya and the United States and currently leads a regional archaeological survey project in northern Ethiopia for the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at University of California, Los Angeles.

The Fifty and Better program (FAB) was designed to offer university-level courses (no tests, no homework) taught by experts in the field, and to host social engagement activities for individuals 50 years of age and older in our community. When COVID-19 erupted and the first-ever offering of in-person courses had to be postponed indefinitely, we responded by moving the courses to a virtual (online) environment using Zoom.

Cost for the two-hour lecture is $8.

Register

Register by 5 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 9.