UC Berkeley graduate students kick off the academic year at our annual Reports from the Field event, reporting on their summer research and excavation experiences at various sites across the globe. Alec Apodaca will be discussing a Native American archaeological site in the San Vicente Redwoods that was damaged during post-fire work related to the CZU Lightning Fire complex of 2020. The damage exposed previously unknown portions of this ancient habitation site that can be studied to learn about how Native people stewarded sources of food, raw material, and habitats in the interior areas, which can be compared to coastal areas and is directly relevant to ongoing historical ecology project between Amah Mutsun Tribal Band and UC Berkeley researchers. Jordan Brown will discuss The Erbil Plain in northern Iraq, which lies at the edge of the rainfall farming zone. Here, five millennia of intensive settlement have seen diverse approaches to water management. Some of these strategies appear to have affected the hydrology of the Plain in lasting ways, mitigating or exacerbating the impact of climatic shifts and constraining the options available to subsequent inhabitants. By utilizing remote-sensing tools and computer-aided analytical techniques, which facilitate the collection and systematization of such data and form the building blocks of a “telescoping” approach to regional geoarchaeology, Jordan will discuss the large-scale and long-term interactions between social and natural forces. David Wheeler will share his experience doing fieldwork and museum research in Greece for the last 18 months in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic. During that time, he excavated a palatial tholos at Pylos during Greece’s first national lockdown, helped supervise rescue excavations at the Mycenaean cemetery of Aidonia, and initiated several 3D scanning projects for Berkeley’s Nemea Center for research, outreach, and classroom use in the post-Covid era.