The Center for Global Antiquity proudly presents a workshop by Professor Xin Wen (Princeton University), A Palimpsest of Empires: Living with the Deep Time in China’s Ancient Capital

The city of Chang’an (modern Xi’an in China’s Shaanxi Province) area served as the capital of the most important imperial dynasties in early and medieval China, including the Western Zhou (1046–771 BCE), the Qin (221–207 BCE), the Western Han (202 BCE–9 CE), the Sui (581–619), and the Tang (618–907). This paper, which is conceived as the first chapter of my monograph on the post-Tang history of Chang’an, offers a survey of the history of Chang’an from its earliest urban settlements to the end of the Tang dynasty. I begin with the earliest residents of the region and trace the rise of urban structures in the Western Zhou dynasty, the first appearance of an imperial capital in Xi’an in the Qin dynasty, the construction of the Han capital of Chang’an, and the Sui emperor’s decision to build a newer and grander Chang’an just to the southeast of the Han capital. The paper describes in detail the palaces, walls, ponds, canals, governmental offices, residential areas, markets and religious institutions that existed in these successive urban structures, and shows that these structures, although chronologically distinct, were geographically related. For example, the Sui-Tang city was only a few hundred meters removed from the abandoned Han city, and the northwestern corner of the Sui-Tang city was built upon a few key Han suburban structures. Such successive waves of construction produced an urban space that resembled a palimpsest, and the ghosts of dead Chang’an residents and old things continued to attach themselves to the sites of their tombs and houses and reemerged when disturbed. Later residents of Chang’an thus had to cope with this deep history of the city and remake their own urban existence in this deep time.

This workshop is an installment of Past Forward: Engaging with Deep Time in the 21st Century, a series of lectures and workshops funded by the Charles K. Colver Lectureships & Publications Fund.

Registration is gently encouraged, though not required. 

The Center for Global Antiquity proudly presents a lecture by Professor Xin Wen (Princeton University), An Envoy State: Turfan and the Integration of Late Antique Eurasia.

In our understanding of medieval trans-Eurasian connections, large political entities such as the Byzantine empire and the Tang empire are often seen as the main upholders and drivers. But even at the heights of their powers, these empires did not have control over the entirety of Eurasia. So who was maintaining trans-Eurasian connections in the absence of—and in the spaces between—empires in the medieval time? In this lecture, I examine the case of the Central Asian kingdom of Turfan from the fifth to the seventh century. The history of this kingdom during this period is known to us thanks to its medieval residents’ peculiar practice of clothing the dead bodies with used papers, including government documents, and its arid climate that helped preserve these documents. From them, we can see that an extraordinary number of travelers from Byzantine, India, China, and the Steppe world converged in Turfan, not typically as their destinations, but as a stop to other large states. In response, the kingdom of Turfan devoted outsized resources both material and human to the receiving, accommodating, and protecting these travelers. In this way, Turfan fashioned itself into what I call an “envoy state,” a state whose administrative functions disproportionately served travelers from other, larger states. States like Turfan, I argue, was indispensable in the maintenance of long-distance connections in and the cultural and political integration of Eurasia in the medieval time.

This lecture is an installment of Past Forward: Engaging with Deep Time in the 21st Century, a series of lectures and workshops funded by the Charles K. Colver Lectureships & Publications Fund.

Join the Brown Late Antique Group for a workshop featuring Professor Sarah Mady’s recent work on ancient milk shrines in Lebanon. Her research project at Harvard focuses on how women in ancient Lebanon built networks of healing shrines away from a male- dominated society. Professor Mady is an interdisciplinary scholar who engages with anthropological and archaeological methods to study the ways in which women have healed each other and their infants in the longue durée of the Eastern Mediterranean. By focusing on socially constructed spaces such as cave shrines, she traces back women’s presence in public spaces and studies their landscape of healing, grief, and memory.

Applications are now open for the CGA Spring 2026 Funding & Grant Round. During this round, we encourage faculty, graduate students and post-docs focused on the study of pre-modern cultures and societies through any academic discipline to submit event proposals for the 2026/2027 academic year.

Graduate students and post-docs are also encouraged to apply for CGA top up funding for Spring & Summer 2026, and graduate students are also encouraged to submit proposals for student-led groups. Please note that graduate student applications require the support of a faculty member (graduate students should complete the application form first, leaving plenty of time to forward it on to a faculty supporter to complete their letter of recommendation).

Please also note that you are required to be affiliated with CGA to apply for funding. If you are interested in affiliating, you may do so by submitting this form.

All application materials must be received by 5pm on Monday, March 16, 2026.

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email Global_Antiquity@brown.edu.

Global/Antiquity: a pair of panel discussions to mark the launch of Brown’s Center for Global Antiquity.

What is Global Antiquity? What does it mean to you, and what does it mean at Brown? Two panels, one on the theme “antiquity” and one on the theme “global”, will continue the ongoing conversation about how we can come together to study the distant past across times, places, and disciplines. Panelists from a variety of departments will reflect on what these terms mean in their own research, followed by open discussion. All Brown faculty and graduate students are welcome, and anyone who wants to contribute to the ongoing work of defining the CGA’s scope, methods, and ambitions should be there!

Antiquity

What are the stakes of defining the distant past as “antiquity”? When does antiquity begin and end? Are its limits and definitions the same in different places, or for different disciplines? What do researchers of these periods share, and what distinguishes them from others in their field working in more recent time?

The March 9th panelists are Professors Steve Houston (Anthropology), Matthew Rutz (Egyptology and Assyriology) & Amy Russell (Classics, History). 

Reception to follow. 

Our faculty panel (Jana Mokrisova, Matthew Rutz) will talk through and take questions on the stages of an academic job search. If you’re thinking of going on the market next year, this is for you - and come along even if you are earlier in your graduate career or aren’t sure about pursuing an academic job, to get a sense of what awaits and connect with other students in the same position. Open to all graduate students with an interest in the ancient world.

Refreshments served!

The Center for Global Antiquity proudly presents a virtual lecture by Professor Eduardo Góes Neves (Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, University of São Paulo, Brazil), Ancient South America as a Continental System in the First Millennium CE. 

From its beginnings, archaeological research in South America has been marked by a sharp heuristic division between, at the one hand, the Andean highlands and, at the other, the vast lowlands east of the Andes. As a consequence, different national academic traditions have established distinct chronologies and hypotheses to explain the deep histories of these areas as if they were poorly connected. However, recent research has shown remarkable historical parallelisms between the Andes and the Amazon. This talk will explore some of these parallelisms and call for initiatives to devised unified approaches towards a holistic perspective on the ancient South American past.

This lecture is an installment of Past Forward: Engaging with Deep Time in the 21st Century, a series of lectures and workshops funded by the Charles K. Colver Lectureships & Publications Fund.

Please join us for a discussion of how to apply for research funding, within and beyond Brown. Professors Michael Satlow (Judaic Studies & Religious Studies) and Shanti Morell-Hart (Anthropology & JIAAW) will facilitate the discussion. There will also be an opportunity to talk to the CGA director about any plans you might have to apply to our own grants, either this time round (the deadline will be March 16) or in the future. All graduate students with an interest in the distant past are welcome.

Free lunch will be provided! 

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email Global_Antiquity@brown.edu.

Saturday, February 7, 2026 | 10:00am - 5:00pm

Rhode Island Hall, 60 George Street, Providence, RI

go.brown.edu/water2026

While much attention has been given to the development of water management systems (aqueducts, baths, canals, cisterns, etc.) in earlier Roman periods, much less attention has been paid to what happens to this infrastructure in the later years of Roman rule. Designing, building, and maintaining these systems required significant funding and organization that often relied upon either a strong State-funded system or generous benefactions by wealthy private citizens. Neither of these foundational elements were necessarily guaranteed in later Antiquity, as Roman State power and finances waned and private wealth was either reduced or moved to other foci, such as church construction. In this changing socio-economic landscape, what happens to the flowing water that once supported so much of the Roman world? 

This one-day workshop brings together experts on ancient water to investigate the legal, economic, and environmental contexts of hydraulic and hydrological infrastructure from roughly AD 300-600 and demonstrate the heterogeneity of ancient approach and importance of further modern research in this period.

More information, including the full workshop schedule, can be found at go.brown.edu/water2026.

T he workshop is free and open to the public, but pre-registration is required.

This workshop is sponsored by the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, with additional support from the Center for Global Antiquity.

CGA invites all graduate students interested in the ancient world to join us for our December Grad Forum: “Alt-Ac Careers”. We’ll be talking about alt-ac or para-academic careers: job opportunities in academia and related sectors other than becoming a professor. What opportunities are there, and how can you set yourself up for success? There will also be room to discuss non-academic career paths more broadly. We will be joined by two Brown colleagues who use their PhDs in ancient studies in different branches of academia: Sam Caldis (Associate Dean of the Faculty, 2019 PhD in Ancient History) and Micah Saxton (Humanities Librarian, 2013 PhD in Religious Studies). 

Join other graduate students across Brown as we all work on our own writing assignments - together. This can range from a weekly response post for seminars, to a dissertation chapter. Snacks and coffee will be provided by the Center for Global Antiquity. Sessions will include one silent hour and one social hour to accommodate different work styles and provide a chance to meet graduate students across the various departments connected to the Center for Global Antiquity.

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email Global_Antiquity@brown.edu.

This workshop will focus on Nubian rites at the Egyptian temple of Philae, located at Egypt’s traditional southern border, gateway to Nubia. The temple was a site shared by Egyptians, Nubians, Greek pilgrims and residents in Egypt, and Roman soldiers in the third century CE. During about 100 years, Nubian priests traveled to Philae to perform rites for Osiris, god of the underworld. They poured milk libations meant to resurrect the god. I will share a short article for participants to read beforehand, present a brief PowerPoint on the topic, and then open the floor to conversation about Nubian ritual practice, Meroitic royal involvement in the temple of Philae, and the prayers engraved into the temple’s stone walls in Egyptian Demotic, Greek, and Meroitic that give us insight into these unique ritual practices that find echoes in royal burials at Meroe, hundreds of miles to the south.

Registration is gently encouraged, but not required. 

This lecture considers the powerful sole-ruling queens of the ancient kingdom of
Meroe, Egypt’s southern neighbor in the land now called Nubia (300 BCE-300
CE). These women portrayed themselves as powerful rulers, warriors, and as
officiants in rites performed for the gods. They were also voluptuous and
frequently depicted bare-breasted. Both of these factors have caused distress to
Egyptologists who discuss them, often evoking expressions of disgust and fat
phobia. Using Sabrina Strings’ 2019 monograph Fearing the Black Body: The
Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, I will trace the development of a European racial
hierarchy during the time of the early period of Egyptology. Echoes of those
racialized concepts remain unexamined in Egyptology and are unconsciously
expressed when discussing the queens of Meroe.

Join the Brown Late Antique Group (BLAG) for a graduate student-led primary source workshop on November 13th from 1:30 pm to 3:00 pm in the Wilbour Hall Seminar Room. We will read and discuss a selection of primary sources, both in translation and in their original languages (Syriac, Latin). The workshop will be led by Paul Aste, PhD Candidate in History, and Patryk Imielski, PhD Student in Religious Studies, who will present these sources and how they relate to their current research projects.

Graduate students and faculty are welcome!

Please email bailey_freeburn@brown.edu to receive pre-circulated primary sources.

The Department of Egyptology and Assyriology is pleased to present: The Abraham Sachs Lecture in Assyriology: “Doing and Undoing Gender in Babylon, ca. 1800 BCE” with Jana Matuszak, Assistant Professor of Sumerology at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, The University of Chicago. Wednesday, November 12th, 2025, 5:30 p.m., 280 Brook St. (Stephen Robert Hall), Room 101 (True North).

About the Sachs Lecture Series:

Join other graduate students across Brown as we all work on our own writing assignments - together. This can range from a weekly response post for seminars, to a dissertation chapter. Snacks and coffee will be provided by the Center for Global Antiquity. Sessions will include one silent hour and one social hour to accommodate different work styles and provide a chance to meet graduate students across the various departments connected to the Center for Global Antiquity.

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email Global_Antiquity@brown.edu.

Since its heyday during the Song period (960–1279), antiquarian scholarship in China was by no means a sterile exercise in book learning. To the contrary: the deep engagement with the authentic (or imagined) material heritage from the past was thought to enable its practitioners to enter into a spiritual communion with the ancient sages. One important aim was the reconstruction of ancient rituals and music. This lecture tentatively explored how the resulting bodily practices manifested themselves in visual culture.

Free and open to the public. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6070.

About the Speaker

Lothar von Falkenhausen is Distinguished Professor of Chinese Archaeology and Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he has taught since 1993. He also holds a part-time appointment as Visiting Professor at Xibei University in Xi’an (China). Educated at Bonn University, Peking University, Kyoto University, and Harvard University, Falkenhausen received his Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard in 1988. His research mainly concerns the archaeology of Bronze Age China, focusing on large interdisciplinary and historical issues on which archaeological materials can provide significant new information. His major books are Suspended Music: Chime Bells in the Culture of Bronze Age China (University of California Press, 1993) and the award-winning Chinese Society in the Age of Confucius (1000–250 BC): The Archaeological Evidence (Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2006; also published in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese translations). A new monograph on the economic archaeology of Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age China is in press.

This lecture is presented as part of the collaborative humanities seminar “Trace and Absence: Comparative Perspectives on the Past in Things” and convened by Jeffrey Moser (History of Art and Architecture) and Felipe Rojas Silva (Archaeology and the Ancient World, Egyptology and Assyriology).

CGA invites all graduate students interested in global antiquity to join us for our next Grad Forum: “How to Make the Most of a Conference”. Professors John Steele (E&A) and Susan Harvey (Religious Studies) will serve as panelists for this session.

Should you be attending conferences? Should you be speaking at conferences? When, and how? And how do you make the most of it once you’re there? This informal workshop is for all graduate students whose research relates to the ancient world. No registration required.

This workshop describes the most recent theories and approaches to studying body modification in archaeological settings. It includes an overview of recent bioarchaeological methods used to identify tattoos, demonstrating how modern tattooists inform and are informed by the archaeology of tattooing. The workshop will also discuss methods and evidence for other body modifications evidenced in the Nile Valley including piercings, scarification, and dental modifications. Participants will discuss new theoretical perspectives on body modification and identify limitations and sources for these practices. Finally, the workshop will address how modern communities are using evidence from archaeological contexts to inform contemporary body modification practices.

This workshop will be of particular interest for bioarchaeologists; Egyptologists and other Nile Valley scholars; and scholars interested in body modification practices.

Registration is gently encouraged, but not required. 

The first discoveries of tattoos on ancient Egyptian human remains date back over a century, but Egyptologists had only identified tattoos on a few individuals spanning Pharaonic Egypt’s more than 3,000 year history. Textual evidence is virtually silent on the practice and depictions of tattoos are often ambiguous. Over the past decade, however, new technology, reduced stigma, and growing scholarly interest have dramatically changed our evidence for and understanding of tattooing.

This includes my work with the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale (IFAO), where we made an incredible discovery—an extensively tattooed woman from the necropolis at Deir el-Medina, the community of the workmen who cut and decorated the New Kingdom’s royal tombs. With over 30 tattoos, this woman completely redefined what we knew about tattooing in ancient Egypt. Since then, we have identified several other tattooed people at the site and new evidence for the practice of tattooing in ancient Nubia. Research by Renée Friedman and experimental archaeology on possible tattoo tools have also filled in large gaps on the practice. Including these recent discoveries, we now have evidence for over 50 tattooed people from the Nile Valley.

This lecture will share the stories of these tattooed people and the remarkable legacy of tattoo practices they represent—a tradition that began over 5,000 years ago and continues today.

Applications are now open for the Center for Global Antiquity’s Fall 2025 Funding & Grant Round. During this round, we encourage faculty, graduate students and post-docs focused on the study of pre-modern cultures and societies through any academic discipline to submit event proposals for the Spring 2026 semester, and for the 2026-2027 academic year. 

Graduate students and post-docs are also encouraged to apply for CGA top up funding for Fall 2025 & Spring 2026. Please note that graduate student applications require the support of a faculty member (graduate students should complete the application form first, leaving plenty of time to forward it on to a faculty supporter to complete their letter of recommendation).

All application materials must be received by 5pm on Wednesday, October 15, 2025.

For more detailed information, please visit our website.

You are welcome to reach out to the CGA Director with any questions: Amy_Russell@brown.edu

The Brown Late Antique Group (BLAG) is excited to host Edward Watts, Alkiviadis Vassiliadis Endowed Chair and Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego, on October 7th for a presentation and conversation about his current project on merging the past and present in Constantine’s Rome. Professor Watts will guide us through a selection of material evidence and literary sources to consider how space and art influenced how people in antiquity made sense of the past, present, and future.

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email Global_Antiquity@brown.edu.

What does the Roman world look like if, instead of assuming women were mostly disempowered, we instead assume that they were able to actively manage and change all of the realities around them? Using an interchronological approach that considers how the words and actions of figures from the past shape both Roman understandings of their present and expectations for their future, this lecture shows how literature, public commemorations, and monuments encouraged Romans of both genders to connect with female political exemplars by speaking their words, feeling their emotions, and understanding the circumstances surrounding their political interventions. These omnipresent, politically engaged Roman women then taught all Romans that their society did not just tolerate female political activity. Sometimes its survival even required it. 

Edward Watts holds the Alkiviadis Vassiliadis Endowed Chair and is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. He received undergraduate degrees in Classics and Ancient and Medieval Cultures at Brown University in 1997, and received his PhD in History from Yale University in 2002. He is the author of seven books and the editor of five more, including Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny (Basic Books, 2018), a narrative history of the last three centuries of the Roman Republic, and The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Oxford University Press, 2021), which traces the 2200-year history of claims about Roman decline and the victims they created. His most recent book, The Romans: A 2000 Year History (Basic Books, 2025), tells the story of the Roman state from the 8^th century BC through 1204 AD. His work has also been featured in Time, the BBC, Vox, Smithsonian, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. 

Join us for this opportunity for graduate students working in antiquities across departments to meet, connect and learn more about the Center for Global Antiquity. 

In this workshop, we’ll examine various sources for labor in the ancient Mediterranean world. We’ll be particularly interested in the messiness of labor practices (the work people actually did) versus categories of identity, and we’ll pay particular attention to the challenges - both ethical and analytical - presented by the evidence from human skeletons. We’ll read a range of sources - from actual human skeletal data and wage labor records, to theoretical models from sociology and Black socialism - to help us in our thinking.

Registration is gently encouraged, but not required. 

Free, open to the public. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact globalbrown@brown.edu

Light Lunch fare will be provided for attendees and will be available starting at 11:45am.

This lecture explores the development of alchemical theory and practice across distinct but interconnected regions—Graeco-Roman Egypt, Byzantium, and the Near East—from antiquity to the early Islamic period. By combining close textual analysis with experimental reconstructions of ancient alchemical procedures, it aims to illuminate the material practices behind the texts. Drawing on a series of laboratory experiments informed by historical and philological research, the lecture will reconstruct how ancient alchemists worked and offer fresh interpretations of the texts and literary forms through which their knowledge was transmitted. In doing so, it presents a comprehensive, longue durée perspective on the evolution of alchemy, revealing it as a dynamic and diverse art shaped by multiple technical and intellectual traditions.

About the Speaker

Matteo Martelli is professor in History of Science at the University of Bologna, where he teaches history of ancient science and technology along with history of ancient medicine. His research focuses on Graeco-Roman and Byzantine science – with particular attention to alchemy and medicine (pharmacology) – and its reception in the Syro-Arabic tradition. His publications include The Four Books of Pseudo-Democritus (2014) and Collecting Recipes. Byzantine and Jewish Pharmacology in Dialogue (2017; edited with L. Lehmhaus). In the framework of the AlchemEast project is currently working on a critical edition and translation of the alchemical books by Zosimus of Panopolis as they are preserved in the Syriac tradition.

About the Brown-University of Bologna Lecture Series

Founded in 2017 to commemorate Brown’s long-standing partnership with the University of Bologna, which now marks 45 years, the Brown-Bologna Lecture Series celebrates the enduring collaboration between our institutions in advancing innovative research, impactful teaching and learning, and immersive cultural exchange.

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email Global_Antiquity@brown.edu.

Join us September 15th for a friendly mixer at the Faculty Club Bar, to celebrate the newly launched Center for Global Antiquity (formerly the Program in Early Cultures)!

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email early_cultures@brown.edu.

This event brings together a panel of academics, museum professionals, and trauma experts for a conversation on the complexities of talking about art and literature that involves gender-based and sexual violence. Our panelists will present their experiences and expertise on the topic, and open the floor for a conversation with the audience to discuss how to move forward with trauma-informed pedagogies.

Panelists:
Dr. Cicek Beeby, Critical Classical Studies Fellow, Brown University
Dr. Tori Lee, Society of Fellows, Boston University
Marlaydis Holloway, Training and Outreach Coordinator, Day One
Kajette Solomon, Social Equity & Inclusion Specialist, RISD Museum

Cosponsored by the Program in Early Cultures.

PEC welcomes Graduate Students interested in Early Cultures to join us for our next Grad Forum: “What can I do this summer to prepare for the job market in the fall?”

Even at the best of times, an academic job search can be unpredictable–but advanced planning can help make things go a little smoother. Join Andrew Scherer (Anthropology, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World), Charles Carroll (Sheridan Center), and Gretel Rodriguez (History of Art and Architecture) as they discuss their thoughts and answer your questions about this very important topic!

The PEC Pedagogy Roundtable Series consists of workshops dedicated to the discussion of current pedagogical theory related to the teaching of ancient languages.

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email early_cultures@brown.edu.

Archaeology has long been central to the nation-state discourse. While the nineteenth century witnessed the first investigations into Jewish and Biblical archaeological sites, mainly conducted by American, British, French, and German Christian archaeologists, the first half of the twentieth century saw for the first time the birth of a “Jewish archaeology” in Mandatory Palestine and, later, in Israel. The recovery of the past answered not only the need for a glorious past and models of military resistance but also for evidence of Jewish life in ancient Palestine. This discourse on the Jewish past, readily adopted by Zionism, sets the stage for the literary response to Jewish archeology in the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine) and in Israel.

Even though space and place have been understood as central issues in the poetry of Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000), his multiple references to Roman archaeological sites have been overlooked. In this talk, I focus on Amichai’s short story “Nina of Ashkelon” (from the collection In This Terrible Wind, 1961). I argue that in this story Amichai allusively attacks the Zionist manipulation of the past: the Roman tomb at the center of the story points out the suppressed past of the Land of Israel – constantly appropriated, exploited and killed, as symbolized by Nina, the protagonist of the story. In his reading of the archaeological landscape, Amichai emphasizes its multilayered nature, spanning the ancient Roman to the pre-1948 War Arab past of the land, as the “subconscious of the earth,” a re-metaphorization of Freud’s conceptualization of the human psyche. This reveals subsequent cycles of migration, competition, and settlement, with no apparent original “native,” thus dismantling the Zionist appropriation of archaeology as a means to validate exclusive Jewish claim to the Land of Israel.

By way of archaeology’s epistemological model and its Freudian metaphorization, Amichai’s narrative deconstructs the mystical-political Zionist notion of the “Land of Israel” altogether. Amichai’s surreal story undermines the supposedly unshakeable bond between the Land of Israel and the Jewish people, offering a snapshot of the charged intersection between Zionism, its archaeological discourse, and its literary reception.

Schedule of Events

9:30 Coffee and welcome

10:00 Introduction (Gretel Rodríguez and Meghan Rubenstein)

10:15 Laurel Bestock | “Seeing and Being Seen: Ancient Egyptian serdab Statues and their Contexts.”

In the Egyptian Old Kingdom (ca. 2650-2120 BCE) many elite tombs were provided with small rooms that scholars term “serdabs.” These rooms were above-ground parts of the tomb chapel and were designed to hold a statue or statues. They are characterized by their inaccessibility—once the statue was emplaced, the room was sealed, sometimes with a slit left through which the statue could see out, but never with any means for a visitor to the tomb to see in. The invisibility of the serdab statues was essential to their function, which was to receive offerings from visitors to the tomb and, it will be argued, to perpetuate social relationships that included an element of hierarchy across the boundary of death. What happens when such a statue is removed from its original context and displayed in a museum? This paper will address both how such statues allowed their original contexts to function and how different museums have chosen to engage with their visibility or invisibility in ways that engage seeing and power in today’s world.

11:00 David Kertai | “An Ornamental Monumentality: On the Interplay Between Architecture and Sculpture in Assyrian Royal Palaces.”

Assyrian palaces are best known for the sculptures that decorated the inner walls of their most monumental rooms. These sculptures are characterized by their large size, their overall shallow depth and the prominence given to inscribed texts. Four royal palaces decorated with sculptures have been excavated from Late Assyrian period (ca. 900-612 BCE). These provide a detailed view on the different sculptural programs. And yet much remains unclear about the roles these sculptures played in their architectural settings. This is partially due to a persistent Modernist focus on space, morphology, and typology to the detriment of the central role played by ornament in the Assyrian conception of architecture. Understanding the architecture of these palaces as forms of monumental ornamentation, this paper explores the central roles played by sculptures in providing meaning to the spaces they decorated and the sensorial experiences they might have evoked in individuals navigating the palaces.

11:45 Patricia Eunji Kim | “The Gallery of Shield-Portraits at the Delian Monument to Mithradates VI.”

In 102/101 BCE, the Athenian priest Helianax commissioned an unusual monument at Delos on behalf of the Pontic king Mithradates VI: a rectangular distyle in antis building was designed as a gallery of the king’s most important friends and generals. The monument boasted a total of thirteen shield-portraits (hopla). While each shield was carved into the surface of the masonry, the portrait busts were sculpted separately and then attached to or “hung” on those walls by iron pins. Inscriptions accompany each of the portraits, guiding the viewer with information about the person’s name, political role, and familial connections. The highly curated and particularly arranged display of honorific portraiture in a gallery of shields-as-art makes the Delian monument unique, prompting two questions for exploration. First, the spatial and sensory conditions that the building created demand analysis; how might we articulate the viewing experiences that the monument’s architecture and sculpture afforded? Second, the Hellenistic- period phenomenon of the shield-portrait is a distinctive category of representation that extended personhood—not only on the battlefield, but also in significant cultural and political arenas; what does the shield-portrait reveal about the aesthetic logics of weaponry in the ancient world?

12:30 - 2:00 Lunch break

2:00 Max Peers | “Buildings Set in Stone: Architecture and Sculpture from Living Bedrock on Punic-Roman Sardinia.”

This paper examines three structures from Punic-Roman Sardinia that blur the lines between sculpture, architecture, and geology in that each is partially carved from living bedrock. As such, the material and spatial characteristics of the different stages of construction—the quarrying, masonry, decoration, etc.—are collapsed into a single locus of activity and must be conceived of together, just as the ancient builders probably did. I examine the phases of, and individuals involved in, the construction of these structures through the lens of the chaîne opératoire, to understand who might have worked on the different elements of the structure, what skills they brought, and how they worked together with the stone in situ and made on site. Through my analysis, I demonstrate how the natural environment and local stone determined designs and building practices. The case studies I consider imbricate loci of work to a single location, which reveals a complex set of factors at play at these building sites, but I also argue that these conclusions concerning stone in states from raw and living to finished and installed, are applicable in other contexts in which local stone is being used for architecture and sculpture.

2:45 Meghan Rubenstein | “Monster Mouth Doorways and the Nature of Maya Architecture.”

Maya artists regularly collapsed boundaries separating the natural and supernatural realms, depicting rulers, ancestors, and deities together with sentient objects and zoomorphic beings. This paper explores how architectural sculpture reinforces that view of an animate and fluid world, looking specifically at the extraordinary, though perhaps misnamed, monster mouth doorways in the Yucatán peninsula. I propose these striking tooth-lined portals marked a point of transition between the natural and supernatural worlds, underscoring the ability of architecture to realize abstract concepts rooted in Maya ontology. This research, which analyzes iconography, materiality, and sensory-oriented design, also speaks to the phenomenological experience of monumental architecture during the Late Classic period (ca. 600-900 CE). The study of this subset of architectural sculpture elucidates the nature of Maya architecture, allowing us to better understand, from our modern perspective, the people who conceptualized, built, and used these monuments.

3:30 Nancy Steinhardt | “Architectural Sculpture in the Ancient World: the View from China.”

This paper seeks to define architectural sculpture in China before the year 1500 CE. It begins by confirming that relief sculpture has been standard on interior walls of tombs and interior and exterior rock-carved surfaces from the late centuries BCE and early CE centuries. The paper argues that, since those times, relief sculpture is interchangeable with wall painting as the primary means of narration, and that often an inscription is not necessary to understand what is represented. In Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian contexts the narration can be considered iconography, is inherently repetitive, and rarely experimental. With this background, we turn to five highly important types of Chinese architectural sculpture that, it will be proposed, have unique Chinese contexts: the gate-tower, with a focus on first- and second-century CE examples; exterior surfaces of Liao-dynasty (907-1125) monumental pagodas; eleventh- and twelfth-century examples of an interior, wooden wall technique known as xiaomuzuo (small-scale carpentry); marble door-pillows and related sculpture positioned only at the foot of a door; and two examples of miniature stages made at China’s premier porcelain kiln in Jingdezhen. In the conclusion, the paper seeks to determine if similar kinds of architectural sculpture existed in other parts of the Ancient World.

4:15-4:30 Coffee break

4:30 - 5:30 Response by Itohan Osayimwese / Group discussion

5:30 - 6:30 Reception

For more information, please visit our event website. 

The Department of Egyptology and Assyriology is pleased to present the 2024-2025 Parker Lecture in Egyptology. Richard Bussmann, Professor of Egyptology at the Institute of African Studies and Egyptology, University of Cologne will give the 2024-2025 Parker Lecture lecture “Subaltern bodies in early Egypt” on Tuesday, April 1, at 5:30 p.m. in RI Hall 108.

About Richard Bussmann

Prof. Dr. Richard Bussmann studies ancient Egypt in its wider regional context from a combined archaeological, philological, and anthropological perspective. He is interested in comparative perspectives on ancient Egypt and in cross-disciplinary approaches to the study of the past and its heritage. In his book The archaeology of Pharaonic Egypt: society and culture, 2700-1700 BC (Cambridge University Press, 2023) he develops key themes in World Archaeology with evidence from ancient Egypt, including urbanism, interregional exchange in Northeast Africa and the Mediterranean, funerary culture, the archaeology of ritual, sacred kingship, archaic states, and realities beyond elites. He also conducts research on early writing and material practices of administration. Richard Bussmann directs the fieldwork project “Zawyet Sultan: Archaeology and heritage in Middle Egypt”. He is the president of the Verband der Ägyptologie and Secretary General of the International Association of Egyptologists.

About “Subaltern bodies in early Egypt”

The rise of the ancient Egyptian state was a catalyst for increasing social inequality on a previously unknown scale. Egyptology has made great advances in studying administration, royal ideology, and social structure from the predynastic period to the Old Kingdom (ca. 3,500 to 2,500 BC), but it is still difficult to understand how these phenomena were anchored in the daily lives of the wider population. This gap in research is partially due to a scarcity of preserved and recorded material, and it also raises questions on the level of theory and social modelling. My presentation explores to what extent subalternity can help with developing fresh interpretation. Subalternity means, briefly, studying the agency of marginalized groups. It has been much debated in history and post-colonial studies, but hardly in Egyptology. The focus of my presentation will be on the human body, a medium of communication that all human beings have, yet at different degrees of autonomy. The body has been a major object of study across the social and cultural sciences from the 1970s onwards, and since the 1990s also in archaeology and Egyptology. I argue that there is scope in Egyptology for reconciling written and visual data for the body with archaeology and physical anthropology. I will present fresh results from my current excavation in Zawyet Sultan (Middle Egypt) which have inspired my research.

About the Parker Lecture Series

The Parker Lecture is one of three lectures named after the founding members of the Departments of Egyptology and History of Mathematics, which were merged in 2006 to form the current Department of Egyptology & Assyriology: Richard Parker (Egyptology), Otto Neugebauer (History of Exact Science in Antiquity), and Abraham Sachs(Assyriology).

Born in 1905, Richard Parker graduated from Dartmouth College and earned his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1938. A 1947 bequest in Charles Edwin Wilbour’s name created Brown University’s Department of Egyptology and the Charles Edwin Wilbour Professorship, given to Richard Parker in 1948 at the recommendation of History of Mathematics Professor Otto Neugebauer. Accepting the job offer, Parker became the first Chair of the first Egyptology department in the United States. At the time of his acceptance, he was a founding trustee of the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) and field director of the University of Chicago’s permanent expedition at Luxor in the Nile Valley. In Parker’s summation, Egyptologists fall into two categories: archeologists (who deal with physical artifacts) and philologists (who decode language). Parker identified himself as an epigrapher, a philologist who records ancient inscriptions. His contributions to the field include significant work in the areas of Egyptian language, astronomy, and chronology (conceptions of time). Parker wrote or collaborated on many books including the four-volume Egyptian Astronomical Texts with Otto Neugebauer. In a 1972 Dartmouth Alumni Magazine profile, Parker compared the study of the ancient world to a medical history: “It is just as important to know what man thought in the past, how he met crises, how he adapted, as it is for a doctor to know his patient’s health record. It gives us background against which to judge ourselves.” After his retirement in 1972, Parker maintained a rigorous research and publication practice. He passed away in 1993.

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email early_cultures@brown.edu.

PEC welcomes Graduate Students interested in Early Cultures to join us for our next Grad Forum: “Careers in and Beyond the Professoriate”.

What can you do now to set yourself up for a successful career in early cultures after grad school? Join recent Brown PhDs Jen Thum (Harvard University Art Museums) and Josh Schnell (U. of Pittsburgh, Dept. of Anthropology) as they discuss their thoughts and answer your questions about this very important topic!

We will meet in Rhode Island Hall, Room 008 at 12pm.

Please RSVP by noon on February 21st to book your free lunch!

The PEC Pedagogy Roundtable Series consists of workshops dedicated to the discussion of current pedagogical theory related to the teaching of ancient languages.

Professor Susan Harvey, Willard Prescott and Annie McClelland Smith Professor of History and Religion, Department of Religious Studies, will lead a workshop entitled “Adding Syriac: Beyond the Standard.” All graduate students and faculty across disciplines are welcome to join in developing active, informed, rigorous, and equitable pedagogical practices.

Please RSVP by noon on February 21st to book your free lunch!

Benjamin Hellings, Jackson-Tomasko Associate Curator of Numismatics at the Yale University Art Gallery, will present his research in an informal lecture: “Augustan Bronze Coins in the Roman Northwest: Cut and Pierced.”

For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit our blog: sites.brown.edu/archaeology/

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email early_cultures@brown.edu.

PEC welcomes Graduate Students interested in Early Cultures to join us for our next Grad Forum: “Writing and the Academic Career.”

Professors Johanna Hanink (Classics), Jason Protass (Religious Studies), and Parker VanValkenburgh (Anthropology) will share their thoughts and experiences, and answer students’ questions about both academic and non-academic writing, and the roles they play in an academic career.

We will meet in Rhode Island Hall, Room 008 at 12pm.

Please RSVP by 12:00pm, December 6th to book your free lunch.

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email early_cultures@brown.edu.

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email early_cultures@brown.edu.

The PEC Pedagogy Roundtable Series consists of workshops dedicated to the discussion of current pedagogical theory related to the teaching of ancient languages.

Mac Carley and Clare Kearns, PhD Candidates in Classics, will lead a workshop entitled “Graduate Pedagogy: Praxis and Publishing.” They will discuss their experiences co-authoring an article on graduate pedagogy for The Classical Outlook with Dr. Sasha-Mae Eccleston, touching on what they learned about graduate pedagogy, the state of pedagogical research in the field of Classics, and writing for a pedagogical journal. All graduate students and faculty across disciplines are welcome to join in developing active, informed, rigorous, and equitable pedagogical practices. 

This talk, “God, Gifts, and Graffiti: Late Antique Church Assemblages and Temporalities of Sacred Space,” advances the idea that sacred spaces are essential cultural mechanisms for creating and for giving shape to particular forms of temporality—in other words, that we can think of them as important of time-making and time-structuring machines. It focuses particular attention on the concept of social time, understood as a lived, participatory mode of temporality that operates on the level of individuals and communities, real or imagined. The paper argues that we can access something of the social time of late antique churches through the various types of “polychronic” material assemblages gathered on their surfaces and in their spaces (architectural members, tombs, graffiti, liturgical silver, books, and other treasury items) that accumulated through and derived meaning from the combined contributions and traces of numerous individuals. The church building, on this reading, is seen as an interface between sacred time—outlined in sacred texts, endorsed by the monumental decorative programs, and reinforced with each liturgical performance—and the personal timelines of individuals and family groups, visible in the names and other kinds of marks of numerous, differently “timed” contributors. 

Ann Marie Yasin specializes in Roman and late antique architecture and material culture and holds a joint appointment in the departments of Art History and Classics at the University of Southern California. Her particular research interests include experience and perception of the built environment, decorative and epigraphic landscapes, commemoration, urbanism, material culture of religion, and long histories of display and reception of sites and artifacts.

Yasin received her BA in Classical Archaeology from the University of Michigan and her MA and PhD in Art History from the University of Chicago. Before joining the faculty at USC Yasin taught for three years at Northwestern University. Her research has been supported by residential fellowships at the American Academy in Rome and at Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies. She was named a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) for 2018-19.

Yasin’s writing on social and political dimensions of sacred architecture and art includes her first book, Saints and Church Spaces in the Late Antique Mediterranean: Architecture, Cult, and Community (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and more recent studies on memory and sacred landscapes, spatiality and perception of devotional graffiti, and architectural frameworks of early Christian relic installations.

Her current book project, Re-Building Histories: Architectural Temporality from Augustus to Justinian, investigates correlations between architectural restoration and notions of continuity, change, monumentality and ephemerality from the first to sixth centuries CE. It analyzes cultural practices such as the literary, epigraphic, and visual representations of architectural destruction and renewal, the selective restaging of antiquities and architectural fragments, and patrons’ appropriation of earlier sites and commemorative forms to explore how the fabrics of cities gave palpable shape to temporal patterns and ruptures.

The Program in Early Cultures warmly invites faculty, post-docs and graduate students to Happy Hour at the Faculty Club on October 15th at 5:30pm!

This event is intended to help those interested in applying for PEC funding to discuss potential event plans with other PEC students and faculty, as well as with the interim director.

To learn more about our Fall 2024 Grant Round, please visit the PEC website.

This is also a great opportunity to come socialize with the PEC community, we hope to see you there!

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email early_cultures@brown.edu.

The PEC Pedagogy Roundtable Series is a series of workshops dedicated to the discussion of current pedagogical theory related to the teaching of ancient languages.

Dr. Sara Misgen, Assistant Director for Interdisciplinary Teaching Communities at the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning will lead a workshop entitled “Addressing Difficult Topics in the Ancient Language Classroom.” All graduate students and faculty across disciplines are welcome to join in developing active, informed, rigorous, and equitable pedagogical practices.

Please RSVP by end of end of day, October 4th to book your lunch and to receive the (optional, but encouraged) pre-circulated readings. 

Come to the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology’s Open Collection Hours! Explore the Institute’s (hidden!) Collection of ancient ceramic vessels, lamps, figurines, lithics, sherds, and more. Expert docents will be on hand to answer questions.

Open hours will be held three times this semester: Wednesday, October 9 from 3:00-5:30pm; Saturday, October 26 from 11:00am-3:00pm; and Monday, November 4 from Noon-3:00pm.

Free and open to the public! All ages are welcome!

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email early_cultures@brown.edu.

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email amy_russell@brown.edu.

This workshop will focus on new approaches to the interpretation of stone inscriptions in ninth to eleventh century China. This was a period that witnessed both the emergence of the Chinese discipline of epigraphy (jinshixue)—the systematic collection, preservation, and study of earlier stone inscriptions—and the development of a number of new kinds of inscriptive practice, including the widespread practice of re-inscribing old inscriptions. The workshop will explore the relationships among these complex, entangled practices of interpreting old inscriptions and making new ones.

This workshop will focus on new approaches to the interpretation of stone inscriptions in ninth to eleventh century China. This was a period that witnessed both the emergence of the Chinese discipline of epigraphy (jinshixue)—the systematic collection, preservation, and study of earlier stone inscriptions—and the development of a number of new kinds of inscriptive practice, including the widespread practice of re-inscribing old inscriptions. The workshop will explore the relationships among these complex, entangled practices of interpreting old inscriptions and making new ones.

Making Muzhiming: Collaboration and the Production of the Chinese Entombed Epitaph, 600-900

At every stage of its production, from conception and composition through revision and manufacture, the late medieval Chinese entombed epitaph (muzhiming 墓誌銘) was the product of collaboration. During these collaborations, details could be added or removed, contexts and timelines refined, content tuned for more positive audience response, or material form shaped to achieve specific ends. In this paper, I explore examples of collaboration occurring at four stages of production—pre-writing, composition, editing, and inscription—and highlight how approaching muzhiming as products of collaborative remembering can help us better interpret these textual artifacts as well as provide insight into medieval commemorative practices more broadly.

Join the Program in Early Cultures for our next Grad Forum! April’s discussion will center on TAing at Brown.

This will be an opportunity for experienced TAs and those preparing to TA to share best practices and practical tips for TAing at Brown. There will be no faculty panel. Open to all graduate students with interests in early cultures: please come and share your ideas and questions.

This would also be a good chance to talk to the PEC Director if you are enrolled in or considering the Graduate Certificate in Early Cultures and want help finding a cross-departmental TA assignment.

Céline Debourse, Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University

Making Priest and Temple in Late Achaemenid and Hellenistic Babylon (484–60 BCE)

In 484 BCE, Xerxes crushed several Babylonian revolts against his rule. One of the results was an almost complete disruption of Babylonian temple life as it had existed up until that point. While in most places the cult never resumed, in the city of Babylon the worship of the gods was eventually reinstated and even flourished again. In this talk, I ask how Babylon’s community undertook this process of rebuilding the temple, both in terms of how the worship of the gods was actually organized and how the rebuilding process was ideally envisioned and legitimized. After all, these people’s undertaking was not so straightforward, as the foreign kings who ruled over them no longer cared for the gods of Babylon.

About Céline Debourse

Céline Debourse is an Assyriologist specializing in the languages, history, and religion of Babylonia during the first millennium BCE. Her work draws on a broad spectrum of methods and disciplines, from rigorous philological analysis, through historical criticism and literary studies, to the application of sociological and anthropological theories. She furthermore aims to embed Babylonia in wider Near Eastern history and to foster dialogues between Assyriology and other disciplines.

Her research centers around two broad themes. First, she is interested in the final stages of cuneiform history and its reactions to and interactions with foreign imperial rule. In her first book, Of Priests and Kings: The Babylonian New Year Festival in the Last Age of Cuneiform Culture (Brill, 2022), she studies cuneiform priestly writings created under Persian, Hellenistic, and Parthian rule. She shows how this Late Babylonian Priestly Literature served to strengthen group-internal bonds and foster a strong priestly identity in a time of foreign domination. Debourse’s work has also focused on the socio-economic aspects of Babylonian temple households post-484 BCE, challenging long-standing assumptions of cultic continuity and shedding new light on the question of the impact of foreign rule on a former “hegemonic” religious system. In her current book project, provisionally titled Babylon Beyond Cuneiform (331 BCE–224 CE), she seeks to study the latest history of the city of Babylon from a comparative perspective and to contend with the challenges presented by the dwindling and eventual disappearance of the cuneiform record.

The second main theme in her research is ancient ritual. Her interest in this topic ranges from the cuneiform textual tradition reflecting ritual to the application of modern theories to ancient ritual. Moreover, she explores how ritual can be an innovative and useful tool for historical research (see the co-edited volume, Ceremonies, Feasts, and Festivities in Ancient Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean World, Zaphon, 2023). She is currently working on a comprehensive study of the corpus of Late Babylonian ritual texts, which will include updated editions and extensive analysis.

About the Sachs Lecture Series

The Sachs Lecture is one of three lectures named after founding members of the Departments of Egyptology and History of Mathematics, which were merged in 2006 to form the current Department of Egyptology & Assyriology: Richard Parker (Egyptology), Otto Neugebauer (History of Exact Science in Antiquity), and Abraham Sachs (Assyriology). After receiving his doctorate from The Johns Hopkins University in 1939, Abe Sachs worked on the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary at the University of Chicago, where a chance meeting with Otto Neugebauer led to Brown University in 1941. After two years at Brown as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow, Sachs became one of the founding members of the History of Mathematics Department (instituted in 1943), eventually serving as its chair. Sachs collaborated on important contributions to the history of mathematics and astronomy, and, together with Albrecht Goetze, he founded the Journal of Cuneiform Studies in 1947. Sachs was a beloved teacher and respected colleague, and after his retirement he remained active at Brown as an adjunct professor until his untimely death in 1983.

How, why, when, and where do novel writing systems come into being? The inception of Mesopotamian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Chinese Oracle Bone graphs receive merited attention. Yet, by ample evidence, scripts appear at many other times and places, usually through contact with earlier systems of recording. To this day, writing continues to be devised under varied conditions of social, linguistic, religious, and aesthetic tumult and possibility, need and amusement. “Guided Inventions” looks at how scripts coalesce in response to prior scripts. A breadth of examples attests to the importance of this process, ranging from Africa to Indigenous America, the ancient Aegean to Scandinavian runes, Hollywood fabulations to the results of encounters with spirits. But the topic remains under-explored. Addressing that need, “Guided Inventions” seeks to find what these inventions share and how they differ. Joining the debate will be archaeologists, linguists, and anthropologists, each intent on understanding how, from the makers’ viewpoint, systems of imaginative marking help to graft meaning, language, and practice.

Schedule of Events

12:00-12:30 Welcome and Opening Remarks by Stephen Houston & Felipe Rojas (Brown University)

12:30-1:00 Silvia Ferrara (University of Bologna), “Leading the way? Cretan Hieroglyphic and Rongorongo (Rapa Nui)”

1:00-1:30 Yoolim Kim (Wellesley College), “Writing and cognition: Distinctiveness, complexity, and informativeness of letter shapes”

1:30-2:00 Coffee Break

2:00-2:30 Piers Kelly (University of New England), “Signs and wonders: Miraculous revelation and recuperation as recurring motifs in global origin stories about writing”

2:30-3:00 Bérénice Gaillemin (Getty Research Institute), “On some glotografic inventions from the Florentine Codex (Mexico, 16th century)”

3:00 Discussion & Closing Remarks by Stephen Houston & Felipe Rojas (Brown University)

Organized by Stephen Houston (Anthropology / History of Art and Architecture) &  Felipe Rojas (JIAAW / Egyptology & Assyriology)

Gordion, in central Turkey, was the capital of the Phrygian empire in Anatolia until about 600 B.C. By the mid 6th century, it came under Persian control as the Medes expanded their territory westward from their Iranian heartland. During the over 200 years of Persian control, the residents of Gordion imported a surprising amount of high quality Athenian fine ware pottery. The presence of Athenian pottery at Gordion prompts a number of questions that we will examine in this talk: HOW did it get there? Gordion lies 500 km from the Aegean and Black Sea coasts, which is unusual because exported Athenian pottery usually clings to the coasts in the Eastern Mediterranean. WHY did the residents of Gordion want Athenian pottery? At the height of importation in the late 6th and early 5th centuries B.C. weren’t the Persians and Athenians archenemies? In this talk, I will also demonstrate how a misguided research question can lead to unexpected answers. The mistake, it turns out, was to assume that the consumers and users of imported Athenian pottery were the Persians. In fact, actual Persians probably had little interest ceramic pots, which they deemed far inferior to metal vessels. Instead, throughout the Persian world, the pattern is clear: consumption of imported Athenian pottery continues at sites that had already been importing Athenian pottery before the shift to Persian control. In other words, it is not the Persian newcomers using the Athenian pottery but the indigenous Anatolian cultures. Connecting themselves to the Greeks (if not the Athenians, specifically) signaled a desire to maintain their existing cultural identities, and perhaps, a little resistance to the Persians.

Short bibliography and/or website on lecture topic (for lay reader):

Dusinberre, E. 2013. Empire, Authority, and Autonomy in Achaemenid Anatolia, Cambridge UP, New York.

Canepa, M. 2018. The Iranian Expanse: Transforming Royal Identity through Architecture, Landscape, and the Built Environment, 550 BCE-642 CE, University of California Press, Oakland.

Miller, M. 1997. Athens and Persia in the Fifth Century B.C.: A Study in Cultural Receptivity, Cambridge UP, New York.

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World and the Narragansett Society, the Rhode Island chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America.

During the middle of the 16th century, the Danish King Christian III (1503–59) successfully established Lutheranism in Iceland. The consequences of this event, which was officially completed in 1550, were many. Monasteries were dissolved; church properties and their inventories seized by the Danish crown; and Catholic practices abolished — these included the veneration of the saints, which was declared to be futile and heretical. Despite such prohibitions, a number of Catholic practices continued in what has been described as a kind of folk religion. This lecture by Natalie Van Deusen (University of Alberta, CA) focused on and sought to explain one such practice, namely the continued production and circulation of the legends of the saints in both prose and poetry, which persisted in Iceland for several centuries beyond the official end of Catholicism.

Presented by the Center for the Study of the Early Modern World in the Cogut Institute for the Humanities.

Disciplining ‘Early Greece’

Archaeological Practice, Race, and the Creation of Cultural Continuity

The ‘discovery’ of Aegean prehistory in the late 19th century was instrumental in shaping several dominant and interrelated discourses, including when the origins of ‘Greek’ civilization should be placed, the ‘race(s)’ of the prehistoric inhabitants of Greece, and the relationship of these races to later Greeks (both of the Classical period, and modern populations). This talk traces the entanglements between the development of archaeological methodologies, racialized understandings of culture, and cultural evolutionism that informed research agendas regarding the above questions, especially in Anglo-American scholarship, well into the mid-20th century. It also considers implications for the treatment of the Late Bronze Age – Early Iron Age transition and legacies of racialized narratives into the present.

Anne Duray (Ph.D. Stanford 2020) is a Visiting Researcher and Lecturer a University of Colorado Boulder. She studies the intellectual and methodological histories of archaeology in their social, political, and cultural contexts. Her monograph project (tentatively titled Hellenism, Archaeological Practice, and the Creation of Cultural Continuity) explores how entanglements between understandings of race, culture, and language have not only shaped (and been shaped by) archaeological practices but also influenced narratives of cultural continuity and discontinuity in Greek archaeology, especially in the case of the Bronze Age – Iron Age transition. She is also working on several articles that examine intersections between Aegean prehistory and race science during the late 19th – early 20th centuries, and Athenian topography in Aristophanes’ Knights. She has excavated at numerous sites in Greece, including the Athenian Agora, Malthi, and Stelida, and is the Editorial Assistant for the American Journal of Archaeology.

Emily Booker, a doctoral candidate in Archaeology and the Ancient World, will present her dissertation, “Contextual Clay Bodies: Figurine Use and Meaning in Late Bronze Age Cyprus,” in a public lecture. All are welcome.

A fundamental dimension of divine essence in ancient Mediterranean beliefs is the radiance of divine beings. How was it experienced in ritual practice? And how did space, natural or artificial, condition modes of interaction with the divine?

Athanasios Papalexandrou is Professor of Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his PhD from Princeton University focusing on the ritual dimensions of Early Greek figurative art. Prior to teaching at The University of Texas at Austin, he taught at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and spent the 2001–02 academic year as a research fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington DC. His first book, The Visual Poetics of Power: Warriors, Youths, and Tripods in Early Greece, was published in 2005. In 2021 he published a book titled Bronze Monsters and the Cultures of Wonder: Griffin Cauldrons in the Preclassical Mediterranean (University of Texas Press).

RSVP is strongly encouraged, but not required.

This lecture is a part of The History of Art & Architecture’s 23-24 Lecture Series: Light in Theory & Practice, which is a part of the Brown Arts IGNITE series.

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email amy_russell@brown.edu.

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email amy_russell@brown.edu.

***PLEASE NOTE THAT DUE TO THE IMPENDING WINTER STORM, THIS MONTH’S MEETING WILL BE HELD OVER ZOOM. EMAIL EARLY_CULTURES@BROWN.EDU FOR THE LINK***

Ethics, Exploitation, and Epistemic Reparations around the Classical Archive

A workshop sponsored by the Program in Early Cultures led by Prof. Nandini Pandey, Johns Hopkins University

All are welcome to join this workshop on the ethics of what (and how) we read and cite. The main case study centers on Foucault’s heterotopia as applied to Roman antiquity, but the questions the workshop raises will be of interest to many disciplines.

Do the lives, biographies, and behaviors of the scholars we use within our own work matter? How do we deal with sources who have abused others to create products we find valuable, and does it matter if they lived in the ancient past or recent memory? How far do the norms of their times excuse behaviors we might now find repugnant? How can we engage with our disciplines’ archives and theories in order to investigate and redress their co-formation with race, imperialism, white supremacy, and colonialism, without recentering the abusers? What reparations or atonement might we owe in using such scholars’ work, or should we cast it out altogether – in which case, what sources and methods do we have left?

This workshop begins with a chapter-in-progress (to be pre-circulated to preregistered participants, but with no advance reading required) for a volume on Roman spatial theory edited by Amy Russell and Maxine Lewis, in which Nandini Pandey (of Johns Hopkins University) applies Foucault’s theory of heterotopic space to the city of Rome. In researching her article, Pandey became interested in ways that Foucault’s theory centers an elite white man’s experience of space, and how recent allegations that Foucault sexually abused Tunisian children might have informed his spatial fetishization of the other. How should this context affect our applications of Foucault’s theory to Roman spaces that themselves facilitated elites’ (ab)use of ‘diverse’ subaltern peoples and objects? This workshop promises no answers, but will generate conversations of interest to many. All are welcome to join discussion, and no prior familiarity with theory or content is expected.

Please register by Tuesday 6 February.

You’re invited to a watch party of a livestream of an Oxford lecture on Elizabeth Rieken and Ilya Yakubovich’s work with a Hittite tablet preserving a new Anatolian language, kalašmaili, and their ideas about its structure and place in the wider family.

Meet in RI Hall 109 (the Common Room) to watch the lecture beginning promptly at 12 noon on Friday, February 2. There may be snacks (and/or bring your own)!

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email amy_russell@brown.edu.

About the Film

Join CLACS and IBES for a showing of the critically acclaimed documentary film Maya Land: Listening to the Bees. Maya Land tells the story of the environmental conflict between GM-soy growers and Maya beekeepers in the Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. It reflects on what the environment and economy could look like if bee health was considered as a criterion of sustainable development. This film explores the pre-colonial and ongoing relationship between Maya people and their environment, in particular the milpa agricultural system (and its main crop, maize), sacred sinkholes (called cenotes), and sacred stingless bees, the Melipona.

Panelists

Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre, Postdoctoral Fellow, ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow for Native American and Indigenous Collections (Brown)

Angélica Marquez-Osuña, Postdoctoral Fellow, Weatherhead Scholars Program (Harvard)

Pizza and refreshments will be served at 5:30 p.m.

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email amy_russell@brown.edu.

The Program in Early Cultures warmly invites faculty, post-docs and graduate students focused on the study of pre-modern cultures, to join us for Happy Hour at the Faculty Club! This event is intended to help those interested in applying for PEC funding to discuss potential event plans with other PEC students and faculty, as well as with Amy Russell. This is also a great opportunity to come socialize with the PEC community, we hope to see you there!

Come to the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology’s Open Collection Hours! Explore the Institute’s (hidden!) Collection of ancient ceramic vessels, lamps, figurines, lithics, sherds, and more. Expert docents will be on hand to answer questions.

Free and open to the public!

Join the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World and the AIA Narragansett Society for an archaeology-themed open house on Brown University’s Main Green. See ancient coins from Greece and Rome up close! Touch animal bones! Examine and draw Persian and Roman ceramics, prehistoric tools, precious metals, and other artifacts from thousands of years ago – coached by experts! And talk with Brown’s archaeologists about their fieldwork all over the world!

Free and open to the public! All ages welcome!

Come be part of an active archaeological excavation! Students will be digging on the grounds outside the List Art Building. Stop by (with your family or on your own) any time between 11:00 am and 3:00 pm to see what artifacts students are discovering or even try your hand at digging.

Join us for the Joukowksy Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World’s Field Dirt: The Undergrad Edition, where undergraduate students will discuss their summer fieldwork in a casual forum.

This event is free and open to the public - all are welcome!

Join the Joukowsky Institute for “Field Dirt 2023: Insider Stories and Results from the Joukowsky Institute’s 2023 Archaeological Field Seasons”, Wednesday, September 13th at 6pm in Rhode Island Hall. Professors Laurel Bestock, Sheila Bonde, Tyler Franconi, Yannis Hamilakis, Candace Rice, and Andrew Scherer will brush off the dirt from their summers spent on Brown University’s archaeological field projects in France, Greece, Italy, and Mexico, and will share the latest news from this summer’s fieldwork. Join us for some good stories, interesting results, and stunning field photos. 

Free and open to the public. All are welcome.

“Emotion from 450 to 750 CE”

“Eastern Kingship and Roman Dominance: The Successes and Failures of Ceremony under Pompey and Nero”

This workshop brings together literary historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists, and a performer to explore topographies of dance and related kinesthetic practices in two distinct cultural environments: the Greek and Roman Mediterranean and the colonial Americas.

We seek to explore such questions as:

Why did people dance where they did?
How did the places where they danced impact or inform their movements?
How did performers, in turn, transform places by dancing?
What did place add to dance and vice-versa?
How did dance engage with historical and mythic spaces?

The study of ancient dance has been dynamized by cross-pollination with theoretical discourses on contemporary performance studies. The organizers are convinced that it can also be enlivened by engaging in dialogue among specialists working in traditions which, though temporally, geographically, and culturally diverse, considered kinesthetic performance of central cultural importance. This workshop thus engages with the ongoing critical attention to site-specific and place-based work in dance and performance studies, as well as the burgeoning interest in comparative and cross-cultural analysis in ancient and pre-modern studies.

Organizers

Felipe Rojas (Brown)
Sarah Olsen (Williams)

Environmental archaeology brings together a range of methods to better understand human and nonhuman pasts, significantly improving our understandings of a range of issues from farming and foraging to food, health, and pollution.Many of these topics are also critical to the present, and archaeologists have increasingly been interested in participating in these discussions. One approach to relevance-seeking in archaeology is the ‘lesson from the past,’ a popular but challenging strategy. In this talk I discuss some other ways in which archaeologists can contribute to better understanding of the present, by using our work on long-term historical transformations to address outcomes in the present. A persistent issue with this approach is one of scale – how much might the changes we document make a difference at larger spatial and temporal scales? I discuss the LandCover6k project, an ongoing effort to use global-scale land use date from the past to contribute directly to climate modeling.

Co-sponsored by the CV Starr Lectureships fund, Program in Early Cultures, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology & the Ancient World, and Institute at Brown for Environment & Society.

The Comparative Literature Department cordially invites you to join us for Intangibles: Toward a Holistic Approach to Literary Translation, a lecture presented by Translator and Scholar, Kareem James Abu-Zeid. This event will take place Friday, April 7, at 4:00 pm at the Brown Faculty Club.

When we translate literary texts, we are translating much more than merely meaning. This praxis-oriented talk will use concrete examples to explore some of the other, less tangible aspects of literary translation, and examine what it might mean to take a more holistic approach to translating literary texts.

Kareem James Abu-Zeid, PhD, is an Egyptian-American freelance translator of poets and novelists from across the Arab world who translates from Arabic, French, and German. He has received the 2022 Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation, a 2018 NEA translation grant, PEN Center USA’s 2017 translation prize, Poetry Magazine’s 2014 translation prize, a Fulbright research fellowship, and residencies from the Lannan Foundation and the Banff Center, among other honors. He is also the author of the book The Poetics of Adonis and Yves Bonnefoy: Poetry as Spiritual Practice.

As always, this event is free and open to the public and a reception will follow. You can find more information on the Comparative Literature website and Comparative Literature Facebook page. We hope to see you there!

On Wednesday, March 22nd at 5:30 pm in Room 108 of Rhode Island Hall, Brown University, Dr. William Fitzhugh (Smithsonian Institution) will deliver a talk entitled:

“Climate Change in the Arctic: It’s Happening Fast, and It’s Happened Before.”

Arctic archaeology reveals how patterns of climate change have both facilitated migrations and extinguished cultures and animals beginning when humans first began to live in Arctic regions 40,000 years ago. We follow these developments in northern Russia, Alaska, Canada, and Greenland as environments and cultures changed, new technology and adaptations developed, and Arctic peoples interacted with each other and with southerners. The story of the Greenland Norse serves as an example of how humans have failed to observe signals of their impending disaster, what they could have done to avoid it, and what we should do now to avoid a similar, but global, fate.

The talk will be followed by a brief reception. Additionally, Dr. Fitzhugh and the AIA Narragansett Society board will be going out to dinner following the lecture - members are welcome to join!

If you are planning to attend the lecture/reception, and if you are interested in joining the dinner, please fill out this RSVP form by Friday, March 17th so we can get a rough head count for reception refreshments and make a dinner reservation.

Disability in Antiquity:

A Panel Discussion on Normativity and Variance in the Premodern World

Panelists: Saul Olyan (Religious Studies, Brown University), Joel Christensen (Classical Studies, Brandeis University), Cicek Beeby (JIAAW, Brown University)

This panel brings together scholars who examine premodern texts and material culture to interrogate how physical, sensory, and mental differences were perceived in antiquity. We will discuss recent theoretical developments in disability studies and explore their application to the study of the ancient world. Q&A and reception will follow.

Support for this panel is provided by the Program in Early Cultures Workshop Series, and the CV Starr Lectureships Fund.

Joukowsky Institute faculty member Professor Tyler Franconi – accompanied by current students – will provide tips and advice on projects, funding, and what to think about when choosing a project. Open to all interested students - you don’t have to be an archaeology concentrator, or even have taken an archaeology class!

Christian A. Tyron:
“Late Pleistocene Archaeology and Human Evolution in the Mediterranean Basin and the Initial Occupation of Sicily”

Christian A. Tryon is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut, as well as a Research Associate in the Human Origins Program of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, and a Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University. He is also Corresponding Editor of Current Anthropology, an Editorial Board Member of African Archaeological Review, and an Editorial Board Member for Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa.

Local Ecological Knowledge and Imperial Demands in Agricultural Practice

Agriculture mediates human interactions with environments and provides the primary avenue through which human societies adapt to environmental change, primarily at the local level through lived experience and inheritance of ecological knowledge. Such adaptations are constrained, however, by both economic pressures and histories of environmental change, which render certain agricultural strategies desirable and others unproductive. Here I illustrate one narrative of long-term agricultural and environmental change over the course of successive imperial periods, the Hittite through Roman empires, at the site of Gordion in central Anatolia. The application of two distinct theoretical perspectives, niche construction and resilience thinking, to a rich body of environmental archaeological data helps us trace long-term entanglements between people and landscapes. I explore how these theoretical perspectives conflict, as well as complement one another, in reconstructing environmental change in the past. I conclude with the implications of such studies for a broader understanding of global environmental change in the Anthropocene.

Co-sponsored by the CV Starr Lectureships fund, Program in Early Cultures, Joukowksy Institute for Archaeology & the Ancient World, and Institute at Brown for Environment & Society

Due to illness, we have had to cancel this event. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Jessica Nelson, Curatorial Assistant, will be working with the Haffenreffer’s collections in the gallery and will be available to chat about the museum’s collections and projects and to answer your anthropology questions!

“The emergence of participatory communities in early Greece”

Come eat pizza and watch an iconic archaeological movie (yes, you know the one) with the Archaeology Departmental Undergraduate Group – the Dig DUG. Panama hats and snake repellant not required; one ark will be provided. All are welcome!

Excavate a prehistoric settlement in Greece this summer (An UTRA-SPRINT project).

Rhode Island Hall, Common Room, 30th of January, 2 pm.

This is a fully funded opportunity for up to six students. It involves participation in the team project: The Koutroulou Magoula Archaeology and Archaeological Ethnography Project: https://blogs.brown.edu/koutrouloumagoula/

Any interested students are welcome to a meeting with the project’s director, Professor Yannis Hamilakis, to find out more about participating in a Brown-sponsored archaeological excavation this summer. 

No archaeological experience is required.

Koutroulou Magoula is a multi-period archaeological site in central Greece, which is becoming increasingly known internationally due to its astonishing preservation and its diverse and unusual material record, as well as the pioneering archaeological and ethnographic methodologies adopted in its exploration. The main period of habitation of the site is the Middle Neolithic (c. 6000-5800 BCE). The project relies on the participation of a large number of scholars and other specialists, including anthropologists, geoarchaeologists, archaeobotanists, archaeozoologists, organic residue specialists, ceramic petrographers, bioarchaeologists and physical anthropologists, soil micro-morphologists, computing application specialists, even performance artists and theater specialists.

Through this detailed interdisciplinary work, we have unearthed a very elaborate settlement with extremely well preserved, stone and mud brick buildings, occupied by a community which was engaged in large scale communal projects, including terracing and the construction of large, perimeter ditches around the settlement. In 2018-2019, the Brown team unearthed a pottery kiln complex, a rare find for the Middle Neolithic. We also located and excavated a highly unusual inhumation burial, associated with the kiln complex. These important contexts will be explored further by our team, in 2023. This community also produced and used impressive material culture, including clay figurines, around 500 of each have already being unearthed and studied, one of the largest such collections from the Neolithic of Southeastern Europe.

In this project, we will be excavating this amazing site but we will be also studying the material, and carrying out ethnographic work in the community. Finally, as happens in every excavation season, we will design and stage a theatrical performance on the excavation site, with the participation of local communities. Participating students will take part in all these activities.