Archaeology Lecture Series

Amy Gansell (St. John's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences)

“What Archaeology Can Tell Us About Ancient Assyrian Queens of Nimrud’s Northwest Palace (c. 865-705 BCE, Iraq)" 

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Archaeology has most prominently revealed the “treasures” with which ancient Assyrian queens were buried beneath the Northwest Palace at Nimrud. Rather than emphasizing individual objects, however, I present these treasures, and other major palace assemblages, in archaeological context. In particular, I investigate the regalia and ritual equipment preserved in the queens’ tombs, the architecture and luxury installations of the queens’ throne room suite, and a corpus of ivory carvings that may once have clad the queens’ furnishings and personal belongings. Through the study of these archaeological assemblages and contexts, we can learn about both the material culture of queenship and the queens themselves. Indeed, archaeology reveals the beauty, power, and presence of ancient Assyrian queens as a palpable force, eternally enmeshed in palace and empire.

Holly Pittman (University of Pennsylvania)

“Cultures in Contact: Seeing Interaction through Imagery on the Iranian Plateau during the Bronze Age of Exchange”

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Among the minor arts in the ancient Near East, engraved seal stones are closely associated with personal or corporate identity expressed through iconography and style.  In settings where administrators from different communities interact, such small portable objects can be particularly sensitive markers of cultural identity when other evidence, textual or ceramic, is absent.  This feature of personal seals makes them an especially useful window into cultural interaction during the third millennium Early Bronze Age when the ancient world from the Euphrates to the Indus was linked together through a vast network of exchange and interaction along which merchants, craftsmen, emissaries and later soldiers and diplomats passed.  While the Mesopotamian cuneiform texts provide us with hints of this interaction, we can evaluate it directly through the material traces left of the minor arts, especially the administrative residue of glyptic art.  This talk will illustrate through the rich and varied finds from the recent excavations at Konar Sandal South in the Halil River valley of Kerman province in southeastern Iran the evidence for this cultural contact.  Among them are impressions of imported seals, local seals, hybrid seals that merge traits of various cultural styles reflecting the cultural identities of the merchants and officials who interacted at the heart of mercantile interaction sphere.  Through this residue we can imagine who the players were and how they were affected by their interlocutors.

Asil Yaman (Villanova University)

“Agricultural Organization in the Chora of Hellenistic Phoenix (Rhodian Peraia)”

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The ancient Phoenix, strategically located in Rhodian Peraea, was founded in the archaic period and flourished during the Hellenistic era. It left behind a unique legacy of agricultural practices and organizational methods. Since 2021, new-gen archaeological pedestrian surveys and excavations by the Phoenix Archaeological Project have shed light on this sophisticated agricultural organization, relating it to settlement patterns and land use. By integrating geophysical data, digital archaeological tools, and botanical studies, I reveal how the agricultural landscape was meticulously organized to optimize both crop production and urban development. This presentation will illuminate the rural agrarian economy of Phoenix and its implications for understanding regional trade with Rhodes and rural economic strategies in Hellenistic societies.

Jeffrey A. Becker (Binghamton University – SUNY)

“Situating the Roman city: form and function”

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The landscapes of Republican Italy are often characterized in relation to the phenomena of urbanism, particularly those related to the expansion of the Roman state. The establishment of colonies under various legal frameworks transforms “pre-Roman” landscapes into “Roman” ones, following the conventional narrative. The “Roman city” thus becomes not simply a place but also a node in a socio-economic network that reshapes the Italian peninsula and the wider Mediterranean. Finding Romanness in all of this expansion is also often a desideratum, often in the hopes of being able to expertly unravel the phenomena of urban expansion into independent cultural threads. The Romans themselves were also looking for identity in these threads, coming to define their world and themselves in terms of urban vs. non-urban dichotomies. An examination of middle to late Republican instances of urbanism in light of later Republican identity building can help in situating the topos of the Roman city and in understanding its forms and functions.

Jason Herrmann, University of Pennsylvania

“Space and Identity in Ancient Motya (Sicily)”

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Originally conceived as a project to document domestic spaces away from the monumental buildings of Motya, the urban plan documented as part of the Space and Identity at Ancient Motya project comprises a new line of evidence for understanding identity and socio-political organization within Phoenecian-Punic polities in the central Mediterranean. This project, a partnership between the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Palermo, has taken a landscape approach to this important node in western Sicily, integrating extensive archaeogeophysical surveys, surface collection, and test excavations to track how space was shaped and re-shaped over time. In this presentation we will discuss the configuration and timing of Motya’s urban elements that were revealed through this research with an emphasis on the city as it appeared at its height in the 5th century BCE. We will then consider varied cultural and political influences that informed urban organization and how they reflect the perspectives of the city’s architects and the people who lived there.

Tyler Franconi (Brown University)

“Health and wealth at Roman and early medieval Vacone, Italy"

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This paper explores the relationship between health and wealth at the Roman villa of Vacone, located 70 km north of Rome in the Sabine region of central Italy. Excavations by the Upper Sabina Tiberina Project since 2012 have revealed the extensive remains of an early imperial villa with heavily decorated domestic quarters as well as one of the largest known olive pressing installations in central Italy. The region was known in antiquity for its olive oil, and the owners of the Vacone villa undoubtedly earned at least part of their wealth from its sale. As wealthy as the villa was, however, analyses of latrines and waste water channels reveal that its inhabitants carried multiple gastrointestinal parasites, offering a strong contrast to the perceived elite lifestyle otherwise associated with rural estates. The villa was destroyed, probably by an earthquake, around AD 200 and its ruins were thereafter used as a cemetery in the late Roman and early medieval periods. These populations also show signs of parasitic infection as well as other ailments, and thus provide the opportunity to explore the changing relationships between health and wealth in Sabine Italy during the first millenium AD. 

C. Densmore Curtis Lecture with Daniele Morandi Bonacossi (University of Udine)

“Settlement, Irrigation and Landscape Commemoration in the Core of the Assyrian Empire. Sennacherib’s Irrigation System in the Nineveh Hinterland and the Salvage of the Assyrian Faida Canal and its Rock-reliefs (Iraq)”

Tea: Quita Woodward Room, 4:00pm

Lecture: Old Library 110, 4:30pm

Reception: Wyndham Terrace, following lecture

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The Governorates of Duhok and Ninawa in northern Iraq host the most unique and monumental irrigation system ever built by the Assyrians in the core of their empire. Between 703 and c. 688 BCE King Sennacherib created in four stages the "Northern Assyrian Irrigation System", a ramified network of canals to water Nineveh’s extensive hinterland and bring water to his ‘Palace without a Rival’ and royal parks on the citadel of Nineveh. The creation of this new waterscape greatly transformed the rural landscape of the Assyrian core region, determining a shift from extensive dry farming to an intensive, predictable and high-yield cultivation system based on irrigation.

The talk presents the results of the work conducted since 2012 by the Land of Nineveh Archaeological Project of the Udine University on the "Northern Assyrian Irrigation System", with a particular focus on the newly discovered Assyrian Faida canal and rock art complex. Investigation of this extraordinary and extremely endangered archaeological site was launched in 2019 and has led to the exploration of an at least 10 km-long irrigation canal cut into the limestone bedrock of the Chiya Daka hill range. Thirteen monumental, sculpted rock panels carved along the canal’s eastern bank were brought to light, representing an Assyrian ruler depicted at both ends of each panel, framing the cult statues of seven deities standing on pedestals shaped like striding animals.
 

Peter van Alfen (American Numismatic Society)

"Power, Money, and Art: Who and What do (Archaic) Coins Represent?"

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On the coins we use today, we recognize the link between the images and the political powers that issue them. These images, often produced by leading artists, generally tend as well to represent notions of community and shared values. Already in the Classical period, imagery on coins had settled into these recognizable functions. But in the first generations of coin production, ca. 650–520 BCE, this wasn’t necessarily the case. This talk explores the nexus of power, money, and art, and the processes by which coins came to be used as tools of political and communal representation.     

Shannon M. Dunn (Bryn Mawr College)

"Sacred Spaces in Peloponnesian Borderlands"

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The boundary zones between Greek city-states were landscapes where many “marginal” or fraught activities could potentially occur — from adolescent initiation rites to military conflict — but also where daily life mostly happened as usual for shepherds, beekeepers, and many settlements situated close to the borders. Sanctuaries located in border zones have long been considered in scholarship as assertions of central polis ownership over distant territory and were sometimes used as boundary landmarks. This talk considers the immediate landscapes of these border sanctuaries, and the communities which they served — whether as cult locales for local populations, meeting places for communities across borders, or as pilgrimage sites for visitors from poleis near and far, even if in mountainous or seemingly remote locations. Different expressions of border zone religious life will be presented from across the Archaic to Roman Peloponnese, considering the physical environment and topography, associated myths, political histories, and material evidence for cult practices.

Lara Fabian (UCLA)

"Pithos burials and the Puzzle of the Parthian Empire"

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The Parthian Empire (ca. 250 BCE–225 CE) has proven to be an elusive archaeological subject, despite its long duration and frequent appearance in textual records generated in the Mediterranean world. In this paper, I discuss one burial practice frequently associated with the Parthian world—pithoi cemeteries, where both adults and children were interred in large jars. After reviewing traditional descriptions and interpretations of this practice, I will present material from the South Caucasus, demonstrating that the phenomenon was much more widespread in this zone than has previously been acknowledged. This evidence suggests the need to reconsider our understanding of pithoi cemeteries and their potential connection to the broader Parthian cultural sphere. In the course of the discussion, I will also address the historical and conceptual challenges that contribute to the Parthians’ persistent elusiveness in the archaeological record, even as we search for the traces of their vast empire.