Archaeological Institute of America

Kentucky Society Lecture with Anne Duray
2025-09-25 17:00 - 18:30 (America/New_York) | Transylvania University., Lexington, KY, 40508
Time TBD

Play Again: Combining Archaeological and AI Methods to Study Ancient Games
2025-09-25 18:00 - 19:30 (America/Phoenix) | https://www.archaeological.org/event/play-again-combining-archaeological-and-ai-methods-to-study-ancient-games/
Play Again: Combining Archaeological and AI Methods to Study Ancient Games
with
Walter Crist, PhD
Lecturer
Faculty of Humanities
Centre for the Arts in Society
New Media & Digital Culture
Leiden University
The archaeology of ancient play has recently undergone a renaissance, as researchers have couched previous culture-historical research on ancient games in anthropological and archaeological theory, demonstrating the importance of play in ancient life. Further advances in AI technology allow for new applications of this technology in the study of ancient games, and the possibilities of such methods are only beginning to be explored. This research explores two case studies where AI-simulated play, when combined with traditional archaeological methods, provide new insights about ancient games.
Biography
Walter Crist is a Lecturer at the Faculty of Humanities at Leiden University. His PhD dissertation (Arizona State University, 2016) examined the archaeological context of Bronze Age game boards in Cyprus to explore the intersection between gaming activity and social complexity. He is the lead author on the book Ancient Egyptians at Play, and has researched ancient games in Cyprus, Egypt, Azerbaijan, Greece, Turkey, and the Netherlands. As a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC Digital Ludeme Project, he constructed the Ludii Games Database, which documents the knowledge of the rules for traditional board games globally over the past 5000 years. Recent explorations on the ways that AI can inform archaeological research on games continue through his position as Vice Chair of the COST Action GameTable: Computational Techniques for Tabletop Games Heritage.
Registration is required. Follow this link to register: https://asu.zoom.us/meeting/register/KMQBlfk-TYCqAMr0j6l21w#/registration

Replacing Empires. The Archaeology of Political Transformation and Spatial Dynamics in 1st Millennium BCE Mesopotamia
2025-10-02 17:30 - 18:30 (America/New_York) | Foster Auditorium, Paterno Library, the Pennsylvania State University, 201 Old Main, University Park, PA, 16802, United States
Kershaw Lectures in Near East Archaeology

Archaeology and the Art Museum: How To Be an Archaeologically Informed Curator
2025-10-05 15:00 - 16:00 (America/New_York) | Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada
Martha Sharp Joukowsky Lectureships

Out of Anatolia: Hittites, Homer and the Trojan War
2025-10-08 17:30 - 18:30 (America/New_York) | Yale University, Phelps Hall, Room 401, New Haven, CT
Homer A. and Dorothy B. Thompson Lectureship

Buried in Enemy territory: A Spartan tomb in Athens
2025-10-09 16:00 - 17:00 (America/Edmonton) | Business Building 2-09, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Oscar Broneer Memorial Lecture

The Kingdom of Philoktetes: Northern Greece in the Age of Homer
2025-10-09 16:30 - 18:00 (America/New_York) | NY

Mothers, Wives, Warriors, Slaves: Violence and Women in the Ancient World
2025-10-09 17:00 - 18:30 (America/Phoenix) | NY
Charles Eliot Norton Memorial Lectureship

Matrilineal Kinship in Aegean Prehistory: Settlements, Figurines, and the Absence of Men
2025-10-16 18:30 - 20:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, 2316 W 1st Ave, Spokane, WA, 99201, United States
Dr. Sabina Cveček
Were communities in prehistoric Greece matriarchal, matrilineal, or simply centered around women? This question has fascinated archaeologists for decades. Early on, figurines of women were often seen as “Mother Goddesses,” meaning female deities often representing motherhood, fertility, and creation, but feminist scholars later cautioned against such broad interpretations. Still, the idea that ancient societies may have been organized around maternal kinship and matrilineal descent—where family ties pass through the mother—has resurfaced in recent years. In this talk, Sabina Cveček revisits the debate, exploring what different types of evidence—from how settlements were laid out to how figurines were used—can tell us about gender and family life in the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Aegean. She draws on ethnographic examples to show that matrilineal kinship does not automatically mean women ruled, a key distinction for better understanding how these early societies were structured. This lecture is sponsored by the National AIA organization.

Finding Bimini: The Unknown History of Ponce De Leon's Discovery
2025-10-16 19:00 - 20:00 (America/New_York) | Brinkman Center, Clark State College, 100 S Limestone St, Springfield, Ohio

Diving the Pyramids: Underwater Tombs and Excavation at the Royal Cemetery of Nuri, Sudan
2025-10-19 15:00 - 16:30 (America/Chicago) | Mitchell Hall, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 3202 Downer Avenue, Milwaukee, WI, 53211, United States
The Frederick R. and Margaret B. Matson Lectureship for Near Eastern Archaeology and Archaeological Technology

The Impact of Roman Military Presence on the Arid Landscapes of Southern Jordan and Israel
2025-10-19 15:00 - 17:00 (America/Chicago) | 118 St Johns College, University of Manitoba, 65 Chancellors Cir, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3T 2N2
Martha Sharp Joukowsky Lectureship

"Tutankhamun’s Funeral—What We Know from KV62"
2025-10-22 19:00 - 20:00 (America/New_York) | Rehm Library, College of the Holy Cross, 1 College St., Worcester, MA, 01610, United States
Dr. Nicholas R. Brown, a postdoctoral fellow in Egyptology at Yale University and director of excavations at the ancient site of Deir el-Ballas, will explore what the archaeological record reveals about the state funeral in ancient Egypt. Dr. Brown will analyze the unique funeral procession scene depicted in the tomb’s Burial Chamber and its connection to a funerary rite known as the “Awakening of Osiris.” This talk will show how these images and artifacts were meant to transform the king into a divine being. The talk begins at 7 PM in Rehm Library, College of the Holy Cross, but there will be a small welcome reception at 6:30 PM, immediately upstairs in the Moran Lounge.

AIA Archaeology Hour October 2025: Shipping Stone for Justinian’s Empire?
2025-10-22 20:00 - 21:00 (America/New_York) | https://www.archaeological.org/event/aia-archaeology-hour-october-2025-shipping-stone-for-justinians-empire/
Join the AIA for a fascinating evening with Justin Leidwanger as he gives the International Archaeology Day month AIA Archaeology Hour talk “Shipping Stone for Justinian’s Empire?”
This presentation will be given at 8pm Eastern/7pm Central/6pm Mountain/5pm Pacific.

Register here!

A High Altitude "Big Bang": Late Formative Period Archaeology of the Lake Titicaca Basin, Bolivia
2025-10-23 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York) | Concordia University, H533, 1455 Blvd. De Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, Quebec, H3G 1M8, Canada
Doris Z. Stone New World Archaeology Lectures

Archaeology and the Art Museum: How To Be an Archaeologically Informed Curator.
2025-10-23 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Chicago) | Chazen Museum of Art, University Avenue, Madison, WI, 53706, United States

Justinian’s Tree: Underwater Environmental Histories in Byzantine Harbors
2025-10-23 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Denver) | Hale Building, Room 260, University of Colorado, Boulder campus, 1350 Pleasant St, Boulder, CO, 80309, United States
Anna Marguerite McCann and Robert D. Taggart Lectureship in Underwater Archaeology

TBA (Denver)
2025-10-24 17:00 - 18:30 (America/Denver) | TBA (Denver 1), Denver, CO, United States
Anna Marguerite McCann and Robert D. Taggart Lectureship in Underwater Archaeology Time TBA

The Myth of Ariadne from the Labyrinth to the Walls of Pompeii
2025-10-25 10:00 - 11:30 (America/New_York) | Richard and Carole Cocks Art Museum at Miami University, 801 S. Patterson Ave, Oxford, Ohio, 45056
The Archaeological Institute of America- Dayton Society, Miami University Department of History, and the Richard and Carole Cocks Art Museum (RCCAM) at Miami University present the Archaeological Institute of America’s Peter H. von Blanckenhagen Memorial Lecture by Dr. Lillian Joyce, Associate Professor of Art History at The University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Most people are familiar with the story of Ariadne helping Theseus escape the Minotaur’s labyrinth, saving him from a situation not unlike the Hunger Games. Ariadne leaves Crete by necessity as well as for her love of Theseus. En route to Athens, they stop at the island of Naxos, where the exhausted Ariadne falls asleep. While she slumbers, Theseus sets sail and abandons her. Alone on the island, she is discovered by the wine god Dionysus and his entourage. Smitten, Dionysus makes Ariadne his consort. This story was explored by Greek writers from Homer onward, but as it comes into the Roman world, poets, patrons, and painters are more interested in the plight of Ariadne rather than the feats of Theseus. Ariadne captivates the Romans and she appears in a great variety of media: glass, gems, sculpture, mosaics, and especially Pompeiian wall painting where the complementary episodes of Ariadne’s abandonment and rescue are the single most common theme in central panel paintings. This talk will explore the strategies that artists employed to make the episodes recognizable and compelling and then expand out to examine the spaces in which Ariadne appears and think about how people experienced these images of the wronged maiden who becomes the consort of a god.

The Origins of the Alphabet and How It Spread Across the World
2025-10-28 08:00 - 17:00 (America/Chicago) | NY
Public Lecture by Professor Wayne T. Pitard
Abstract:
Essentially all of the alphabetic scripts in the world descend from a single script invented probably during the 20th century BCE by a Canaanite in the southern Levant. This lecture will provide a tour of the extraordinary development of the alphabet from its beginnings to its eventual spread across the Mediterranean and the world. We will examine the script’s origin and how the signs were conceptualized by their creator(s). We will look at the alphabet’s extension, first across the eastern Mediterranean where it developed into the distinctive Ugaritic, Phoenician, Hebrew, and Aramaic scripts, and then moved southward into the Arabian Peninsula, where it evolved into the Arabic system. Then we will examine how the early alphabet, which only expressed consonants, was revolutionized by the Greeks, who began using some of the letters as vowels. We will follow the development of the Greek alphabet into both the Latin and the Cyrillic alphabets that exist throughout Europe and much of northern Asia. Finally, we will touch upon the spread of the Arabic alphabet across northern Africa and eastward into India, and the Latin alphabet’s movement to the Americas and parts of southern Africa during the European colonial period of the 15th-20th centuries. All of this has made the alphabetic writing system the most widespread method of writing in the world.

From Berlin to Berkeley: The History of the Edward Gans Collection of Seals and Its Hidden Gems – a Ellen and Charles S. La Follette Lecture
2025-10-29 17:00 - 18:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | NY
The Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures currently houses the Edward Gans Collection of Seals, comprising almost seven hundred seals and seal-related objects from a variety of periods, extending from the Neolithic Middle East to Post-classical Mesoamerica. Since 2023, a new team of Berkeley scholars has been working on the collection to prepare it for digital publication, and this talk arises from the provenance research undertaken as part of that project. This talk will highlight the fascinating story of how the Gans Collection came to be and the legacy of Nazi persecution that shaped the collection’s history, while also featuring several Sasanian seals in the collection of particular significance. This is one of the annual Ellen and Charles S. La Follette Lectures.

Water Histories: How 8,000 Years of Fluctuating Lake Levels in North-Central Florida Affected Indigenous Land Use and Regional Interactions
2025-10-29 17:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | University of Florida, Smathers Library Room 100, 1508 Union Rd, Gainesville, FL, 32611, United States
Recent survey of a tract of public land on Lake Pithlachocco in Alachua County, Florida revealed an 8,000-year record of horizontal stratigraphy extending 500m from and 5m above the modern lake shore. The first half of this record reflects the mid-Holocene expansion of surface water regionally, but the second half reflects a regime of low-frequency, high-magnitude flooding to which lakeside dwellers adapted their land use. Besides affecting settlement choices, fluctuating surface water impacted the potential of regional travel by boat, connecting Lake Pithlachocco to places far afield during extreme hydroperiods and stranding it from flow during extreme droughts.

Reading Matthew’s Gospel in the Cemeteries of Roman Syria and Judea
2025-10-30 18:00 - 19:30 (America/Phoenix) | Zoom, Virtual, FL, 33155, United States
Why does the Gospel of Matthew prefer a different word for burials, taphoi, than the other New Testament gospels? And why does Matthew consistently revise his sources to describe Jesus’s burial as costly? Matthew emphasizes that Jesus was anointed with expensive spices and buried in a rich patron’s new tomb, which makes it appear as though he wanted to portray Jesus as receiving an elite burial. If, however, we read Matthew’s descriptions of burials in light of archaeological evidence of changing mortuary practices in provincial Syria and Judea, where the gospel was composed sometime in the late first century, his motives appear more complicated. Quick though he is to indicate that Jesus received a rich man’s burial, Matthew is clear that this did not include any of the lavish displays of status that were increasingly common on elite tombs in Matthew’s context. Through a critical analysis of both text and funerary archaeology, this presentation explores how the author of Matthew and his earliest audiences responded to and participated in cultural and socioeconomic changes induced by geopolitical shifts in the Roman East.
Biography
Dr. Tony Keddie is Associate Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Religions and Fellow of the Ronald Nelson Smith Chair in Classics and Christian Origins at the University of Texas at Austin. An award-winning social historian, Keddie’s interdisciplinary research focuses on the intersections of religion and economics in the Roman East, particularly among Jews and Christians in Judea and Asia Minor. He is the author of four books, including Class and Power in Roman Palestine; co-editor of five books, including Revelation and Material Religion in the Roman East; and author of more than two dozen articles.
Registration required. Follow this link to register: https://asu.zoom.us/meeting/register/wggxz9iBS2WOCEFg3nGIUA

Cantilevered Walkways—A Remarkable feat of Ancient Chinese Engineering
2025-11-02 14:00 - 15:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | NY
Dr. Lothar von Falkenhausen
Distinguished Professor of Chinese Archaeology and Art History
UCLA
To this day, the Qinling mountains in Shaanxi province, which separate the basin of the Yellow River from that of the Yangzi River, constitute a formidable geographical obstacle to communication on account of their almost unimaginably vertical cliffs. To facilitate inter-regional trade across the Qinling, cantilevered walkways (zhandao 棧道) were constructed since shortly after the middle of the first millennium BC. They were maintained more or less continuously throughout historical times, until the 20th century. Similar thoroughfares were also constructed in mountainous regions elsewhere in China. Recently their archaeological remains have become the subject of major survey projects. This paper presents some of what is currently known about these extraordinary feats of ancient Chinese engineering.

Founding the City: Carved Orthostats and Architectural Experimentation in Anatolia
2025-11-03 18:00 - 19:30 (America/Chicago) | Blegen 308, University of Cincinnati, 2602 McMicken Circle, Cincinnati, OH, 45221, United States

A Dealer, an Insurance Salesman, Seven University Museums, Eighty-Eight Investors, and Three Hundred Classical Antiquities: a Cautionary Tale – a Nancy Wilkie Lectureship in Archaeological Heritage
2025-11-05 17:00 - 18:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | https://www.archaeological.org/event/a-dealer-an-insurance-salesman-seven-university-museums-eighty-eight-investors-and-three-hundred-classical-antiquities-a-cautionary-tale-a-nancy-wilkie-lectureship-in-archaeological-her/
This virtual talk will recount a recently-uncovered story of an unusual, complex, decades-long antiquities investment scheme orchestrated by Royal-Athena Galleries, a prominent Manhattan-based antiquities dealer, that did not end well for most stakeholders. It will also examine the larger ethical implications of the story, raising questions about the relationship of museums to the art market. It also asks, is financial investing in art ever a good idea? This talk is sponsored by the Nancy Wilkie Lectureship in Archaeological Heritage.

Diving the Pyramids: Underwater Tombs and Excavation at the Royal Cemetery of Nuri, Sudan
2025-11-05 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York) | TBA (Knoxville), Knoxville, TN, United States

Nomads of the Desert and the Sea: Evidence from Prehistoric Burial Mounds in Qatar
2025-11-06 16:00 - 17:00 (America/New_York) | Tory Breezeway-1, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Harald Ingholt Lecture in Middle Eastern Archaeology
Lecturer: Dr. Richard Fletcher
Abstract: Prehistoric burial cairns have been a subject of archaeological investigation in Qatar since national development began in the 1950s. The study of various aspects of the burial mounds has yielded substantial evidence, with over 2,000 burials identified. Recent survey projects estimate a density of up to 10 mounds per km2 for the peninsula as a whole. A Qatar Museums project, in collaboration with Sidra Medicine, is testing this estimate through remote sensing to map the burial cairns, using aerial photography, satellite imagery, and LiDAR, and ground truthing results through field survey. Results for an area of 30,000 km2 in northern Qatar indicate 10,782 burials, with a clear pattern of preference in the north-west opposite the island of Bahrain.T he results of the project support the hypothesis that nomads in the desert of northern Qatar were moving between Bahrain and Qatar, probably on a seasonal basis.

Landscapes of Time and Memory: Foragers in the Mojave Desert
2025-11-06 17:30 - 19:00 (America/Chicago) | TBA (Lubbock), Lubbock, TX, United States

New Approaches to Roman Urbanism: The Excavations of the Falerii Novi Project (Lazio, Italy)
2025-11-06 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York) | Kelsey Museum, 434 State Street, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, United States
