Archaeological Institute of America

Meanwhile…at Giza: The Central Field Cemetery in the Fifth Dynasty
2025-10-19 15:00 - 16:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | https://www.archaeological.org/event/meanwhileat-giza-the-central-field-cemetery-in-the-fifth-dynasty/
The American Research Center in Egypt, Northern California chapter, and the UC Berkeley Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures invite you to attend a Zoom lecture by Julia Puglisi, Harvard University:
“Meanwhile…at Giza: The Central Field Cemetery in the Fifth Dynasty”
Sunday, October 19, 2025, 3 PM PDT
This virtual lecture will not be recorded.
Register in advance for this lecture:
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About the Lecture:
Despite the southern shift of the royal necropolises during the Fifth Dynasty, the Giza Plateau remained an important locus of non‐royal burials until the end of the Old Kingdom. While explanations for choosing Giza as a necropolis after the Fourth Dynasty range from royal cultic activity to the perpetuation of generational funerary traditions, the nearby settlements reveal a more complex picture of human activity on the plateau.
At the heart of this landscape lies the “Central Field,” a cemetery whose characteristic landscape originated from its use as a quarry basin for the construction of Khufu’s pyramid. While often cast in historiography as a Fourth Dynasty site, the Central Field is in fact dominated by tombs of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties. Despite its significance for understanding the broader history of the Giza Necropolis, the cemetery has not been extensively studied since the excavations of Selim Hassan (1886–1961) in the early twentieth century.
Drawing on my ongoing dissertation research, I here present new documentation from the Central Field, including several previously unpublished Fifth Dynasty mastabas and their unique adaptations to the quarried terrain. Case studies include the tombs of Khafreankh (G 8840) and Nisutpunetjer (G 8740), excavated prior to the Egyptian initiatives, alongside published monuments whose owners may be referenced in the Abusir archives: Rawer (G 8988) and Khuwiwer (G 8764 = LG 95). By combining an analysis of construction practices with the social history of those interred here, this lecture explores the Central Field to understand the enduring draw of the Giza after the construction of its pyramids.
About the Speaker:
Julia Viani Puglisi received her B.A. in Classical Languages at the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in Egyptology at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is currently completing her PhD at Harvard University, where her dissertation, “Transformation at the Giza Pyramids: The Central Field Cemetery,” examines landscape change in the quarry-cemetery of the Central Field.
Since 2022, Puglisi has been working in the Central Field at Giza with the support of an American Research Center in Egypt-Council of American Overseas Research Centers Fellowship (2022–2024) and the Margaret Weyerhaeuser Jewett Memorial Fellowship (2024). Her research investigates how anthropogenic sites are maintained, reused, and transformed over time. Drawing on archaeological documentation and 3D modeling, she traces these changes to reconstruct a social history of the Giza Plateau after the pyramids were built. As a member of the Giza Project at Harvard, Puglisi is producing improved site maps for use by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, while also working to protect the cemetery from human and environmental threats.
About Northern California ARCE:
For more information, please visit https://www.youtube.com/@NorthernCaliforniaARCE, https://www.facebook.com/NorthernCaliforniaARCE, https://arce-nc.org, https://bsky.app/profile/khentiamentiu.bsky.social, and https://khentiamentiu.org. To join the chapter or renew your membership, please go to https://arce.org/membership/ and select “Berkeley, CA” as your chapter when you sign up.

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

Living in the Glen of Sorrow: an archaeology of life before and after the 1692 Massacre of Glencoe
2025-10-20 10:00 - 11:00 (Europe/London) | Online by Zoom, United Kingdom
This talk will explore the archaeology of Glencoe, among Scotland’s most famous and iconic glens, home to the MacDonald clan and setting for the Glencoe Massacre of 1692. Based on archaeological fieldwork by researchers from the National Trust for Scotland, University of Glasgow and Archaeology Scotland at settlement sites dating to the 17th and 18th centuries we will explore the lives of those who called Glencoe home in this period, the events of the Glencoe massacre and the material remains this tragic event left behind, and how people returned to this landscape to live again along the waters of Coe.
This will be a journey through everyday artefacts and moments which defined the fate of a country.
Dr Edward C Stewart, Archaeology Scotland

The Lumbee River Archaeology Project (LRAP)
2025-10-21 19:30 - 20:30 (America/New_York) | Semans Auditorium (Room 117), Belk Visual Arts Center, Davidson College, 315 N. Main St., Davidson, NC, 28036, United States
About the lecture:
The Lumbee Tribe, one of the largest tribes in the US, has a rich history in the Carolinas, yet a recent executive memorandum from President Trump has reignited debates around federal recognition policies. This talk will situate the current discourse around the Lumbee Tribe within the historical framework of evolving federal policies on recognition, and introduce the Lumbee River Archaeology Project. Founded in 2024 in collaboration with the Lumbee Tribal Historic Preservation Office (THPO), LRAP aims to provide archaeological training to the THPO staff, document and preserve ancestral sites, pursue research questions developed with tribal leaders, and share our findings with the community in addition to publishing in academic journals.
About the speaker:
An anthropological archaeologist, Dr. Seth Grooms works primarily in the Eastern Woodlands of North America. His research focuses on crafting archaeological narratives of Native histories that are, as much as possible, informed by Native American perspectives. He uses methods from geoarchaeology, landscape archaeology, and chronological modeling, and he interprets the resulting data within a theoretical framework comprising traditional anthropological theory as well as Native American philosophies and epistemologies. Grooms’ work in Mississippi and Louisiana has focused on early monumentality in North America at sites that participated in the Poverty Point phenomenon (ca. 4500-3000 cal yr BP). His interests in community-based archaeology led him to work with the Crow Tribe (Apsáalooke) in Montana in 2016. Dr. Grooms’ most recent project is the Lumbee River Archaeology Project.

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!

Windows on the Ancient Mediterranean: Glass and Society
2025-10-23 17:30 - 18:30 (America/Chicago)
A lecture co-sponsored by Tulane University’s Department of Classical Studies & the New Orleans Society of the AIA
Dr. Allison Sterrett-Krause, College of Charleston (SC) will lecture on Roman glass
As archaeologists, we are all familiar with artifacts of daily life, like pottery vessels, and artworks, like architecture, statues, mosaics, and wall paintings, from the ancient world. Glass straddled the line between artwork and object of daily life in the Greek and Roman worlds. We often see glass in museum collections and marvel at its beauty and preservation, but we rarely learn about this material in our studies. In this lecture, we’ll use glass as a lens to explore ancient society. We will investigate religious and commemorative practices, evidence for recycling and trade, the use of glass vessels as a social marker, and—of course—windows.
NOTE: a photo ID is needed for entry into the university library.

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

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)
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.

Preserving Cultural Heritage & Uncovering Hidden Histories: USACE Walla Walla Archaeology
2025-10-30 17:00 - 18:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Whitman College Maxey Hall 207, 173 Stanton St., Walla Walla, WA, 99362, United States
Please join us to hear a talk by Leah Bonstead and Scott Hall, archaeologists with the Walla Walla district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). Preservation and exploration of local and regional histories is a critical and often overlooked responsibility of federal organizations. At USACE, archaeologists are dedicated to the ethical stewardship of cultural heritage, working closely with tribes, environmental planners, engineers, and state historical-resource organizations. Come learn more about the work of our Walla Walla district archaeologists in this endeavor.

Reading Matthew’s Gospel in the Cemeteries of Roman Syria and Judea
2025-10-30 18:00 - 19:30 (America/Phoenix) | Zoom, 4985 SW 74th Court, Miami, 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

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
Charles Eliot Norton Memorial Lectureship

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

Archive Archaeology at Karanis: Recontextualizing the Michigan Documentation in Three Dimensions
2025-11-06 17:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | Ellis Library Auditorium, 520 S 9th St, Columbia, MO, 65201, United States
The Archaelogical Institute of America (AIA) Central Missouri Society is co-sponsoring with the Classics, Archaeology, and Religion (CAR) Department a guest lecture by Dr. Tyler Johnson on November 6th at 5:30 pm with a reception beforehand at 5pm in the Ellis Library auditorium. Dr. Johnson will be presenting “Archive Archaeology at Karanis: Recontextualizing the Mighigan Documentation in Three Dimensions”, and he will be exploring the challenges and possibilities of conducting “archive archaeology” at Karansis, creating new tools for exploring, cross-referencing, and reinterpreting this essential legacy dataset.
Although far from modern standards, the University of Michigan excavations at Karanis (1924–1935) employed advanced recording techniques for their time. Documenting the site’s evolution through a system of “levels,” the excavators left behind a dense archival record of photographs, tables, notes, drawings, plans, artifact inventories, and survey results. Housed at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, this documentation has been consulted for a century but never systematically analyzed or disseminated. The most authoritative source remains an unfinished manuscript by Enoch Peterson (professor at Michigan from 1924–1962), never published or made publicly available.
Today, a revival of interest in Karanis has created a demand for better curation and accessibility of these records. In response, researchers at the Kelsey Museum are leading a digital initiative with two objectives. First, drawing upon legacy survey data and new radiocarbon results, we are using the game engine Unity to reconstruct and reinterpret the site’s chronological evolution in three dimensions. Second, we are transforming Peterson’s manuscript and related materials into an interactive, open-access resource. These collaborative efforts between Kelsey researchers, staff, graduate, and undergraduate students go beyond digitization, requiring the restructuring and reassessment of excavation data within an updated framework.
As we integrate new insights and methodologies, our work sometimes calls the Michigan excavators’ original interpretations into question. This raises the need to balance faithful preservation of archival materials with that of reassessing the excavation results through contemporary archaeological lenses. This paper explores the challenges and possibilities of conducting “archive archaeology” at Karanis, creating new tools for exploring, cross-referencing, and reinterpreting this essential legacy dataset.

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

TBA (New Brunswick)
2025-11-07 17:00 - 18:30 (America/Halifax) | TBA (New Brunswick), Fredericton, New Brunswick
Time TBA

Sparta and Totalitarianism
2025-11-09 14:00 - 15:00 (America/New_York) | 303 Paterson Hall, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Speaker: Susan Downie – Carleton University
The ancient Greek city-state of Sparta has never really left the imagination of western civilization. From political philosophers like Plato and Aristotle to modern political parties such as Greece’s Χρυσή Αυγή “Golden Dawn”, the Spartan state and its citizens have represented an ideal for which to strive. What elements of the ancient Spartan state and society have made it the poster-child for modern Totalitarianism? Given the significant problems with our sources about ancient Sparta, can we ever understand exactly how the state and its citizens functioned, or must we forever deal with the “Spartan mirage”?
There will also be an initial talk by Christos Zigoumis on Mani and Cephalonia: Survey and Excavation.

Book talk & Signing - Yearning for Immortality: The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife
2025-11-09 15:00 - 16:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | ARCE Egyptology Lectures Room 254 Social Sciences Building, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, California, 94720, United States
The American Research Center in Egypt, Northern California chapter, and the UC Berkeley Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures invite you to attend a book talk and signing by Dr. Rune Nyord, Emory University:
“Yearning for Immortality: The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife”
Sunday November 9, 2025, 3 PM Pacific Standard Time
MELC Lounge, Room 254 Social Sciences Building, UC Berkeley
Because of nearby construction, please allow extra time to park your vehicle.
This is an in-person lecture and is not virtual. No registration is required.
The lecture will be recorded for later publication on the chapter’s YouTube channel.
About the Lecture:
The overall model for understanding the ancient Egyptian afterlife in scholarship and popular culture alike is well known: The ancient Egyptians believed in a post-mortem judgement that would determine their fate in the afterlife, being either rewarded with an eternal life of bliss or punished with painful annihilation. However, in my new book Yearning for Immortality, I argue that for the most part these ideas were in place well before the decipherment of hieroglyphs and thus draw more on Greek and especially Christian frameworks for life after death than on ancient Egyptian ones, meaning that our model for understanding the Egyptian afterlife is due for a fundamental rethinking. This lecture covers some of the main results presented in Yearning for Immortality before turning to the question, raised only briefly in the last chapter of the book, of what such a rethinking might look like. If we cannot read texts like the “Book of the Dead” as straightforward descriptions of the Egyptian afterlife, then what sources can we draw on to get a sense of ancient Egyptian ideas of life and death? And correspondingly, what strategies for reading and viewing funerary texts and art can we use to approximate an indigenous understanding as opposed to one projecting Western models of postmortem existence?
About the Speaker:
Dr. Rune Nyord is Associate Professor of Ancient Egyptian Art and Archaeology at Emory University, where he is also Chair of the Art History Department. His research focuses on conceptions and experiences of representation, ontology, and personhood in ancient Egypt, especially as evidenced in funerary culture, and drawing on a combination of archaeological and textual sources. He is also interested in the history of the discipline of Egyptology and ways in which it continues to influence contemporary practices and interpretations. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of several books, the most recent being the monograph Yearning for Immortality: The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife (Chicago 2025) and a co-edited special issue of Interdisciplinary Egyptology titled Egyptology in Dialogue (Vienna, 2025).
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Parking is available in UC lots all day on weekends, for a fee. Ticket dispensing machines accept debit or credit cards. Parking is available in lots around the Social Sciences Building, and in lots along Bancroft. A map of the campus is available online at http://www.berkeley.edu/map/ .
About Northern California ARCE:
For more information, please visit https://www.youtube.com/@NorthernCaliforniaARCE, https://www.facebook.com/NorthernCaliforniaARCE, https://bsky.app/profile/khentiamentiu.bsky.social, and https://khentiamentiu.org. To join the chapter or renew your membership, please go to https://arce.org/membership/ and select “Berkeley, CA” as your chapter when you sign up.

The Shipwreck at Gnalić – Gagliana Grossa (1569-1583)
2025-11-11 18:30 - 19:30 (America/New_York) | Math & Science Center, W201, 400 Dowman Dr NE, Atlanta, 30322, United States
The George F. Bass Lectures

Decoding the Pyramid Statues of King Menkaure
2025-11-12 18:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Florence Dunn Friedman, Visiting Scholar, Department of Egyptology and Assyriology, Brown University
King Menkaure’s Fourth Dynasty pyramid temples at Giza were once filled with statues. The surviving statues represent some of the finest in ancient Egyptian sculpture. Crafted for eternity, these statues served as “bodies” through which the king could function in this life and the next. The iconography, inscriptions, figural groupings, stances, gestures, and even the damage of these statues have stories to tell. While these stories rarely involved ordinary Egyptians, certain statue details hint at far-reaching economic ties that did. This talk dives into the mysteries behind Menkaure’s sculptures—exploring their symbolism, damage, and relocation—and reveals how much they still have to say, even after thousands of years.
Advance registration recommended for online and in-person attendance.
Free admission. Free event parking at the 52 Oxford Street Garage starting at 4:00 pm. Presented by the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East and the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture.

AIA Archaeology Hour November 2025: The People's Arena
2025-11-12 20:00 - 21:00 (America/New_York) | https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/1117571134992/WN_obR16xWNSO6l2B2JHgfShg
Join the AIA for a fascinating evening with Alison Futrell as she gives the International Archaeology Day month AIA Archaeology Hour talk “The People’s Arena.”
This presentation will be given at 8pm Eastern/7pm Central/6pm Mountain/5pm Pacific.

Register here!

The Shipwreck at Gnalić – Gagliana Grossa (1569-1583)
2025-11-13 16:00 - 18:30 (America/New_York) | Wellesley College, Founders Hall 120, 106 Central St, Wellesley, MA, 02481, United States

The Rape of the Sabines: Myth and History in the Urban Development of Republican Rome
2025-11-13 17:00 - 18:30 (America/New_York) | TBA (Hartford 1), Hartford, CT, United States
Martha Sharp Joukowsky Lectureship Time TBA

Ancient Egypt In Its African Context and at a Crossroads
2025-11-14 18:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | Architecture School, UVA, CAM 160, 110 Bayly Dr, Charlottesville, VA, 22903, United States
Shomarka Keita, a biological anthropologist affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution and the Institute for Historical Biology, William and Mary, has written extensively on identity and biology in Egypt and Nubia. Egypt is in the northeastern corner of Africa, in essence a 930 mi linear oasis in the eastern Sahara. Due to the history of Egypt’s exploration and reception by the European gaze, it has traditionally been regarded as ‘Western’ or ‘Near Eastern’, divorced from its place of emergence and cultural connections with Africa. This lecture will address the origins of ancient Egyptian culture including aspects of its interconnections with Nubia. Evidence from linguistics, biology and archaeology will be explored.

The Second Style at Saqqara during the Late Old Kingdom and First Intermediate Period: Results of an Investigation and New Observations
2025-11-15 15:30 - 17:00 (America/New_York) | PA, United States
Saturday, October 15
3:30 pm EST
Penn Museum, Anthro Classroom 345
In-person; no registration required
Speaker: Dr. Valentina Anselmi, PhD, UPenn
Title: The Second Style at Saqqara during the Late Old Kingdom and First Intermediate Period: Results of an Investigation and New Observations
Abstract:
In the late Old Kingdom, an unusual corpus of artistic production, royal and non-royal, appeared on the scene. Funerary statuary and reliefs from that time display atypical proportions when depicting aspects of the human form: limbs appear longer, eyes and heads seem larger. Overall, these changes, which appear to distort traditional canons, exude pervasive dynamism and expressiveness. In the past, art historians and Egyptologists dismissed the phenomenon as “bad art” resulting from political decentralization and cultural decline. Then two scholars in particular, Edna Russmann and Edward Brovarski, reevaluated these artistic productions, assessing them as voluntary innovations. Such manner of representation has been called the “Second Style.” The research for my dissertation set out to review the phenomenon in theoretical terms and determined its existence, assessing and verifying known occurrences of the style in statuary and relief at Saqqara, as well as surveying the archaeological context for unreported occurrences. The finds revealed an early onset of the style with diffused use of its idiosyncratic elements during the Fifth Dynasty, which seemingly emerged in the royal workshops as early as the reign of Raneferef, per Prakash’s previous assessment of the phenomenon in the royal realm. During the Sixth Dynasty, the style found favor with the courtiers, with its employment in private statuary reaching its peak during the reign of Pepy II. The Second Style then continued to exert its influence on the production of statuary and relief of the Middle and Upper Egyptian sites, in particular during the First Intermediate Period and well into the early Middle Kingdom, when the artistic representations of the upcoming Theban dynasty show some of the style characteristics. This lecture will cover the finds of my research, which has further extended to investigating female representation during the same time period, as well as the appearance of nude statues that is also associated with the Late Old Kingdom and the First Intermediate Period.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Valentina Anselmi is a recent PhD in the Graduate Program in Egyptology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Her dissertation, An Investigation of the So-Called Second Style at Saqqara in the Later Old Kingdom and First Intermediate Period, examines shifts in artistic conventions during a critical time in ancient Egyptian history. With an M.Phil. in Egyptology from Penn and a B.A. from the American University in Cairo, she has also received the Felix J. Korsyn Prize in Egyptology. Her teaching experience includes courses on Art and Architecture in Ancient Egypt and Coptic. Her research and public engagement work include fieldwork at Abydos, a recently published article on a Ka-statue at the Glencairn Museum, and ongoing museum experience at the Penn Museum. Her work has also explored the use of 3D imagining to better understand the nature of Egyptian art.
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Lectures are FREE to ARCE Members, $7 for University of Pennsylvania Museum Members and UPenn Staff and Faculty, $5 for Students with ID, and $10 for the general public.
Light refreshments served starting at 3pm.
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The American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) is a private, nonprofit organization founded in 1948 by a consortium of educational and cultural institutions to support research on all aspects of Egyptian history and culture, foster broader knowledge among the general public, and strengthen American-Egyptian cultural ties. The ARCE Pennsylvania Chapter (ARCE-PA) is the local branch of the national institution. We host monthly events including scholarly lectures, Egyptian-themed workshops, social events, and guided tours of the Penn Museum’s Egyptian galleries. For more information or to learn about the perks of membership, please send an e-mail to info@arce-pa.org, or visit our website at www.arce-pa.org.
