AIA Archaeology Hour January 2026: NAGPRA as a Path to Healing and Reciprocity
2026-01-28 20:00 (America/New_York)
Join the AIA for the first AIA Archaeology Hour talk of the new year as new AIA President Brian I. Daniels hosts Danyelle Means for “NAGPRA as a Path to Healing and Reciprocity.”
This presentation will be given at 8pm Eastern/7pm Central/6pm Mountain/5pm Pacific.
Have you noticed empty exhibit cases at museums over the past two years as museums move to comply with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)?
Means’ presentation reframes NAGPRA not as a legal obligation but as a vital opportunity for healing, reciprocity, and relationship-building between archaeologists, museums, and Indigenous communities. Drawing from Indigenous perspectives, the talk explores how NAGPRA challenges institutions to move beyond compliance and toward practices rooted in respect, sovereignty, and shared stewardship. By centering Native voices and experiences, this session invites the audience to consider how honoring ancestors and returning cultural items can transform the field into one of accountability, trust, and long-term collaboration.
Register here!

Dr. Stephen Humphreys zoom lecture about the Camden Revolutionary War battlefield.
2026-01-31 14:00 - 15:30 (America/Chicago)
Dr. Stephen Humphreys is the CEO of American Veterans Archaeological Recovery program. One of his projects involves the Camden Revolutionary War battlefield.

Founding the City: Carved Orthostats and Architectural Experimentation in Anatolia
2026-02-03 18:30 - 19:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Reed College, Performing Arts Building (PAB) 320, 3017 SE Woodstock Blvd., Portland, OR, 97202, United States
Charles Eliot Norton Memorial Lectureship

Provenance Research in the Fight Against Looting
2026-02-07 08:00 - 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | ARCE-NC Lectures, Rm 126 Social Sciences Bldg., UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 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 Zoom lecture by Sara Aly, Griffith Institute:
“Provenance Research in the Fight Against Looting”
Sunday, February 22 2026, 3 PM PST
Register in advance for this lecture:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/MvauTi1wT0OHniyDLJXJHw
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the lecture.
There are a few things you should know before you join the lecture:
* Advance registration is required. When you click on the link to “Register in advance for this lecture” you will receive instructions by email on how and when to join, along with a link on which you will click to join the meeting. Save the email, as you will need the link it contains to join the meeting. Please register now. Please do not share the join link with anyone, it is unique to your email address. Try to join at least 10 minutes before the meeting. When you do join the meeting, be prepared to be put in the waiting room until the lecture starts at 3 pm. This is a security measure.
* If you haven’t already installed Zoom, you should download and install the Zoom program (app) well before you try to join the meeting. There IS an option to use your web browser to join the meeting instead of the Zoom program, but the browser interface is limited and depends greatly on what browser and what operating system you’re using.
* For tutorials on how to use Zoom, go to https://learn-zoom.us/show-me. In particular, “Joining a Zoom Meeting” should show you what you need to do to join our lecture.
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If you have any questions, please email glenn@glennmeyer.net or arcencZoom@gmail.com.
About the Lecture:
Since the days when the pharaohs ruled over Egypt, funerary materials have been affected by the greed of people. An enormous amount of wealth was invested in preparations for the afterlife, but often this richness represented by gold and precious minerals in the funerary equipment became the booty of many, rather than the resting place for one. Unfortunately, the scale of destruction due to the ongoing looting is greater today than ever and several illegally sourced artefacts from Egypt constantly appear on the art market. Authorities consistently work to detect these objects by tracing the activity of dealers and galleries, but a lot still needs to be done. Source countries require tougher laws and international legislation needs to become stricter. Moreover, the knowledge of specialists must be employed in a systematic way to assist in the rescue of these objects. Museum curators should implement due diligence, learn about the art market, and understand how to conduct provenance research. This practice helps with the identification of looted artefacts by analysing an object and comparing it with published examples of the same kind, allowing its origins to be identified and some lost archaeological context to be recovered.
About the Speaker:
Sara Aly’s research focuses on the circulation of illicitly sourced Egyptian artefacts on the art market, following a collaboration that started 6 years ago with the Circulating Artefacts project at the British Museum. Her MA dissertation at the University of Manchester (2023) examined upper coffin fragments appearing on the art market. Since 2023, she has been a member of the Franco-Egyptian Archaeological Mission of Western Thebes, working at the Ramesseum, where she analyses coffin and cartonnage fragments. From 2023 to 2025 she worked as an Art Market Expert at the British Museum helping to identify and recover missing items from the museum’s collection. Now based at the Griffith Institute, Sara is studying the archival material of J.J. Clère related to his documentation of Egyptian objects in the possession of antiquities dealers and collectors between the 1930s and the 1980s.
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.

“What Do We Owe to Already-Looted Objects?”
2026-02-09 18:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | Jepson Hall, Room 118, Richmond Way 221, Richmond, VA, 23226, United States
Lecture by Elizabeth Marlowe, Professor of Art History and Chair of the Art department at Colgate University
(https://www.archaeological.org/lecturer/elizabeth-marlowe/)

Daniel Healey, Provenance Researcher, Worcester Art Museum: "Orphaned Antiquities & Cold Case Files: Investigating Provenance in the New Era of Museum Restitution"
2026-02-09 18:30 - 20:00 (America/New_York)
The Clarence and Anne Dillon Dunwalke Lecture
Provenance refers to an artwork’s history of ownership, from the time of its creation or archaeological discovery to the present. Provenance researchers track down a wide range of sources—scholarship, auction catalogs, financial records, inventories, correspondence, photographs, markings on artworks themselves, and more—to reconstruct an object’s past and retrace its path to the museum. This work has been compared to that of an investigator, and provenance researchers routinely described as “art detectives.” Over the past decade, these metaphors have become increasingly relevant as law-enforcement agencies across the U.S. have arrested dealers, seized antiquities from the nation’s leading museums, and made hundreds of repatriations to countries around the world—all to great fanfare and press coverage. The collision between the worlds of law enforcement and museums has revolutionized the field of provenance research and redefined the standards of ethical and legal collecting in this country. As a former Antiquities Trafficking Analyst for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and now the Provenance Research Specialist at the Worcester Art Museum, I will share stories from the frontlines of provenance research—stories of looting, forgery, and repatriation—that explain why museums need “art detectives” now more than ever.

COZA/COSANO/COZANO: Socio-Economuc Interactions among Middle Republican Cities in Central Italy
2026-02-12 17:30 - 18:30 (America/New_York) | Kirkhof Center, room 2270, Grand Valley State University, Allendale campus, Allendale, MI, 49401, United States
Join us for discussion of innovative new approaches to the study of ancient coins! Dr. Melissa Ludke will discuss her numismatic work at early Roman Cosa and beyond. Dr. Ludke serves as Numismatic Specialist at the the Cosa (Terme) Excavations. She has published several papers on numismatics and is working on a book about Cosa during the Middle Republic.
The Latin colony of Cosa has long experienced archaeological investigation and, more recently, re-analysis, but Cosa’s earliest history remains elusive. However, new numismatic evidence from Cosa is raising interesting questions. Who was minting these coins, why do they appear at certain regional centers and nowhere else, and do these small objects represent larger processes of network connectivity? Dr. Ludke addresses these questions and more, using a geospatial network-based approach through QGIS, and a Least-Cost Path analysis to track potential socio-economic interactions between Cosa and contemporaneous regional centers.

Linda Cordell and Her Many Contributions to Southwest Archaeology
2026-02-17 18:30 - 20:00 (America/New_York) | Pecos Trail Café, 2239 Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe, NM, 87505, United States
(Lecturers: Dr. Maxine McBrinn and Dr. Judith Habicht Mauche) Linda Cordell was extraordinarily active in southwestern archaeology during her resources in the work of others. Because of this, her influence extended well beyond her own students to those of many of her colleagues. One of her last personal endeavors was working with the Tijeras Pueblo Ceramics Project. Examples of her prodigious influence on archaeological research will be presented.

Public Lecture: Professor Jean-Michel Roessli (Department of Theological Studies, Concordia University)
2026-02-19 18:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | Concordia University, H 411, 1455 De Maisonneuve Blvd W, Montreal, QC, H3G-1M8, Canada
On Thursday, February 19th, Professor Jean-Michel Roessli (Department of Theological Studies, Concordia University) will deliver a presentation entitled, Orpheus in Early Judaism and Early Christianity: Texts and Images. The talk will take place at 600pm in Hall Building 411 (SGW).

U-2 Over Egypt: A Remote Survey of the Nile Delta using Cold War Aerial Photography
2026-02-19 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York) | University of Louisville Center for Archaeology and Cultural Heritage (CACHe), 1606 Rowan Street, Louisville, KY, 40203, United States
The KY Society of the AIA and the University of Louisville Department of Anthropology present a free public lecture by Dr. Oren Siegel (University of Toronto). During the height of the Cold War, the United States flew a series of reconnaissance missions using U-2 spy planes over Egypt. Film negatives from two flights that cover much of the Nile Valley and Nile Delta from 1959 have recently been declassified, and the resulting imagery is both earlier and higher resolution than publicly available CORONA satellite imagery. This talk will discuss the ongoing work by the Brown-Toronto U2 Aerial Photography of Egypt Project to digitize this imagery from the National Archives and Records Administration and make these photographs publicly available to all interested researchers. Beyond this, I will showcase the results of our ongoing remote survey of Beheira Governorate using U-2 imagery, highlighting how this imagery gives us a unique window onto a landscape that has changed significantly over the last 5 decades. The talk will close by looking at how this compares to other satellite imagery and aerial photography and highlight the potential of this dataset for archaeological research.

Egyptian Blue, humanity’s first inorganic pigment
2026-02-19 18:30 - 20:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, 2316 W 1st Ave, Spokane, WA, 99201, United States
Join us for a lecture by Professor John McCloy, Washington State University, who will present results of an investigation into the materials science and processing parameters to fabricate Egyptian blue faience.
Recently, our group at Washington State University, with the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Museum Conservation Institute, recreated Egyptian blue to uncover the science behind its color, ranging from gray or green to deep blue. We produced 12 versions of Egyptian blue and compared them with artifacts, using advanced X-ray techniques, spectroscopy, and quantitative color measurements. We found Egyptian blue is a complex mixture of phases, with hue controlled by particle size, glass content, and cuprorivaite–silica ratios. Even small changes in materials or heating could dramatically shift its color.
These findings reveal ancient craftspeople as skilled materials scientists. Beyond cultural insights and conservation, Egyptian blue’s infrared glow continues to inspire modern technologies, linking past creativity with future innovation.

Digging in Circles: Miami's Prehistoric Legacy
2026-02-21 15:00 - 16:30 (America/New_York) | Palm Beach Museum of Natural History, the Mall at Wellington Green, 10300 Forest Hill Blvd., Wellington, FL, 33414, United States
Martha Sharp Joukowsky Lectureship

Piramesse – from the City of Wonders to Terra Incognita
2026-02-21 15:30 - 17:00 (America/New_York) | Online via Zoom, PA, United States
Saturday, February 21
3:30 pm EST
Virtual on ZOOM
FREE lecture; RSVP required for Zoom link
Speaker: Dr. Henning Franzmeier, Senior Research Associate, The Cyprus Institute, Nicosia
Title: Piramesse – from the City of Wonders to Terra Incognita
Abstract:
Where today just a typical Egyptian village is located, surrounded by fertile, green fields, 3300 years ago, Ramesses II founded his capital Piramesse. In contrast to Akhenaton’s Akhetaton, Piramesse was not founded at a virgin site but instead Ramesses II chose a site with a lot of tradition to which he could connect. During his long reign, the city became the one of the largest settlements not only of Egypt but the whole koiné spanning the Eastern Mediterranean and Western Asia. Texts portray Piramesse as a place where food is abundant, where temples and colossal statues were erected, and where the king would receive the envoys bringing the silver tablet with the famous peace treaty with the Hittite Empire. A few years later, the king received his Hittite wife after the god Seth had made winter become summer so that the long journey could be finished safely. Moreover, it was a military headquarters and center of trade between Egypt and the outside world. When entering Egypt, Piramesse was the first city the traveler would have seen, serving as a showcase and a stage of pharaoh’s power.
But what does remain of the city and what can we say after nearly a century of excavations? And what happened so that the memory of Piramesse only survived via its mention in the bible as Ramses, while the location remained disputed and was only identified by Mahmoud Hamza in 1930?
This lecture will tell the biography of Piramesse from its beginnings before Ramesses II through its heydays in the 19th Dynasty until its decline when it finally vanished almost completely from the surface after the end of the New Kingdom. Using the results of the excavations since 1928, the major features of the city will be shown and finds will be used to illustrate the long and rich history of the city.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Henning Franzmeier has been working at Qantir-Piramesse for the past 20 years and directed the excavations since 2015. Over the past ten years, he has taught at UCL Qatar in Doha, the University of Innsbruck, and the University of Bologna, and also worked for the Humboldt-University in Berlin and The Cyprus Institute in Nicosia. In 2014, he received his PhD from the Free University of Berlin with a thesis on the New Kingdom cemeteries at the Middle Egyptian site of Sedment – a reassessment of the 1920/21 excavations of William Matthew Flinders Petrie. His MA thesis at the University of Göttingen dealt with a well of Ramesses II at Samana near Qantir-Piramesse. His interests range from settlement archaeology to the history of Egyptology and the analysis of funerary assemblages.
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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.

Bone by Bone: The Commingled Remains from the Tomb at Tell Abraq, UAE (2200-2000 BC)
2026-02-22 17:00 - 18:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Santa Rosa Junior College Campus, Petaluma, CA
Charles Eliot Norton Memorial Lectureship Time TBA

Petra's Forgotten Past
2026-02-24 19:30 - 21:00 (America/Vancouver) | Buchanan A202, Unversity of British Columbia, 1866 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z1, Canada

The Elk Ridge Community in the Mimbres Pueblo World
2026-02-25 17:00 - 18:30 (America/New_York) | University of Florida, Smathers Library Room 100, 1508 Union Rd, Gainesville, FL, 32611, United States

Life, Death, and Disease: Insights form Petra’s Tombs and Cemeteries
2026-02-26 17:00 - 18:30 (America/New_York) | UMass Amherst, Herter Hall 301, 161 Presidents Drive, Amherst, MA, 01003, United States
Kershaw Lectures in Near East Archaeology
Dr. Megan Perry, “Life, Death, and Disease: Insights from Petra’s Tombs and Cemeteries”
Thursday, February 26 at 5:00pm Eastern
UMass Amherst, Herter Hall 301
For Zoom attendance, register here: https://umass-amherst.zoom.us/meeting/register/GD44nDLmTwKs_QZUh44AFw
ABSTRACT
Ensconced within the sandstone hills of southern Jordan, evidence from mortuary structures in the ancient Nabataean city of Petra tells powerful stories about life, illness, death, and commemoration of its residents. This talk will focus on their experiences across the life course through bioarchaeological evidence of disease, diet, and immigration from the skeletal remains recovered from tombs within the city. In addition, evidence of mortuary behaviors within these tombs will reveal the rich and varied forms of remembrance after their deaths. This integrated approach, shifting away from Petra’s temples and monuments, offers new perspectives on resilience, identity, and memory in a dynamic ancient city.
SPEAKER BIO
Dr. Perry is a Professor of Biological Anthropology at East Carolina University. She teaches courses on human osteology, death and disease in Classical antiquity, and human diseases and ancient environments. Most of her research focuses on 1st century B.C. – 7th century A.D. Jordan, but she supervises graduate students interested in numerous aspects of bioarchaeology. She has been working on archaeological projects in Jordan for 30 years and is a member of the Board of Trustees of the American Center of Research (ACOR) in Amman, Jordan. She is currently Director of the Petra North Ridge Project, which focuses on the excavation of 1st century A.D. tombs and 1st – 4th century domestic structures.
This year’s AIA National Lecture (Kershaw Lectures in Near East Archaeology) is co-sponsored by the AIA–Western Massachusetts Society and the UMass Amherst Department of Classics.

New Approaches to Roman Urbanism: The Excavations of the Falerii Novi Project (Lazio, Italy)
2026-02-26 17:30 - 18:30 (America/Chicago) | University of Missouri, Mumford Hall 133, Mumford Hall, Columbia, 65201, United States

Soldier Burials, Landscapes, and Memory in Early Iron Age Greece
2026-02-26 18:00 - 19:00 (America/Denver)

Spectacles of Cultural Heritage Destruction in Global Media
2026-02-28 18:00 - 19:30 (America/Chicago) | https://www.archaeological.org/event/spectacles-of-cultural-heritage-destruction-in-global-media/

Highland, Lowland: Chlorite Landscapes of the Iranian Plateau in the Third Millennium BCE (Lecture by Breton Langendorfer)
2026-03-02 16:30 - 18:00 (America/New_York) | Princeton University Art Museum – Tuttle Lecture Hall (Room 134), 45 Elm Drive, Princeton, NJ, 08544, United States
In 2001, flooding near the city of Jiroft in southeastern Iran exposed a vast Bronze Age cemetery. Large quantities of vessels made from a dark soft stone known as chlorite or steatite began to appear on antiquities markets, the majority of which were successfully repatriated by Iranian authorities. These events spurred new archaeological exploration in the Jiroft area, leading to the discovery of a previously unknown urban polity located just south of the modern city in the valley of the Halil Rud river. The discovery also prompted scholars to recontextualize these distinct objects, found across the Middle East in the later 3rd millennium BCE and formerly referred to by the appellation “Intercultural Style,” as grave goods of the so-called Jiroft Civilization. This project explores the aesthetic values expressed within this class of artifacts, using an example now held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a window into evocations of sensory experience, funerary otherworlds, and an extremely early tradition of landscape depiction I argue they present.
This Robert J. Braidwood Lecture is presented by Breton Langendorfer.

Decorating for Death
2026-03-03 17:00 - 18:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | TBA (Eugene), Eugene, OR
Time TBA

TBA (Hawaii (Honolulu))
2026-03-05 17:00 - 18:30 (America/New_York) | TBA (Honolulu), Honolulu, HI

Petra's Forgotten Past: Uncovering the Iron Age Foundations of Nabataean Society 2
2026-03-05 17:30 - 18:30 (America/New_York) | Johns Hopkins University, Homewood Campus, Shaffer Hall Room 3, Baltimore, 21218, United States

Matrilineal Kinship In Aegean Prehistory: Settlements, Figurines, And The Absence Of Men
2026-03-05 17:30 - 18:30 (America/Chicago) | Jones Hall 108, Uptown Campus of Tulane University, 6801 Freet St, New Orleans, LA, 70118, United States

Re-Encountering Egypt: Museums and the Human Experience in the Age of AI
2026-03-07 15:30 - 17:00 (America/New_York) | Penn Museum, 3260 South Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Saturday, March 7
3:30 pm EST
In-person only at the Penn Museum, Classroom L2
No registration required
Special Event: Annual Korsyn Lecture in honor of Felix J. Korsyn
Speaker: Prof. Rita Lucarelli, Associate Professor of Egyptology, Faculty Curator of Egyptology at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, University of California Berkeley
Title: Re-Encountering Egypt: Museums and the Human Experience in the Age of AI
Abstract:
In an age increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, where images, texts, and even ancient cultures can be generated instantly, what role do museums still play in helping us understand the past? This lecture revisits Egypt as a case study to explore the enduring human value of museum experiences in a digital and AI-driven world.
Drawing on examples from Egyptian collections and exhibitions, the speaker’s own 3D and VR projects and student engagement with the ancient Egyptian collection of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology of UC Berkeley, the talk examines how museums create forms of knowledge and emotional connection that cannot be reduced to data or algorithms alone. While AI offers powerful new tools for access, reconstruction, and interpretation, it also raises important questions about authenticity, presence, and the meaning of cultural encounter.
By re-encountering Egypt through the physical, sensory, and social space of the museum, this lecture argues that museums remain vital sites where history is not only learned, but felt, questioned, and shared.
Speaker Bio:
Prof. Rita Lucarelli studied at the University of Naples “L’Orientale,” Italy, where she received her MA degree in Egyptology. She holds her Ph.D. from Leiden University, the Netherlands. Her Ph.D. thesis was published as The Book of the Dead of Gatseshen: Ancient Egyptian Funerary Religion in the 10th Century BC. She worked as a Research Scholar and a Lecturer at the Department of Egyptology of Bonn University, where she was part of the team of the “Book of the Dead Project”. She is currently an Associate Professor of Egyptology at UC Berkeley and Faculty Curator of Egyptology at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology of the University of California, Berkeley and Fellow of the Digital Humanities in Berkeley. Her specialty is the study of the ancient Egyptian magic and religion, and the reception history of ancient Egypt, in particular in Black Visual Arts and music.
She is presently working at a project aiming at realizing 3D models of ancient Egyptian coffins, the “Book of the Dead in 3D” and a VR App, “Return to the Tomb”, which recreate the tomb space where an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus is brought back, from the museum to the tomb. She is also completing a monograph on demonology in ancient Egypt entitled “Agents of punishment and protection: ancient Egyptian Demonology in the First Millenium BCE”. Rita Lucarelli is also involved in a teaching Higher Education in the San Quentin State Prison, in California.
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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.

Public Lecture: Dr. Alexander Dale (CMLL Department, Concordia University)
2026-03-12 18:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | Concordia University, H420, 1455 De Maisonneuve Blvd W, Montreal, QC, H3G-1M8, Canada
On Thursday, March 12th, Dr. Alexander Dale (CMLL Department, Concordia University) will deliver a presentation entitled, Two Lesbian Brothers: the quest for fortune and glory in the Archaic Greek East. The talk will take place at 600pm in Hall Building 420. It is sponsored by the Concordia Classical Students Association and the Archaeological Institute of America, Montreal Society.

Prof. Debby Sneed, Assistant Professor of Classics, California State University, Long Beach, "Disability and the Greek Ideal: A Case Study in Marble"
2026-03-12 18:30 - 20:00 (America/New_York) | College of the Holy Cross, Hogan Campus Center, Room 401 (an accessible space), 1 College Street, Worcester, MA, 01610, United States
The study of Greek art is heavily influenced by the notion of the ideal and idealized human body, which has long been assumed to exclude aspects of bodily difference and disability. In this talk, I consider a collection of 6th century BCE sculptures of maidens (korai) that were found on the Athenian Acropolis. As traditionally interpreted, these statues all stood together as representations of the feminine ideal in Greek art, but scholars tend to separate one maiden from her sisters because her body does not fit into modern definitions of beauty. By returning her to her rightful place in this collection, I present a reassessment of Greek sculptural ideals and, with it, of our understandings of Greek art, display, and dedication in late 6th century BCE Athens.

TBA (Mississippi/Memphis)
2026-03-18 17:00 - 18:30 (America/Chicago) | TBA (Oxford MS/Memphis TN), United States

From Money to Metal: How to Operate a Civic Mint in the Roman Empire
2026-03-18 17:00 - 18:30 (America/Chicago) | Joseph Merrick Jones Hall 108, Tulane University, Freret Street, New Orleans, LA, 70118, United States
Speaker: Dr. Kenneth W. Harl, Professor Emeritus, Department of History, Tulane University
Based on analysis of the coins themselves, Professor Harl reconstructs how Greek cities in the Roman Empire manufactured and distributed bronzes coins. Not only do the coins reveal the stages of production by workers and the engraving of dies by artists, but they also offer a means of calculating the output of money. The scale of production and organization of labor are both far more impressive than hitherto realized. The coins struck by mint of Marcianopolis (today Devnya, Bulgaria) in the reign of the Emperor Macrinus (217-218) offer the test case for explaining how metal was turned into money.
