Archaeological Institute of America

The Gunboat at Ground Zero: A Revolutionary War Mystery
2026-02-15 15:00 - 17:00 (America/New_York) | Rye Free Reading Room, 1061 Boston Post Road, Rye, New York, 10580, United States
In 2010, archaeologists monitoring excavation at the World Trade Center redevelopment site made an extraordinary discovery: the remains of an 18th-century wooden gunboat buried deep beneath Manhattan’s historic landfill. Likely built near Philadelphia in the early 1770s, this Revolutionary War-era vessel once patrolled shallow waterways before being abandoned along the Hudson River. Preserved for over 200 years in oxygen-poor soil, the ship measured about 50 feet long and featured a raised deck.
More than 600 pieces of timber and 2,000 artifacts—including musket balls, buttons, and ceramic tankards—were recovered from the site. Evidence suggests the vessel was likely captured by the British and traveled south, perhaps as far as the Caribbean, before arriving in New York. How it ended up buried in New York City remains a fascinating mystery.
Stabilized and studied for over a decade under the direction of Dr. Peter Fix, Associate Research Scientist of Archaeological Watercraft and Aircraft Conservation at Texas A&M University, the ship returned to New York in the spring of 2025. It is now being reconstructed for permanent display at the New York State Museum by Dr. Fix and his team.
As one of the few documented American-built Revolutionary War vessels, the gunboat offers a rare, tangible link to the nation’s fight for independence and highlights New York’s enduring role in shaping American history.
The Gunboat at Ground Zero : A Revolutionary War Mystery exhibit is on display at the New York State Museum from May 14, 2025 to January 31, 2026. Details online at the New York State Museum website.
IN-PERSON SPEAKERS
Michael Lucas is Curator of Historical Archaeology at the New York State Museum where he oversees a collection of over 4 million objects including the World Trade Center ship remnant and associated artifacts. He received a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Maryland in 2008, focusing on 17th century town development in Maryland. He broadly studies rural production, labor, and community formation during the 17th through 19th centuries. His current field research program focuses on the contributions and struggles of African American farmers in the Hudson River Valley from 1780 to 1880. His collections research includes comparative analysis of tobacco pipes, and artifact assemblages associated with enslaved people and wage laborers.
Michael T. Lucas, Ph.D.
Curator of Historical Archaeology
New York State Museum
CEC Room 3049
Albany, NY 12230
Michael Pappalardo is a Registered Professional Archaeologist and a Senior Technical Director at the environmental planning firm AKRF, Inc. Pappalardo has more than 30 years of experience in cultural resource management, working in the context of both national and state level historic preservation legislation, and has directed numerous excavations across New York and other states dating from the early Precontact through the Historic Periods. Pappalardo led the multidisciplinary team of archaeologists, ship experts, conservationists, and other specialists that discovered, documented, and excavated the Gun Boat at Ground Zero in 2010 and 2011.
Michael Pappalardo RPA
Archaeologist
AKRF
500 Summer Street, Suite 400, Stamford, CT 06901
www.akrf.com
VIRTUAL PARTICIPANT
Peter Fix
Assistant Research Scientist
Watercraft Conservator
Dr. Fix grew up on the coast of southeastern Connecticut where he fell in love with watercraft of all types. An avid sailor from the age of six, growing up he spent half the year sailing and racing sailboats on Fishers Island Sound, and the rest of the year reading about history. In 1981 he began his career in the field of historic maritime preservation at Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, CT working first for the Education Department and later for the Museum’s Henry B. du Pont Preservation Shipyard. It was this love of watercraft, and the encouragement of several prominent marine archaeologists and preservationists, that led him to enter the graduate program in Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University in September of 1996.
In January 1997, he began working for the Conservation Research Lab where he has served in several capacities over the last two decades. He has directed field work and developed archaeological and conservation plans for sunken aircraft in Irian Jaya, Indonesia and in the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Dr. Fix was the principal conservator for the 17th-Century French ship La Belle and head of her reconstruction in the Texas State History Museum in Austin, TX. He oversees the conservation for large artifacts, including: two disarticulated 18th century ships from New York City and Alexandria, VA; two dugout canoes from Louisiana; and the Gunboat Philadelphia.
The Nautical Archaeology Program (NAP) at Texas A&M University is the oldest academic degree-granting graduate program in the U.S. devoted to the study of boats and ships and the cultures that created and used them. NAP Faculty provide instruction in the history of seafaring and wooden ship construction; maritime commerce and cargoes; the skills needed to record, excavate, analyze, and conserve the archaeological remains of these activities.
To see the video, click here https://nysm.nysed.gov/exhibitions/gunboat-at-ground-zero
To register for the lecture click here

Soto’s Stuff: Spanish 16th Century Expeditions and What They Left Behind
2026-02-17 17:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | University of Florida, Smathers Library Room 100, 1508 Union Rd, Gainesville, FL, 32611, United States
Lecturer: Dr. Charles Cobb
Lockwood Chair in Historical Archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History
2025 UF Research Foundation Professor
Over the last decade, research by a collaboration of archaeologists has made considerable strides toward identifying sites visited by Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto’s army in the American Southeast (A.D. 1539-1543). In addition to delineating the route traveled by Soto, our working group has now amassed a substantial sample of European metal objects recovered from Indigenous villages. This presentation provides new insights on the Soto route and on how the related artifacts shed light on patterns of discard, trade, and the ways in which Indigenous societies reshaped European material culture.

From Farmers to Kings: The Emergence of Social Hierarchy in Prehistoric Europe
2026-02-17 17:30 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College, 1 Quinlan St, Lynchburg, VA, 24503, United States
Lecture by William Parkinson; William (Bill) Parkinson is an archaeologist who specializes in European and Eastern Mediterranean Prehistory. His anthropological and archaeological research explores the social dynamics of early village societies and the emergence of early states. He has over 30 years of experience conducting archaeological fieldwork and developing museum exhibitions for the Field Museum.
The modern world is plagued with unprecedented levels of social, economic, and political inequalities. But these inequities did not happen overnight; in places like southeastern Europe they emerged over the course of thousands of years as the small egalitarian farming villages of the Neolithic gave way to some of the earliest hierarchical kingdoms in the Iron Age. This is the story that was told in the First Kings of Europe exhibition, an ambitious international collaboration between twenty-six museums in eleven countries in southeastern Europe. In this presentation, Bill Parkinson gives an overview of his archaeological research into the emergence of social hierarchy in the region, as well as an overview of the exhibition he co-curated with his long-time collaborator, Attila Gyucha.

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.

Punitive Labor and Enslavement in the Roman Bakery
2026-02-17 19:30 - 20:30 (America/New_York) | Semans Auditorium (Room 117), Belk Visual Arts Center, 315 N. Main St., Davidson, NC, 28036, United States
About the lecture:
In 2023, excavators in Pompeii found a bakery in the Casa di Rustio Vero that was separated from the house—and the rest of the world—by metal bars. The excavators interpreted the bars as an indication of incarceration and the use of convicts as labor. This lecture explores the evidence for convict labor in bakeries and argues that the material consequences of enslavement and incarceration are probably indistinguishable in the setting of commerical activity. Deploying both textual and material evidence, Benton will show the various ways that punitive labor grafted onto different systems and scales of production.
About the speaker:
Dr. Jared Benton, associate professor of art at Old Dominion University, is co-director of the Saïss Plain and Zerhoun Massif archaeology project, a survey of the plain SE of Volubilis in Morocco. He has previously excavated workshops in Volubilis and was a field supervisor for the American Excavations at Morgantina from 2013-2020. His book, The Bread Makers, explores Roman commercial baking, with a focus on how production would differ not only between communities but also between operators with different investment tolerances. With a number of co-authors, he recently published an article on the structure and archaeobotany of a bakery at Volubilis in Mouseion.

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.

Society Sunday 2026 Public Lecture
2026-02-22 13:00 - 14:00 (America/New_York) | https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/4517701567776/WN_MQkKm7LIQWO2cF5hY_QMLA
Marketing the Etruscans—From Mystery to Modern Media
Join us as the AIA Societies Committee presents a virtual presentation and Q&A with Jessica Tilley. This presentation will also be available in American Sign Language.
Often deemed the ‘mysterious’ Etruscans, this pre-Roman civilization of early Italy has fought a hard-won battle in finding its place in the field of Classical Archaeology. Various titans of American Etruscology, including this year’s AIA Gold Medalist Nancy de Grummond, have dedicated decades of research to highlighting the value of Etruscan material in answering larger questions related to ritual practice, cross-cultural interaction, and Mediterranean trade networks. In recent years, Etruscan material has been at the foreground of widely publicized repatriation cases and cultural heritage protection conversations. This buzz culminated in the globally acclaimed 2023 film La chimera about a band of Etruscan tomb robbers. Looking ahead, Etruscology is primed for engaging in the development of current archaeological theory, with ongoing research relevant to our multi-cultural, interconnected world. In this lecture, Dr. Jessica Tilley outlines the dynamic history of the Etruscan civilization’s modern reception and highlights the ways in which it is uniquely positioned to contribute to ongoing dialogue around decolonialism, queer theory, globalization, and network theory in Mediterranean archaeology.
Dr. Jessica Tilley is currently the Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at Centre College. Her research explores questions of postcolonialism and globalization theory in the ancient Mediterranean world through examination of cross-cultural funerary practices. She has excavated at sites across Italy, Greece, and the southeastern U.S. and is actively involved in cultural heritage public outreach.
The lecture will also be available in American Sign Language and we will also enable auto captioning on Zoom. Due to Zoom limitations on mobile devices and tablets, participants interested in accessing ASL interpretation should log in using the desktop version of Zoom.

The Origins of the Alphabet and How It Spread Across the World
2026-02-22 14:00 - 15:30 (America/New_York) | Knight Auditorium, The Spurlock Museum(UIUC), 600 S.Gregory Street, Urbana, IL 61801, Illinois, 61801, United States
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.

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

Micromorphology at Olynthos
2026-02-24 00:00 (America/New_York) | IL
Dr. Britt Hartenberger will discuss geoarchaeological approaches to life at the northern Greek city of Olynthos. Her research has included archaeological excavation and lithics and ceramics analysis at urban sites in Cyprus, Greece, Syria and Turkey. Her specialty is craft production and household organization in the Bronze and Iron Ages, as attested by numerous published papers.
Her current work at Olynthos (Greece) focuses on household analysis, based on the study of microdebris (microscopic remains of human activity) and how these materials illuminate our understanding of domestic life in this vibrant ancient city.
This talk will take place on the GVSU Allendate campus. (room 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

AIA Archaeology Hour February 2026: Metropolitan Walls of the Ọyọ Empire
2026-02-25 17:00 - 21:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | IL
Join the AIA for a virtual trip to West Africa as Akin Ogundiran delivers the February AIA Archaeology Hour talk “Metropolitan Walls of the Ọyọ Empire.”
This presentation will be given at 8pm Eastern/7pm Central/6pm Mountain/5pm Pacific.

Register here!

Monumental Ritual Texts in Ancient Egyptian Pyramids
2026-02-25 18:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA, Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Hybrid Lecture
Monumental Ritual Texts in Ancient Egyptian Pyramids
Wednesday, February 25, 6:00–7:00 pm ET, Advance registration recommended for online and in-person attendance
Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA
Speaker: Christelle Alvarez, Assistant Professor of Egyptology, Brown University
The earliest large-scale records of ancient Egyptian religious literature come from Saqqara, an important royal cemetery from Egypt’s Old Kingdom period. For nearly two centuries, the subterranean chambers beneath some of Saqqara’s pyramids were inscribed with hundreds of ritual texts carved in hieroglyphs. In this lecture, Christelle Alvarez will discuss the final Old Kingdom pyramid to bear such inscriptions: the tomb of King Qakare Ibi. Smaller than its predecessors, badly damaged, and marked by architectural and textual idiosyncrasies, this monument has often been dismissed as marginal to the main Pyramid Text tradition. Alvarez argues that Qakare Ibi’s pyramid actually provides a rare glimpse into the process of monumentalizing ritual texts, revealing how this tradition was composed, transmitted, and continually reshaped over time.
Free admission. Free event parking at the 52 Oxford Street Garage starting at 5:00 pm. Presented by the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East and the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture.
Fragment photo by Christelle Alvarez

The Making of Myth & Marble: Bringing the Torlonia Sculptures to the U.S.
2026-02-26 17:00 - 18:00 (America/New_York) | Whitman College Maxey Hall 207, 173 Stanton St., Walla Walla, WA, 99362, 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)

Egypt and Sudan: From Prehistory to the Present. An international conference supporting The World Between: Egypt and Nubia in Africa exhibition on view at The Fralin Museum of Art
2026-02-27 09:30 - 16:00 (America/New_York) | IL
The event brings together a distinguished group of Egyptologists and Nubiologists to explore the historical, archaeological, and cultural trajectories of the Nile Valley through an interdisciplinary lens. The conference is part of the programming for the ongoing exhibition The World Between: Egypt and Nubia in Africa at The Fralin Museum of Art, University of Virginia (through May 31, 2026). It provides vital context to the themes of the exhibition and up-to-date insight on the sociopolitical developments and artistic transitions that shaped Egypt and Nubia over millennia.
This is a webinar attached to an in-person event. Registration is required.
https://virginia.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_0e3Iq_rkQpm7BtbgG0LaAQ#/registration

Recreating Urban Biographies in Roman Italy: Recent Research at Gabii
2026-02-28 14:00 - 15:00 (America/Chicago) | historic Longview Farm House located at 13525 Clayton Road in Town and Counry, MO., 13525 Clayton Road, St. Louis, MO, 63141, United States
Dr. Marcello Mogetta (Chair of the Dept. of Classics, Archaeology & Religion at the University of Missouri – Columbia) will lecture on “Recreating Urban Biographies in Roman Italy: Recent Research at Gabii”. A Roman themed reception will be held afterwards, but 21st century clothing is totally cool.

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/
Charles Eliot Norton Memorial Lectureship

Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East Tours Led by Harvard Students
2026-03-01 13:00 - 13:45 (America/New_York) | Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, 6 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, 6 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, 02138
Available during the Harvard academic year Sundays at 1:00 pm, October 5, 2025–April 26, 2026. See blackout dates.*
*Blackout dates: November 30, 2025–January 25, 2026, March 15, 2026 and March 22, 2026
This free tour, led by Harvard students, explores the Mediterranean Marketplaces: Connecting the Ancient World exhibition and how the movement of goods, peoples, and ideas around the ancient Mediterranean transformed the lives and livelihoods of people at all levels of society. Touch replicas and smell “ancient” scents as the students bring the past alive.
Visitors may drop in at the scheduled times. No reservation is required. Tours meet in the lobby and last approximately 45 minutes.
Groups of 10 or more may contact reservations to request other times. Please complete the reservation request form.

Mayan writing Workshop: Learning the Mayan Calendar
2026-03-01 14:00 - 15:00 (America/New_York) | IL
Speaker: Paul Caetano
Further details to come

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.

"Across Jordan in the Footsteps of Alois Musil: Archaeology and Discovery" with Sylva Pavlasová
2026-03-03 15:00 - 16:00 (America/New_York)
Join a fascinating online lecture about Alois Musil with Sylva Pavlasová, head of the Mashrek unit of the Middle East Department at the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who recently returned from Jordan, a nation rich with traces from Neolithic, Nabataean, Roman, Early Christian, Byzantine, and Islamic times to the establishment of the modern Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Musil, a theologian, orientalist, and explorer, was nicknamed Sheikh Mousa by local Bedouin tribes. A major Czech scholar of the 19th and 20th Century, fluent in 35 dialects of Arabic, leader of two Bedouin tribes with friends amongst local Arabs — Musil amassed important knowledge related to Jordan´s history. In 1898, he rediscovered the Islamic desert castle of Qusayr ‘Amra, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

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