Archaeological Institute of America

Dr. Leanne Bablitz: "Where have all the courtrooms gone?: Are they hiding in plain sight?"
2022-11-17 18:30 - 20:00 (America/Vancouver) | Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture (MAC), 2316 West 1st Avenue, Spokane, Washington, 99201, United States
In many western cultures legal activities are accommodated within purpose-built structures, most commonly, the courthouse. While within Roman culture some building types were linked with specific activities, the assignation of a specific structure type for legal activities only, such as preliminary hearings, arbitrations, and trials, did not occur. Using ancient evidence (literary texts, artistic representations, material remains) and virtual reality 3D modeling, we will explore the locations at which the inhabitants of Roman communities sought resolution to their disputes. Through such examination, a new appreciation of what is, and is not yet, known about the Roman legal system emerges.
Dr. Leanne Bablitz, University of British Columbia.

Producing Domesticity: a bioarchaeology of domestic labor in Irish immigrants, 19th-century New York City
2022-11-17 18:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | Education Center rm 118, College of Charleston, CHARLESTON, SC, 29424, United States
A lecture by Dr. Alanna Warner-Smith, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution.
The rise of industrial capitalism not only restructured labor and class, but also reconfigured the intimate spaces of the home and everyday life. As the workplace moved out of the home, the home was idealized as private and separate from the market. As part of this shift, the role of women came to be defined as moral guardians who created domestic spaces that promoted middle-class ideals of respectability, which included self-discipline, etiquette, cleanliness, and order. Historical archaeologists have examined the “cult of domesticity” by largely highlighting how women exercised agency as consumers, purchasing tablewares, tea sets, and decorative elements that reinforced these ideals and middle-class families’ social status. However, less attention has been paid to the physical labor required to produce these domestic spaces. Far from being separate from the market, the home was, in fact, a place of work. Middle- and upper-class families hired waged domestic servants to perform the physical housework, which took a toll on those who did it—many of whom were immigrant women.
In this talk, Dr. Warner-Smith draws upon the archival and physical remains of Irish immigrants who died in various public institutions and hospitals in New York City at the turn of the century. She highlights the ways this labor shaped the bones of these women, looking at the breakdown of joint surfaces, changes to muscle attachment sites, and long bone morphology. Recovering evidence of this labor is important because even as they completed the work necessary for middle-class families to achieve the ideals of domesticity, these women were alienated from notions of respectability and femininity. Moreover, occupational hazards in domestic labor continue to be less visible today, as private homes are not often considered to be workplaces. This talk sheds light on past immigrant experiences while connecting them to contemporary issues in labor rights.

The Wild, Wild East: Combating the Black Market in Ancient Asian Art
2022-11-17 14:00 (America/New_York) | Maryland
Virtual lecture which is part of the AIA Archaeology Abridged Series.

NAGPRA and the Challenge of Tribal Sovereignty in Removal States
2022-11-16 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Chicago) | 116 Art Building West (ABW), 141 N Riverside Dr, Iowa City, IA, 52242, United States
Even before 1990, and the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, Native nations forcibly removed from their Midwestern homelands have worked to protect their ancestors’ right to eternal rest. NAGPRA has been a powerful tool in this centuries-long struggle. The results have been mixed. Thanks, in part, to lax state cemetery laws, unequal enforcement of NAGPRA laws, and nearly two hundred years of Indigenous erasure, Midwestern states typically lag behind their Western counterparts. In Ohio and Indiana, both the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and the three federally-recognized Shawnee tribes have worked tirelessly to reassert their sovereignty in their former homelands. The allyship of non-Native scholars and community leaders has been crucial to their success. Recent collaborations between tribal leaders and state archaeologists to protect the Newark Earthworks and Serpent Mound, respectively, point to a hopeful new chapter in the long relationship between states, scholars, and Native nations subjected to removal.

Dr. Steve Warren
2022-11-16 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Chicago) | University of Iowa campus (exact location TBA), Iowa City, IA, United States
Dr. Steve Warren (University of Iowa) will discuss his recent research on community-engaged research and collaborations between the three federally-recognized Shawnee tribes and state archaeologists and historians to protect Hopewell mound complexes in Ohio.

Blood Antiquities: Tomb Raiders, Art Smugglers, and the Black Market in Cultural Treasures
2022-11-16 19:00 (America/New_York), 2022-11-15 19:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Maryland
Virtual lecture which is part of the AIA Archaeology Hour series.

Blood Antiquities -- Tomb Raiders, Art Smugglers, & the Black Market in Cultural Treasures
2022-11-15 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Whitman College, Olin Hall 129, 920 E Isaacs, Walla Walla, WA, 99362, United States
Lecturer: Tess Davis (Antiquities Coalition)
Come join us for a watch party of a live-streamed lecture by lawyer and archaeologist, Tess Davis. There will be a drawing for a surprise gift and discussion of the lecture afterwards.

Virtual Symposium: Color in Ancient Tennessee
2022-11-15 12:00 - 13:00 (America/Chicago) | The Parthenon, 2500 West End Ave, Nashville, TN, 37203, United States
Join us for a free virtual talk on Tuesday, November 15, at 12 PM Central. This Virtual Symposium is free and open to the public.
ABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM:
Dr. Kevin Smith, archaeologist and professor at Middle Tennessee State University, will share his archaeological work to understand the pigments and colors used by Native Americans right here in ancient Tennessee.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Dr. Kevin Smith is an archaeologist and professor at Middle Tennessee State University. His research interests include the Late prehistoric Mississippian cultures of the Midwest and Southeast United States, Mississippian art and iconography, the history and development of Southeastern archaeology, frontier period archaeology (1760-1820), archaeology of African-American lifeways (1783-Reconstruction), and Native Americans in popular culture. He received his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University.
SYMPOSIUM SPONSORS:
Archaeological Institute of America- Nashville Society
Centennial Park Conservancy
Vanderbilt University
Metro Nashville Parks and Recreation

Pour One out for Me: Libations in Roman Funerary Commemoration
2022-11-12 10:30 (America/New_York) | University of Dayton, Science Center Auditorium, 300 College Park Ave, Dayton, OH, 45469
Lecturer: Liana Brent, Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at Kenyon College

Fixing the Date: The AD 79 Eruption of Mt. Vesuvius
2022-11-10 19:00 - 20:30 (America/New_York) | Maryland
Lecture by Dr. Pedar Foss, Depauw University
DC Society Annual Davidson Lecture; hosted by George Washington University

The Pot Detective in Cyprus
2022-11-10 18:00 - 19:30 (America/Phoenix) | Maryland
Dr. Gloria London
Independent Scholar
Knud Jensen was a Danish rural police officer with dreams of becoming a Mediterranean archaeologist. To do so he joined the United Nations Peace Keeping Force in Cyprus beginning in 1964. When not on village patrols, he recorded the immense old-fashioned wine fermentation jars littering rural roads. Following a centuries-old practice, itinerant craftsmen made the last jar in 1972. Equipped with superior social and detective skills, he traced pots back to their makers, including a family of jar makers active from 1850 to 1913. Jensen achieved much, but did not live to publish his research, which Dr. London has done with help from his family and the descendants of jar makers.
To register, please visit www.aiacentralarizonasociety.wordpress.com.
For questions about the event or registration, please email the program coordinator, Casey Gipson, at casey.gipson@asu.edu.

The origin and initial dispersal of Sino-Tibetan populations in archaeology
2022-11-08 18:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | University of Oregon Knight Library Browsing Room (106), 1501 Kincaid St, Eugene, OR, 97403
Matson Lecture

Rural Matters: Studying the Countrysides of Ancient Cyprus
2022-11-08 17:00 (America/New_York) | WEBINAR (New Haven), New Haven, CT
Kershaw Lecture

Life at Berkou: a newly-discovered Roman fortress in Egypt
2022-11-07 19:30 (America/Chicago) | University of Alabama – Huntsville, Room TBA, 301 Sparkman Drive, Huntsville, AL, 35899

Women in the Cults of Isis: Patrons, Symbols, and Pariahs
2022-11-07 17:30 (America/Chicago) | University of Nebraska – Lincoln, Richards Hall 15, 1410 Q Street, Lincoln, NE, 68588

Iron in the Sky: Words and Conceptions of Iron and Meteorites in Ancient Egypt
2022-11-06 15:00 - 16:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | ARCE Egyptology Lectures, Room 126 Social Sciences Building, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 94720, United States
The American Research Center in Egypt, Northern California Chapter, and the Near Eastern Studies Department, University of California, Berkeley, invite you to attend a lecture by Dr. Victoria Almansa-Villatoro, Brown University:
“Iron in the Sky: Words and Conceptions of Iron and Meteorites in Ancient Egypt”
Sunday, November 6, 2022, 3 PM Pacific Time
Room 126 Social Sciences Building (formerly Barrows Hall)
UC Berkeley
Please note that no Zoom meeting is scheduled for this lecture.
About the Lecture:
This lecture explores the cultural implications of an ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic sign, known as N41, used in an apparently random constellation of words related to women, water, and metals. Based on a re-examination of the sign’s contexts of appearance in The Pyramid Texts and other religious sources, it is determined that an ancient Egyptian cosmovision contemplated the sky as an iron container of water, pieces of which fell to the earth in the shape of meteors and were used to produce ritual objects. The fact that the N41 sign’s iconicity encapsulated such complex interconnectedness suggests that the relation between birth, afterlife, and iron existed even before the earliest religious texts in Egypt. The knowledge of the extraterrestrial provenance of iron was lost at some point in modern times when meteorites were classified along with fossils as “thunderstones” as late as the 18th century. However, the Egyptian knowledge, consistent with contemporary science, was most likely shared with other ancient civilizations that also connected iron and sky in texts. We will examine some examples of non-Egyptian iron-sky cultural parallels, particularly from the Ancient Near East, which can be explained as common analysis of natural observations, rather than knowledge transmission.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Victoria Almansa-Villatoro obtained her Ph.D. in Egyptology at Brown University in 2022. She is a Junior Research Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows (2022-2025) and specializes in the use of language and hieroglyphs’ iconicity to understand oral knowledge and ideology in Old Kingdom Egypt. Since 2019 she is a member of the AERA archaeological project in Giza, and assistant director to the Royal Necropolis and Pyramids of Nuri Expedition since 2021.
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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
About ARCE-NC:
For more information, please visit https://facebook.com/NorthernCaliforniaARCE/, https://arce-nc.org/, https://twitter.com/ARCENCPostings, or https://khentiamentiu.org. To join the chapter or renew your membership, please go to https://www.arce.org/general-membership and select “Berkeley, CA” as your chapter when you sign up.

Aramus: A dialogue between archaeology and comic art
2022-11-06 14:00 - 15:00 (America/New_York) | University of Ottawa, Canada
Comic books meets Archaeology! The authors of “Aramus” will talk about the process of creating an archaeological comic book.

The Earliest Pottery in the World
2022-11-06 11:30 (America/New_York) | Maryland
A lecture hosted by the Long Island Society of the AIA.
Ilaria Patania, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis will present on “the Earliest Pottery in the World.”
Why was pottery invented? While for decades we assumed a connection between plant domestication, pottery use, and social hierarchy today we know that the earliest pottery in the world was found in cave sites in South China connected to a hunter and gatherer lifeway at ~20 -19 kya. This is the first example of a wider Eastern Asian hunter gatherer pottery making tradition. In this talk we will discuss the sites of the earliest pottery and explore cooking practices and social structure of the groups that first used pottery.
Join via Zoom by this link on November 6th, 2022 at 11:30 AM EST.
Meeting ID: 881 5810 9696
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Roman/Byzantine Ruins at Gadara in Jordan
2022-11-05 13:00 (America/Chicago) | Maryland
ZOOM lecture “Roman/Byzantine ruins at Gadara in Jordan” by Sufyan al-Karaimeh (University of Leiden – Netherlands) Room opens at 12:45 and lecture promptly starts at 1 PM. Sign in at 12:45, please…
More Zoom events are listed here on the St. Louis Society webpage.

Ireland before the Saints and Scholars: Excavations at the Iron Age site of Dun Ailinne, Co. Kildare
2022-11-04 19:30 (America/New_York) | Provincial Archives of New Brunswick, 23 Dineen Drive, Fredericton, NB, Canada

Paying Attention: Images of Monuments on Roman Imperial Coins
2022-11-04 16:30 (America/New_York) | Department of Art & Archaeology seminar room (Green Hall 3-S-15), Washington Rd., Princeton, NJ, 08540, United States
Thompson Lecture

Community Engagement in the Archaeology and Heritage of Pakistan: New Work at MohenjoDaro
2022-11-04 15:30 (America/New_York) | WEBINAR (Albany), Albany, NY
Joukowsky Lecture
Join the Zoom meeting on November 4th at 3:30 PM EST by clicking the “Register” button below — no need to sign up in advance.

Community Engagement in the Archaeology and Heritage of Pakistan: New Work at MohenjoDaro
2022-11-04 15:30 (America/New_York) | WEBINAR (Albany), Albany, NY
Joukowsky Lecture

Manton Lecture
2022-11-04 05:00 - 18:00 (America/New_York) | The Johns Hopkins University (Homewood campus), Gilman Hall 50, Baltimore, MD, 21210, United States
Please join the Baltimore AIA society for our first in-person talk since 2020! Dr. Catherine Popovici (The Johns Hopkins University) will speak about “Binding City, Sculpting Politics: Artistic Interventions in Classic Maya Landscapes” on Friday, November 4 at 5 pm ET. The talk will be streamed on Zoom but not recorded. Email akoch@towson.edu for Zoom details.

The Egyptian Prisoner Statues: Depictions of Pharaoh's Triumph
2022-11-03 19:00 - 20:30 (America/New_York) | Harbor Walk West, room 217, 360 Concord St., Charleston, SC, 29401, United States
Dr. Tara Prakash (College of Charleston) will discuss “The Ancient Egyptian Prisoner Statues: Depictions of Pharaoh’s Triumph” on November 3, 2022, at 7:00 pm. Please join us to learn more about these fascinating artifacts and their archaeological contexts.
The lecture will take place at Harbor Walk (360 Concord St., West building, room 217), the temporary home of the College of Charleston’s Department of Art and Architectural History. Parking is available nearby at the City of Charleston’s Aquarium Garage.
Following the lecture, guests are invited to join the speaker for a light reception and informal conversation. This event is free and open to the public.
In accordance with current CofC COVID-19 protocols, attendees are welcome, but not required, to wear masks.

An Urban Garden at Pompeii: reexploring the "House of Queen Caroline"
2022-11-03 18:00 (America/New_York) | William T. Young Library Auditorium at the University of Kentucky, 401 Hilltop Ave., Lexington, 40506
Hanfmann Lecture

“Instructing the Eye: Museum Catalogues and the Archaeological Imaginary in Early 20th-Century Tunisia”
2022-11-02 19:30 - 21:00 (America/Vancouver) | UBC-Vancouver Campus, Buchanan A building, Room 202, Vancouver, British Columbia, V6T1Z1, Canada
Lecture by Daniel Sherman, UNC-Chapel Hill

Expanding the Spatial and Temporal Limits of the Pinson Mounds Landscape in Western Tennessee
2022-11-02 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Denver) | CU Museum of Natural History, Broadway, Boulder, CO, 80309, United States
In this lecture, Professor Ed Henry will discuss the monumental earthen architecture present at Pinson Mounds State Archaeological Park (PMSAP) in West Tennessee, which features prominently in the archaeology of the American Midsouth. However, the Johnston and Elijah Bray mound sites, situated west and east of PMSAP respectively, are considered the anchors in defining the broader Pinson Landscape. Recent research in this area has dramatically reshaped how archaeologists might consider the temporal and spatial extent of this enigmatic Middle Woodland landscape and its ties to Hopewell societies in the eastern U.S. In my lecture I will discuss the field verification of new monumental features at Johnston, new and unusual subsurface features identified at PMSAP, and the first archaeological investigations of the Elijah Bray site. Our new discoveries reveal how our knowledge of this unique area expands our understandings of, and approach to studying, deeply used places in the archaeological record.

Andromeda, Alexander, and Ascalos: Founders and Foundation Myths in the Roman Near East
2022-11-02 19:00 (America/New_York) | Maryland
The Tallahassee Society of the Archaeological Institute of America and the Student Archaeology Club at FSU present:
“Andromeda, Alexander, and Ascalos: Founders and Foundation Myths in the Roman Near East”
By Robyn Le Blanc, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
The AIA Kershaw Lecture in Near Eastern Archaeology
Additional Funding by the AIA Father Bader Lecture in Mediterranean Archaeology
Wednesday, November 2, 2022 7:00 PM
A Zoom Lecture: https://fsu.zoom.us/j/93621021276

This talk explores city founders and foundation myths in the Roman Near East. Depictions of these local traditions appear on civic coinage, sculpture, and on the “Caesarea bowl,” and some are described by ancient authors such as Pliny and Pausanias. Foundation myths reflect ideas about the community and its past, and helped forge and maintain cultural, ethnic, and kinship links between and within communities.
Relevant website, The Roman Provincial Coinage online: https://rpc.ashmus.ox.ac.uk
