Natalie Abell is an Assistant Professor of Mediterranean Studies at the University of Michigan. She received her BA in Classics, Anthropology, and French from Indiana University in 2003, her MA in Classics from the University of Cincinnati in 2008, and her PhD, also from Cincinnati, in 2014. A specialist in the archaeology of the Aegean Bronze Age and the early Mediterranean, in particular the effects of trade as well as interactions between craftspeople in ancient societies, she wrote a dissertation on long-term patterns of exchange in the Bronze Age Cyclades, focusing on the settlement of Ayia Irini on Kea (ca. 2650-1400 BC). Her next project will examine, from a regional and comparative perspective, the development of market-based exchange systems in the Bronze Age Cyclades and their relation to social, religious, and cultural institutions. Dr. Abell was a Fulbright Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and, most recently, a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Classics at the University of California, Berkeley. She has published articles on the mobility of craftspeople and on technologies and their transmission in the Middle and Late Bronze Age.
John Arthur is Associate Professor with the Department of Society, Culture, and Language at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, and holds his degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Texas at San Antonio (MA), and the University of Florida (PhD). His research interests are ethnoarchaeology, the archaeology of beer, ceramic technology, experimental archaeology, craft specialization, complex societies, African archaeology and North American archaeology, and his current project is on interpreting social stratification from African archaeological and living contexts. His work in the Gamo highlands (southwestern Ethiopia) with Kathryn Arthur and Matthew Curtis led to the 2015 article in Science describing a 4,500 year old male human skeleton from Mota Cave that provided the first complete ancient human genome sequenced from the African continent found.
Catherine K. Baker is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Bryn Mawr College, and holds her degrees in Classical Archaeology (Ph.D.), and Classics (M.A.) from the University of Cincinnati; History of Art and Archaeology (M.A.) from New York University; and Classical Archaeology and Ancient History (M.A.) from Brandeis University. Her areas of specialization are Roman archaeology and art history; Roman Republican history; ancient urbanism, imperialism, and colonialism; first millennium BCE Central Italy; the Central Apennines; Pompeii and the Bay of Naples; archaeologies of identity; Greek and Roman pottery and small finds; ancient trade and the economy. Her several forthcoming publications include Excavations at Pompeii (I.1, VIII.7, and the Porta Stabia). The Small Finds (with L.A. Lieberman, S.J.R. Ellis and contributors).
Douglas Bamforth is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder:
“I am an archaeologist who works mainly on the Great Plains; I have also worked in the Colorado mountains, coastal California, the California desert, the Great Basin, Germany, and Ireland. I have a major technical interest in the study of how ancient people made and used stone tools. My research has focused on how human use of the Plains landscape responded to long-term environmental change during the Paleoindian period (from roughly 11,000 to 8000 BC); recently, my interests have shifted towards the archaeology of farmers on the central and northern Plains during the last 1000 years. I am currently involved in a long-term field project that examines the archaeology of the Ceramic Period along the Pine Ridge in northwestern Nebraska.”
Caitlín Barrett is Associate Professor with the Department of Classics, Cornell University. She holds her degrees from Harvard University and Yale University (Ph.D.), and was a Fulbright Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Her areas of specialization include Classical archaeology and Egyptology, the archaeology of religion and ritual, and household archaeology. She is the Co-Director of the Casa della Regina Carolina (CRC) Project at Pompeii, and she has published extensively on interactions between Egypt and the Greco-Roman world. Her first book, Egyptianizing Figurines from Delos: A Study in Hellenistic Religion (Leiden: Brill, 2011), investigated religious change and cultural hybridization in the household through a study of locally-made “Egyptianizing” terracotta figurines from the Hellenistic trading port of Delos. Her second book, Domesticating Empire: Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens (Oxford University Press, 2019), is the first contextually-oriented monograph on Egyptian imagery from Roman domestic contexts.
Hilary Becker is Associate Professor of Classics with the Department of Middle Eastern and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Binghamton University. She earned her A.B. at Bryn Mawr College and her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has published articles dealing with Etruscan economy and settlement patterns and co-edited, along with Margarita Gleba, the volume Votives, Places and Rituals in Etruscan Religion (Brill 2009). She is currently writing a book entitled Commerce in Color about the trade in Roman pigments, an investigation that started with her research on the only surviving pigment shop from ancient Rome. Professor Becker was the AIA Cinelli Lecturer for 2019/2020.
Danielle Smotherman Bennett is a Curatorial Associate working with the ancient Mediterranean art in the Menil Collection in Houston, TX, and was previously a Post-Doctoral Fellow with the Department of Classics at San Diego State University. She holds her degrees from Bryn Mawr (Ph.D.) and the University of Missouri, Columbia, and her areas of specialization include Athenian vase-painting and digital methodologies. She has extensive museum experience, and has done fieldwork in Greece, Italy, Turkey, and England. Dr. Bennett’s current publications projects include “Targeted Advertising for Women in Athenian Vase-Painting of the Fifth Century BCE” in Arts, Vol. 8, Issue 2, Article 52 (2019), and “Visualizing the Traumatized in Athenian Images of Philomela and Procne,” to be published in Hesperia.
David Carballo specializes in the archaeology of Latin America, especially central Mexico and with topical interests in households, urbanism, religion, social inequality, and working with contemporary communities in understanding ancient ones. Current investigations focus on Teotihuacan’s Tlajinga district, a cluster of non-elite neighborhoods on the periphery of what was then the largest city in the Americas. Recent books include Cooperation and Collective Action: Archaeological Perspectives (ed., 2013), Urbanization and Religion in Ancient Central Mexico (2016), Teotihuacan: The World Beyond the City (ed., 2020), and Collision of Worlds: A Deep History of the Fall of Aztec Mexico and the Forging of New Spain (2020).
Alison Carter is Assistant Professor in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Oregon. She holds her degrees from the University of Wisconsion, Madison (M.S. and Ph.D.) and Oberlin College. Profssor Carter is an anthropological archaeologist with interests in the political economy and evolution of complex societies in Southeast Asia, the archaeology of East and South Asia, materials analysis and LA‐ICP‐MS (Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry), craft technology and specialization, household archaeology, ritual and religion, trade and exchange, and bead studies.
Alexis Castor is Associate Professor in the Department of Classics at Franklin & Marshall College, and holds her Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College. Her area of specialization is the jewelry of ancient Greece and Italy, especially concerning how Greek and Etruscan elite classes in general, and women in particular, used jewelry to express their status. Her most recent publications include “Macedonian Lionesses: A New Paradigm for Female Jewelry Use (c. 325-275 BC)”, (Journal of Greek Archaeology, vol. 2, 2017), and More than Glitter: Jewelry in Greece and Italy (1st millennium B.C.E.), in progress.
