Upcoming Events

AIA Local Lecture:  Beyond Thebes:  Local Identity and Power in Early New Kingdom Egypt

Speaker:   Prof. Emily Smith-Sangster, College of the Holy Cross

Time and Date:  6:30-7:30pm Monday, September 28th

Location:  Rehm Library, College of the Holy Cross (location; parking)

About:  Studies of identity in the Egyptian New Kingdom have long focused on Thebes, often treating "Theban" as interchangeable with "Egyptian" identity as a whole. This talk challenges that assumption by taking a more local approach, viewing identity as shaped by specific places, time periods, and communities, rather than as something that a single place and period can essentialize. Using the early 18th Dynasty Ahmose Cemetery at South Abydos, first discovered by the Abydos South Project in 2023, as a case study, this talk explores how a non-royal and non-elite community at Abydos manufactured and understood their local identities during a period of major political change and cultural shift. By examining burial customs, grave goods, and intangible culture such as landscape, this talk shows that while some Theban traditions of the early New Kingdom were adopted in Abydos, the community that made up the Ahmose Cemetery was not simply imitating the capital. Instead, this community developed its own local ways of expressing belonging, memory, and identity. In doing so, this study reframes Egyptian identity not as fixed or uniform across the country, but as a collection of flexible and self-formed local identities, which require close analysis of individual sites to more fully understand. 

~~~

AIA National Lecture:  The Thrill of the Catacombs:  From Rome to Worcester

Speaker:   Dr. Jessica Dello Russo, Clark University, in conversation with Prof.  Caroline Johnson Hodge, College of the Holy Cross

Time and Date:  6:30-7:30pm Thursday, October 29th

Location:  Rehm Library, College of the Holy Cross (location; parking)

About:  When people hear about the catacombs of Rome, they often think of early Christian history. But many don’t realize that these underground graves also belonged to non-Christians, including Jews. Jessica Dello Russo shares her experience in the Vigna Randanini Catacombs and insights from her recent book on the site's rediscovery: A Jewish Archaeology: The Christian Discovery of Jewish Catacombs in Rome (Brill, 2025).

This fascinating story tells how these underground graveyards were lost and later brought back into history as clearly Jewish sites. By placing this story in the wider context of digging up and protecting sites in nineteenth-century Rome, Dello Russo highlights important changes in how catacombs have been studied and what their lasting presence has meant to people over time.

The event will take the form of an interview, with Prof. Johnson Hodge asking Dr. Dello Russo questions. There will also be time for questions from the audience.

~~~

From September 25, 2026 to May 30, 2027 the Davis Museum at Wellesley College is running an exhibit "Excavating Antioch:  The Archaeology of an Ancient City", which is open to the public.   An opening symposium, "Antioch Today:  Archaeology, Labor, and Knowledge Production" will be held from 10am to 6pm on Friday, September 25, 2026 -- please click the link to register for the symposium, which is open to the public.