Archaeological Institute of America Hanfmann Lecture

Melissa Baltus, University of Toledo

"Rituals of the Everyday: Neighborhood Diversity in the Urbanization of Cahokia"

Thursday, April 28, 5:30pm

Virtual: Zoom link

Meeting ID: 940 3122 2274

Passcode: 291815

The neighborhoods of ancient Cahokia tell its stories. Their similarities and differences provide invaluable insight into the processes of urbanization, as well as the ways in which lived lives shaped the urban landscape.  Much of what we know about Cahokia’s neighborhoods derives from salvage excavations in or near the core of “downtown”. These excavations demonstrate planned site organization, dynamic neighborhood uses, and varying relationships between politico-religious practices, landscape features, and domestic spaces. Describing the development and depopulation of Cahokia through its neighborhoods, I will contextualize the findings of a recent multi-year project at one area of Cahokia and what we have learned about the city from this newly explored neighborhood. 

Religion, Race, and Democracy Lab: Conference

Making Up Selves: The Operating Instructions

"Arrhidaeus in Babylon"

In-person and online

Schedule of Events

Friday, April 8

11:30 AM–1 PM EST, Rotunda Dome Room

Tanya Luhrmann: Voices

Saturday, April 9

10:30 AM–12 PM EST, Gibson Room, Level 1, Cocke Hall

Sarah Iles Johnston: Narrating Reality in the Ancient Greek Magical Papyri

3:30–5 PM EST, Gibson Room, Level 1, Cocke Hall

Niki Kasumi Clements: Foucault and Practices of the Self in Late-Antiquity

Intellectual Focus

“Our experience of ourselves,” the French philosopher Michel Foucault said, “seems to us, no doubt, to be that which is original and immediate; but we have to remember that it has been constituted through historically formed practices. And what we believe we see so clearly in ourselves…is given to us via techniques.” American writer Ursula K. Le Guin noted that “All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people.” What is true of our experience of ourselves and our lives goes for the worlds we take ourselves to inhabit and experience: the ones we find apparently ready-made for us; the ones we narrate into being and enact in our rituals; the ones we dream ourselves into.

But let’s get serious. To adapt a question a few Buddhist monks once asked an unhappy traveler whose body was swapped with one made from the re-assembled limbs of a corpse after an unlucky run-in with a pair of demons: “What manner of beings are we?” What can we imagine ourselves as being? And how do we make ourselves up?

Over two days an anthropologist (Tanya Luhrmann), a classicist (Sarah Iles Johnston), and a philosopher of religion (Niki Kasumi Clements) will discuss voices, and how people use social practice to shape inner worlds and moral purpose; how ancient handbooks of spells in Greek dating to the first six or seven centuries CE narrate worlds into which one can immerse oneself; and how we might think of the difference between practices, technologies and hermeneutics of self in the work of Michel Foucault.

Graduate Student Colloquium

"Pushing the Boundaries: African and Asian Interactions with the Ancient Mediterranean"

Saturday, 19 March, 9:00am

"Miss-understood Emblem: The Indian Female Figure of Pompeii"

Priyasakhi Chiara Barchi and Lylaah L Bhalerao

Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University 

"Isis and the Ptolemaic Ruler Cult on Rhodes, Delos and Thera"

Brooke McArdle

New York University

"Roman Glass in Tombs of Ancient China (4th-6th centuries A.D.)"

Xiao Yang

Autonomous University of Madrid

"Between Books and Life: The Reception of Graeco-Roman Literature Among Formerly Enslaved Black Writers, 1780-1865"

Daniel Whittle

Hertford College, Oxford

"The Racialization of Prometheus: Emancipation and 'Universal Humanity' in 19th-Century African-American Abolitionist Literature"

Leo Kershaw

Balliol College, Oxford

"Nandipha Mntambo's Reception of Classical Myth and Cultural Fusion"

Cody Houseman

Emory University

"Greek Tragedy in Postwar Japan: The Divine, State, and Household in Euripides' Heracles and Yukio Mishima's The Decline and Fall of the Suzaku" 

Brinda Sarma

Ashoka University

"'These are the words of a people and nation worn down by an accumulated load of cares': Classical Wisdom and Modern Crisis in Lin Shu's Aesop's Fables"

Benjamin Porteous

Harvard University

Keynote Address

"Edward Said's Orientalism: A Reappraisal"

Phiroze Vasunia

University College London

This conference is made possible through the generous support of our co-sponsors: The Office of the Dean of Arts and Humanities at the University of Virginia, the Department of Classics, the Ancient History Fund, the Department of Anthropology, the McIntire Department of Art, the UVA Division for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, the Department of English, the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies, and the Interdisciplinary Archaeology Program.

The registration link is copied below. Registration will close on March 19th. Please address any further questions to the co-directors of the colloquium, Nina Raby (nr8ca@virginia.edu) and Camilla Basile (cb8vd@virginia.edu). 

Link: https://virginia.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUqce2ppzorEtYzUJpXTG00fYGvGfY2gI5R

Antonio Curet, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian

"Disaster, Community, and the Ancestors: The Case of the Ceremonial Center of Tibes, Puerto Rico"

 Friday, 18 March, 4:00‐5:15pm

Brooks Hall 2010

Hosted by the Interdisciplinary Archaeology Program and the Anthropology Department at UVA

Archaeology Brown Bag

Sadie Louise Weber, Harvard University 

"Eating Local, Drinking Imported: Cuisine and Identity at 3000 BP in the Central Andes"

Friday, November 5, 4:00-5:15

Virtual: Zoom registration link

Abstract: This study combines microbotanical, faunal, and stable isotope analyses to explore interregional interaction, cuisine, and identity formation during the Formative Period (ca. 1800-200 BCE) in the Central Andes at two sites: Chavín de Huántar and Atalla. Both sites comprise civic-ceremonial centers and affiliated settlements tied to the Chavín culture, a phenomenon that spread widely across the Central Andean Region between ca. 1300 – 400 BCE. While animal use at both sites appears to have been distinctly highland in tradition, a greater variety of plants were used, including cultigens that cannot grow within either sites’ immediate area. Moreover, evidence for grinding, boiling, and fermentation of maize, manioc, and algarrobo, point to specific beverage recipes that may have played a significant role in social cohesion. In this presentation, I explore the movement of foodstuffs, distinctive methods of food preparations, and ingredients as markers of identity during the Formative Period in the Ancient Andes.

Archaeology Program Info Session

"Finding Field Schools"

Thursday, October 28, 6:30pm-8pm

Fayerweather Hall Lounge

Please join the Archaeology Program for an informal gathering of students and faculty to discuss how to find your perfect archaeology field school! You will hear some gems of advice from our faculty, grad students, and some of your fellow-majors. We will also discuss internships and other opportunities.   Dinner will be served.

Archaeology Brown Bag

Najee Olya, University of Virginia

"Exiting Frank M. Snowden, Jr.’s Anthropological Gallery: Toward an Understanding of Visual Representations of Africans in Ancient Greek Vase-Painting"

Friday, October 22, 4:00-5:15

Virtual: Zoom registration link

Abstract: A recurring theme in the iconography of ancient Greek vase-painting produced during the Archaic and Classical periods from the sixth through fourth centuries BCE is the non-Greek foreign “other”—a category that included Africans, Persians, Scythians, and Thracians. During the second half of the twentieth century, Greek vases and other artifacts with depictions of Africans were extensively studied by Frank M. Snowden, Jr., the most prominent Black classical scholar in the United States. Focusing on both written and visual portrayals of Africans, which he asserted were sympathetic, Snowden advanced the thesis that pervasive anti-Black racism characteristic of the contemporary United States was unknown in the ancient Mediterranean. Snowden, nevertheless, relied heavily on anthropological scholarship rooted in biological racial essentialism that was already being discredited when he began his career in the 1940s. Framing the artifacts as an “anthropological gallery,” his interest in the superficially realistic representations of Africans came at the expense of other important considerations—of production, function, distribution, audience, and context. Using these considerations as a point of departure, in this talk I reconsider two kinds of Greek vases studied by Snowden to offer a preliminary attempt at showing how archaeologists might interrogate his foundational research and, by adopting a more comprehensive approach, exit the “anthropological gallery.”

AIA Joukowsky Lecture

Michael Chazan, University of Toronto

"Tracing the Origins of Art"

Thursday, October 21, 5:30pm

Virtual: Zoom link

Meeting ID: 940 5443 7501

Passcode: 789016

The urge towards creativity and self-expression is a fundamental element of being human.  This lecture explores the emergence of creative expression in the archaeological record.   The topics covered will include the earliest known symbolic artifacts from sites in southern Africa and the explosion in symbolic artifacts found at the outset of the European Upper Paleolithic.  The lecturer’s research at the site of Wonderwerk Cave, South Africa provides an opportunity to consider the deepest roots of the artistic impulse.  The wealth of recent archaeological discoveries provides an opportunity to consider human origins from a new perspective, and also raises intriguing questions about the nature of artistic expression. 

Archaeology Brown Bag

Amanda Phillips, University of Virginia

"Textile Studies: Interdisciplinary Potentials"

Friday, September 24, 4:00-5:15

Brooks Hall Conference Room (2nd floor)

Abstract: Textiles were, and are, a major object of exchange, traded at all levels of all markets around the world. This talk focuses on textiles in the Ottoman Empire, from about 1400 to about 1700, considering the objects themselves provide the basis for writing new kinds of history. A massive silk hanging made for Sultan Bāyezīd I (r. 1389-1402), a type of cotton sometimes worn by dervishes and guildsmen, velvet upholstery made for avid customers in towns and cities near and far, and garments found in Palace collections begin to suggest the many overlapping topographies of textiles in the Empire and beyond. Using these examples and others, I’ll also argue that textiles—haptic, somatic, ubiquitous; in an immense range of types; with a collective status as a major commodity—demand new kinds of scholarly treatment.

Everyone must be masked inside Brooks Hall and in the conference room.  So that we can remain masked during the talk, we won’t be serving refreshments—we’ll resume that tradition as soon as we can do it safely!!!  We will end promptly at 5:15.

Joint Conference: Things Have Changed Divine Interventions in Human Bodies and Landscapes

Newcastle University & University of Virginia

Friday - Saturday, September 17-18

Virtual.  Register by email to jc3ev@virginia.edu

Classics Open House

Thursday, September 16, 4:00pm

Classics Department, Cocke Hall

Undergraduates interested in Classics are welcome to come and learn about the Department, the subject, the Professors, etc.

Archaeology Brown Bag Lecture

Introductory Meeting

Friday, September 10, 4:00pm

Fayerweather patio

Please join us for an outdoor, informal get-together to welcome our new and returning graduate and undergraduate students, and to see each other in person and chat about what we’ve been up to.  We’ll be meeting on the Fayerweather patio, which you can find on the Carr’s Hill side of the building.

UVA Democracy Intitiative

“Touchstones of Democracy: Renaissance Humanism, Democracy, and the University”

Speakers: Christopher Celenza, Chad Welmon, Jacqueline Arther-Montagne (Moderator)

Wednesday, September 8, 4:00pm

Virtual. Register HERE.

How does an engagement with Renaissance Humanism help us understand the contemporary role, and potential futures, of the university’s contributions to democratic life? Join us for a conversation between Christopher Celenza, a scholar of the Renaissance and Dean of the Krieger School of Arts & Sciences at Johns Hopkins, and Chad Wellmon, a scholar of knowledge and information and Professor of German and History at UVA. They will discuss the connections between their two new books – Celenza’s The Italian Renaissance and the Origins of the Modern Humanities & Wellmon’s Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age – and how their research shapes their perspectives on the contemporary university.  

The conversation will be moderated by Jacqueline Arthur-Montagne, a specialist on education and democracy in the ancient world, who was recently hired in the Classics Department as part of the Democracy Initiative’s faculty hiring initiative.