We live in the age of mass incarceration, and the field of critical prison studies maintains that the prison itself, and its widespread use, is unprecedented in pre-modern history. This lecture will dispute that traditional timeline, exploring the deep history of incarceration in the ancient Mediterranean world. We will see spaces of incarceration through 3D models, and we will read the words of people imprisoned thousands of years ago as preserved in their papyrus letters requesting food, clothing, and release from captivity. The lecture employs the past as a mirror in which we can critically examine modern ideals about the prison. We will explore troubling resonances between ancient and modern carceral practices, along with clear points of departure that help to denaturalize some modern prison policies that appear to many as obvious or necessary

2024/2025 AIA Online Archaeology Hour Continues! Join us virtually for the following exciting lectures (all at 5pm Pacific Time):

September 25, 2024 – Chip Colwell

On the Origins of Stuff

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October 16, 2024 – Solange Ashby

Ancient African Queens

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November 13, 2024 – Alison Futrell

The Peoples’ Arena

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January 22, 2025 – Uzma Rizvi

Caring for MohenjoDaro

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February 26, 2025 – Zainab Bahrani

Towards an Archaeology of Preservation

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March 19, 2025 – Rosemary Joyce

Complex Society Without Rulers

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April 9, 2025 – Mark Aldenderfer

Archaeology and the Tibetan/Himalayan Afterlife

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Fall & Winter 2023/2024: Archaeology Abridged and Archaeology Hour (virtual)

The AIA will be broadcasting virtual lectures throughout the academic year. You will be able to find announcement on our Facebook page, or follow them on the AIA site directly by following this link.

Spring Quarter 2023 In-Person Lectures:

March 4th (Saturday) @ Seattle University: “Excavating War: Violence, Power and Urbanism in

Prehistoric Anatolia,” Annual Faculty Lecture, presented by Prof. Stephanie Selover

April 15th (Saturday) @ University of Puget Sound: “Where Was the American Southwest (and Why Isn’t It There Anymore)?” AIA National Lecture, presented by Prof. Douglas Bamforth

April 26th (Wednesday) 5-6 pm, @ Zoom: The Ancient Mayan Diet in Times of Climate Change, presented by Dr. Mario Zimmermann

Subsistence production among the ancient Maya has traditionally received a fair amount of attention by the archaeological community. In this talk, Dr. Mario Zimmermann will discuss how the recent advances in microbotanical analysis have produced new agroecological models. Moreover, when present-day farming communities are taken into consideration, developments of the past can be compared to the challenges faced today due to environmental change.

Dr. Zimmermann is currently a Lora Bryning Redford Post-Doctoral Fellow in Archeology at the University of Puget Sound.  

2020-2021 SCHEDULE OF LECTURES CO-SPONSORED BY THE AIA PUGET SOUND SOCIETY AND THE UW AND UPS DEPARTMENTS OF CLASSICS

In the weeks prior to each lecture, you will be able to find detailed lecture announcements, including information about any meal reservations, by clicking on the lecture title.

In 31 BC, Octavian defeated Antony and Cleopatra in a naval battle off Cape Actium in Western Greece. A few years later, the victor constructed on the site of his personal camp a grand Victory Monument to commemorate the event. I first visited this site in 1978, and since then, have been trying to explain what I found there: the ruins of a massive rostral display whose complex details preserve evidence for the sizes of Antony’s and Cleopatra’s largest warships. After a brief attempt to find battle debris in the sea off Cape Actium, I was asked by Dr. Konstantinos Zachos to join his team in analyzing the results of his systematic excavations of the site. His work, conducted over a quarter century, has added much to our knowledge of this important monument—its original design, its elaborately decorated altar, its dedication text, and its period of use. At the same time, emerging 3D technologies have allowed me to comprehend the rostral display more fully, to visualize the monstrous sizes of the ships that fought in the final naval battle, and to restore the text of the dedication inscription. In this lecture, I will summarize the main results of our research, but do so in a personal manner, in the context of my own 40-year journey of discovery in search of the Battle of Actium

From 2014 to 2017, the Western Argolid Regional Project conducted an archaeological survey in the mountainous valleys in the watershed of the Inachos river (Greece). The survey collected a lot of information about the ancient, medieval and modern use and occupation of this archaeologically neglected area. As has become common in Greek archaeology, the project also had an ethnographic component that involved engaging local inhabitants. This paper attempts to bring these two components together to ask what an archaeology of the Greek landscape might look like if we took local knowledge seriously and incorporated it into our theoretical frameworks.

The current Covid-19 pandemic provides a dramatic example of the numerous, and mostly negative, health and social outcomes of epidemics. Research on past epidemics provides a temporal depth to our understanding of our current experience, gives context and illuminates the consequences of epidemics in general. This temporal depth is crucial for predicting how epidemics might shape health and society in the future. The archaeological record gives us access to the human experiences of large pre-industrial epidemics from the Neolithic onwards. Most previous archaeological work on epidemics has focussed on the human skeletal and microbiological evidence. Here I take a different approach, and instead survey the material traces of past human experiences of epidemics, including the Athenian and Justinian Plagues, the Black Death and its many waves throughout Europe, Africa and Asia, and epidemics in Indigenous communities resulting from colonial contacts. I will discuss vignettes drawing on physical evidence from landscapes, built environments, technologies, and artefacts show that apparently similar epidemics could have deeply different consequences. I highlight how archaeological research on past epidemics helps us to think about our current pandemic experience, and prepare for the future.

Undoubtedly the most familiar and recognizable feature on the faces of figures carved in the round or in relief during the Greek Archaic period (c. 750-480 BCE) is a shallow, inscrutable smile that, like the Mona Lisa’s, has defied explanation. The lecture surveys the origin and history of the “Archaic Smile” as well as the history of its interpretation. It is often thought a stylistic “import” from the sculpture of Egypt or the Near East, and it has been variously considered a sign of life, or happiness, or status, or divinity, or even an “optical refinement.” But although certain theories can be eliminated from the discussion and others added, there may in fact be no single, universal explanation for the Smile at all.

Image credit: Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge

The University of Washington is committed to providing access, equal opportunity and reasonable accommodation in its services, programs, activities, education, and employment for individuals with disabilities. To request disability accommodations for events at UW, contact the Disability Services Office at least ten days in advance at: 206-543-6450/V, 206-543-6452/TTY, 206-685-7264 (FAX), or dso@uw.edu.

RIDGWAY LECTURE 

Through the generosity of an anonymous donor, the Puget Sound Society of the AIA is privileged to have its own endowed lectureship, established in 1992 in honor of and inaugurated by Professor Brunilde S. Ridgway of Bryn Mawr College. The lectureship allows the society to invite a speaker of its choice each year. Click here for a list of previous Ridgway Lectures.