CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email [email protected].

This presentation examines the ritual agency of objects looking at the water sanctuary at Nîmes in modern Provence, a garden complex known today as Les Jardins de la Fontaine. Originally an indigenous shrine dedicated to the local water deity, Nemausus, this ritual space was monumentalized and consecrated to the cult of the emperor after the Roman conquest, sometime in the late first century BCE. Considering the architecture of the site and the corpus of votive offerings found in the local spring, Professor Gretel Rodriguez brings attention to how haptic engagements with the water shaped the religious experience worshippers encountered at this complex, and explores the role of votives as extensions of imperial personhood.

Gretel Rodríguez is Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture. She specializes in the art, architecture, and archaeology of ancient Rome. Her work investigates the relationship between art and society, exploring issues of viewership, reception, colonialism, and identity in relation to ancient visual culture. Her current book project explores the design and reception of Roman honorific architecture. Professor Rodríguez’s secondary specialization is in the art and architecture of ancient Mesoamerica. She has conducted research in Rome, the Bay of Naples, Southern France, and, in Palenque, Mexico. She is editor of Roman archaeology for the Database of Religious History (DRH), an international digital humanities initiative.

Join the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology as we welcome Christopher Sockalexis (Penobscot), Penobscot Nation Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, he discusses where his work intersects as a tribal official, cultural tourism guide, artist and archaeologist.

In addition to his work as the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Penobscot Nation, Chris is currently conducting research for his Masters of Science degree at the University of Maine Climate Change Institute, with his thesis work focusing on Cultural Identity and Maritime Adaptation in Frenchman Bay, Maine. Chris is also artist, and cultural tourism guide, and is one of the lead singers of the RezDogs, an intertribal powwow drum group based out of Indian Island, Maine. He serves on the Abbe Museum Board of Trustees and is also an avid canoe and kayak paddler who loves being out in the Maine woods and on the waterways that his ancestors have traveled for thousands of years.

This program is part of the Haffenreffer Museums 2024-2025 Programming Initiative to highlight Indigenous professionals working in the fields of tribal historic preservation and repatriation work, to discuss the intersection and overlap of these professions and how museums such as the HMA can best work to support them.

6:00 pm | Reception

6:15 pm | Lecture begins

Supported by generous donors to Shepard Krech III Lecture Fund.

This talk, “God, Gifts, and Graffiti: Late Antique Church Assemblages and Temporalities of Sacred Space,” advances the idea that sacred spaces are essential cultural mechanisms for creating and for giving shape to particular forms of temporality—in other words, that we can think of them as important of time-making and time-structuring machines. It focuses particular attention on the concept of social time, understood as a lived, participatory mode of temporality that operates on the level of individuals and communities, real or imagined. The paper argues that we can access something of the social time of late antique churches through the various types of “polychronic” material assemblages gathered on their surfaces and in their spaces (architectural members, tombs, graffiti, liturgical silver, books, and other treasury items) that accumulated through and derived meaning from the combined contributions and traces of numerous individuals. The church building, on this reading, is seen as an interface between sacred time—outlined in sacred texts, endorsed by the monumental decorative programs, and reinforced with each liturgical performance—and the personal timelines of individuals and family groups, visible in the names and other kinds of marks of numerous, differently “timed” contributors. 

Ann Marie Yasin specializes in Roman and late antique architecture and material culture and holds a joint appointment in the departments of Art History and Classics at the University of Southern California. Her particular research interests include experience and perception of the built environment, decorative and epigraphic landscapes, commemoration, urbanism, material culture of religion, and long histories of display and reception of sites and artifacts.

Yasin received her BA in Classical Archaeology from the University of Michigan and her MA and PhD in Art History from the University of Chicago. Before joining the faculty at USC Yasin taught for three years at Northwestern University. Her research has been supported by residential fellowships at the American Academy in Rome and at Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies. She was named a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) for 2018-19.

Yasin’s writing on social and political dimensions of sacred architecture and art includes her first book, Saints and Church Spaces in the Late Antique Mediterranean: Architecture, Cult, and Community (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and more recent studies on memory and sacred landscapes, spatiality and perception of devotional graffiti, and architectural frameworks of early Christian relic installations.

Her current book project, Re-Building Histories: Architectural Temporality from Augustus to Justinian, investigates correlations between architectural restoration and notions of continuity, change, monumentality and ephemerality from the first to sixth centuries CE. It analyzes cultural practices such as the literary, epigraphic, and visual representations of architectural destruction and renewal, the selective restaging of antiquities and architectural fragments, and patrons’ appropriation of earlier sites and commemorative forms to explore how the fabrics of cities gave palpable shape to temporal patterns and ruptures.

Meet HMA student staff who work behind the scenes, engage with archaeological objects from around the world in our CultureLab, learn about our programs and events, and enjoy light refreshments. View our current exhibit “A Verry Drunk Hunters Dream: Modernist Expressionism in Africa”

Admission is Free.

Please note: the date has changed for this event. HMA’s Archaeology Day Open House will be held on October 26th. 

Come be part of an active archaeological excavation! Students will be digging on the grounds outside the List Art Building. Stop by (with your family or on your own) any time between 11:00 am and 3:00 pm to see what our students are uncovering or even try your hand at digging.

Join the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World and the AIA Narragansett Society for an archaeology-themed open house on Brown University’s Main Green. See ancient coins from Greece and Rome up close! Touch animal bones! Examine and draw Persian and Roman ceramics, prehistoric tools, precious metals, and other artifacts from thousands of years ago – coached by experts! And talk with Brown’s archaeologists about their fieldwork all over the world!

Free and open to the public! All ages welcome!