• Mar
    23
    All Day

    Spring Recess

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    Spring Recess

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  • Apr
    2
    9:00am - 10:00am

    Presentation of Dissertation Research by Rachel Kalisher (JIAAW)

    Salomon Center for Teaching, Rm 203

    Rachel Kalisher, a doctoral candidate in Archaeology and the Ancient World, will present her dissertation, “A Bioarchaeological Study of House Kinship at Bronze Age Megiddo,” in a public lecture. All are welcome.

    *Please note that this talk will be held in Salomon, Room 203.

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  • Apr
    4
    12:00pm - 12:50pm

    Brown Bag Series in Archaeology | Kathleen Forste

    Rhode Island Hall, Rm 108

    Kathleen Forste, a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Brown University’s Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, will discuss her research in an informal talk, titled “From Terrace to Tray: Archaeological Investigations of Andalusi Agriculture and Foodways”.

    For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit our blog: sites.brown.edu/archaeology/

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  • Apr
    4
    4:00pm - 5:00pm

    Carlos Fausto: Could Manioc Have Been a Root of the State?

    Rhode Island Hall, Rm 108

    Manioc was domesticated some 8,000 years ago in southwest Amazonia and has since become the staple food of the region’s indigenous peoples. Since colonial times, Europeans have viewed it with suspicion, opposing it to grains. One Jesuit priest even proposed uprooting all manioc and replacing it with wheat. More recently, tubers and tuberous roots, characteristic of tropical agriculture, have been associated with political decentralization and the absence of the state. They would be state-evading crops. In this talk, Dr. Carlos Fausto will investigate this idea using ethnographic and archaeological data from an indigenous Amazonian society, whose political-ritual economy revolves around chiefs and their grandeur.

    Carlos Fausto is a professor of anthropology at the National Museum, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He served as a visiting scholar at the universities of Chicago, Stanford and Cambridge, as well as at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the École Pratique des Hautes Études, both in France. He has been conducting fieldwork among indigenous peoples in Amazonia since 1988, most notably with the Tupi-speaking Parakanã and the Karib-speaking Kuikuro. His most recent books are “Warfare and Shamanism in Amazonia, Art Effects: Image, Agency and Ritual in Amazonia,” and the co-edited volume “Ownership and Nurture: Studies in Native Amazonian Property Relations.” He is also a photographer and a documentary filmmaker, having co-directed the award-winning feature film “The Hyperwomen.

    Dr. Fausto is currently Visiting Professor of Anthropology and Global Scholar at Princeton University’s Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and the Brazil LAB.

    This lecture is co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, with support from the William R. Rhodes Latin American Fund. It is free and open to the public. No registration is required.

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  • April 5-6, 2024

    Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World
    60 George Street, Rhode Island Hall, Providence, RI sites.brown.edu/archaeology/workshops/jiaaw2024

     

    There are universals to the human experience; all of us are born, and all of us die. Between those bookends, our lives are inevitably punctuated by periods of success and struggle. The diversity of human nature means that how one experiences these milestones is variable, and, to truly approach reconstruction of past lives, we must weave together the many evidential threads that constitute the archaeological record.

    Through the study of ancient skeletal and botanical remains, as well as texts and objects, this conference seeks to gather archaeologists working across disciplinary, geographical, and chronological boundaries to discuss one thing: the life course.

    The Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World will hold a conference on these themes on April 5th-6th, 2024, at Rhode Island Hall.

    Free and open to the public. No registration required.
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  • Apr
    10
    All Day

    Guided Inventions: Visual Signs, Language, and Graphic Notation

    Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Rm Joukowsky Forum (Room 155)

    How, why, when, and where do novel writing systems come into being? The inception of Mesopotamian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Chinese Oracle Bone graphs receive merited attention. Yet, by ample evidence, scripts appear at many other times and places, usually through contact with earlier systems of recording. To this day, writing continues to be devised under varied conditions of social, linguistic, religious, and aesthetic tumult and possibility, need and amusement. “Guided Inventions” looks at how scripts coalesce in response to prior scripts. A breadth of examples attests to the importance of this process, ranging from Africa to Indigenous America, the ancient Aegean to Scandinavian runes, Hollywood fabulations to the results of encounters with spirits. But the topic remains under-explored. Addressing that need, “Guided Inventions” seeks to find what these inventions share and how they differ. Joining the debate will be archaeologists, linguists, and anthropologists, each intent on understanding how, from the makers’ viewpoint, systems of imaginative marking help to graft meaning, language, and practice.

    Schedule of Events

    12:00-12:30 Welcome and Opening Remarks by Stephen Houston & Felipe Rojas (Brown University)

    12:30-1:00 Silvia Ferrara (University of Bologna)

    1:00-1:30 Yoolim Kim (Wellesley College), “Writing and cognition: Distinctiveness, complexity, and informativeness of letter shapes”

    1:30-2:00 Coffee Break

    2:00-2:30 Piers Kelly (University of New England), “Signs and wonders: Miraculous revelation and recuperation as recurring motifs in global origin stories about writing”

    2:30-3:00 Bérénice Gaillemin (Getty Research Institute), “On some glotografic inventions from the Florentine Codex (Mexico, 16th century)”

    3:00-3:30 Fallou Ngom (Boston University), “Beyond Europhone and Oral Sources: The Significance of African Ajami Texts”

    3:30-4:00 Closing Remarks by Stephen Houston & Felipe Rojas (Brown University)

    Organized by Stephen Houston (Anthropology / History of Art and Architecture) & Felipe Rojas (JIAAW / Egyptology & Assyriology)

     

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  • Apr
    11
    4:00pm - 5:30pm

    Chris Heaney | Mummifying Museums: The Inca Ancestors of American Anthropology

    Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Rm Joukowsky Forum (111 Thayer Street)

    About the Event
    Between 1820 and 1920, the largest single population of human remains in American museums like the Smithsonian, the American Museum of Natural History, and Harvard’s Peabody was from the Andes. By collecting these “ancient Peruvian” mummies and skulls, anthropologists sought a foundation for the historical study of race worldwide. But in doing so, they compounded a far longer struggle for the ancestral dead in the Andes—one that began when Spain invaded the empire of Tawantinsuyu in 1532 and confiscated its Inca ancestors. This longer history of the theft of Indigenous bodies makes clear the responsibility of U.S. museums to the history of supposedly more distant populations, whose racialization fueled grave-robbing throughout the Americas. But it also reveals how Peruvian intellectuals and grave-openers, some of Inca and Andean descent, used the dead to transform their study, curating these “scientific ancestors” as evidence of historical precedence, sovereignty, climactic care, healing, and national belonging. This work preceded North American efforts at decolonization by decades, if not centuries, and challenges our understanding of what it might mean to mummify a museum.

    About the Speaker
    Christopher Heaney is a historian of Latin America, with research interests in the history of science, indigeneity, museums, race, and deathways in the Andes, Americas, and the World. He is the author of two books. His most recent, “Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology(Oxford University Press, 2023), is a history of the collection and display of Inca mummies and ancient Peruvian skulls in the Americas, spanning from the 16th century to the present. His prior book, “Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham, a Real-Life Indiana Jones and the Search for Machu Picchu” (2010), was a history of Yale University’s conflict with Peru over the excavation of Machu Picchu, and advocated for the return of the site’s human remains and gravegoods to Peru. It was published in Spanish as “Las Tumbas de Machu Picchu: La historia de Hiram Bingham y la Busqueda de las últimas ciudades de los Incas” in 2012. His third book will be a history of the colonial laws regulating grave-robbing in the Anglo-Iberian Atlantic World, and their assault upon Indigenous sovereignty.

    At Penn State, he trains undergraduate and graduate students in Colonial and Modern Latin American history, the history of Peru and the Incas, the history of science, and the cultural history of United States-Latin American relations. His approach to teaching presumes a Latin America that has always been modern, and an Americas and Atlantic World shaped by movements, infrastructures, and knowledges of Native peoples. In 2012, he co-founded and was the Editor-in-Chief of The Appendix, a journal of narrative and experimental history. From 2016 to 2018 he was the Barra Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. His writing has been featured by The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times.

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  • Apr
    12
    9:30am - 10:30am

    Presentation of Dissertation Research by Anna Soifer (JIAAW)

    Rhode Island Hall, Rm 108

    Anna Soifer, a doctoral candidate in Archaeology and the Ancient World, will present her dissertation, “Landscapes of Practice and Community in 7th-4th c. BCE Etruria: Lived Experiences of Ceramic and Metal Production”, in a public lecture. All are welcome.

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  • Apr
    15
    5:30pm

    2024 Sachs Lecture in Assyriology: Céline Debourse

    Rhode Island Hall, Rm 108

    Céline Debourse, Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University

    Making Priest and Temple in Late Achaemenid and Hellenistic Babylon (484–60 BCE)

    In 484 BCE, Xerxes crushed several Babylonian revolts against his rule. One of the results was an almost complete disruption of Babylonian temple life as it had existed up until that point. While in most places the cult never resumed, in the city of Babylon the worship of the gods was eventually reinstated and even flourished again. In this talk, I ask how Babylon’s community undertook this process of rebuilding the temple, both in terms of how the worship of the gods was actually organized and how the rebuilding process was ideally envisioned and legitimized. After all, these people’s undertaking was not so straightforward, as the foreign kings who ruled over them no longer cared for the gods of Babylon.

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    Céline Debourse is an Assyriologist specializing in the languages, history, and religion of Babylonia during the first millennium BCE. Her work draws on a broad spectrum of methods and disciplines, from rigorous philological analysis, through historical criticism and literary studies, to the application of sociological and anthropological theories. She furthermore aims to embed Babylonia in wider Near Eastern history and to foster dialogues between Assyriology and other disciplines.

    Her research centers around two broad themes. First, she is interested in the final stages of cuneiform history and its reactions to and interactions with foreign imperial rule. In her first book, Of Priests and Kings: The Babylonian New Year Festival in the Last Age of Cuneiform Culture (Brill, 2022), she studies cuneiform priestly writings created under Persian, Hellenistic, and Parthian rule. She shows how this Late Babylonian Priestly Literature served to strengthen group-internal bonds and foster a strong priestly identity in a time of foreign domination. Debourse’s work has also focused on the socio-economic aspects of Babylonian temple households post-484 BCE, challenging long-standing assumptions of cultic continuity and shedding new light on the question of the impact of foreign rule on a former “hegemonic” religious system. In her current book project, provisionally titled Babylon Beyond Cuneiform (331 BCE–224 CE), she seeks to study the latest history of the city of Babylon from a comparative perspective and to contend with the challenges presented by the dwindling and eventual disappearance of the cuneiform record.

    The second main theme in her research is ancient ritual. Her interest in this topic ranges from the cuneiform textual tradition reflecting ritual to the application of modern theories to ancient ritual. Moreover, she explores how ritual can be an innovative and useful tool for historical research (see the co-edited volume, Ceremonies, Feasts, and Festivities in Ancient Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean World, Zaphon, 2023). She is currently working on a comprehensive study of the corpus of Late Babylonian ritual texts, which will include updated editions and extensive analysis.

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  • “Rebuilding Rome, Rebuilding Tenochtitlán: Two Post-Sack Sacred Cities in the 1520s”
    In 1521, the sacred city of Tenochtitlán was sacked by a coalition of Central Mexican anti-Aztec warriors and their European allies. Six years later, across the Atlantic, another sacred city–Rome–was also invaded, looted, and occupied. Much has been written about the rebuilding of bombed European cities after World War II, but studying processes of urban reconstruction five centuries ago presents very different challenges. This talk (itself very much a work in progress!) considers the kinds of sources we can use to tell the story of how these two early modern cities were remade after devastation.

    Byron Ellsworth Hamann (BA History of Art and Architecture, Brown University, 1994) has written on writing systems, dictionaries, archives, inquisitions, shipwrecks, landscapes, temporalities, and architecture in the early modern Mediterratlantic world. He is an editor of Grey Room; author of The Translations of Nebrija: Language, Culture, and Circulation in the Early Modern World (2015), Bad Christians, New Spains: Muslims, Catholics, and Native Americans in a Mediterratlantic World (2020), and The Invention of the Colonial Americas: Data, Architecture, and the Archive of the Indies 1781-1844 (2022); and co-editor (with Felipe Rojas and Benjamin Anderson) of Otros pasados: Ontologías alternativas y el estudo de lo que ha sido (2022).
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