• Dec
    12
    All Day

    Exhibit: I should be Poseidon

    Rhode Island Hall
    How can we find alternative, sensorially rich and affective ways of engaging with the material past in the present?
    How can photography play a central role in archaeological narratives, beyond representation and documentation?
    These questions area explored in a photography exhibition on the first floor of the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World (Rhode Island Hall).
    Ancient and not-so-ancient stones, pine trees that were “wounded” for their resin, people who lived amongst the classical ruins, and the tensions and the clashes with the archaeological apparatus and its regulations, all become palpable, affectively close and immediate.
    The exhibition is based on the book, “Camera Kalaureia: An Archaeological Photo-Ethnography”, by Yannis Hamilakis and Fotis Ifantidis (Oxford, Archaeopress, 2016). It is curated by the class ARCH2153 “Archaeological Ethnography”, taught by Professor Yannis Hamilakis.
    Open weekdays from 8:30am-5:00pm.
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  • Andrew Dufton, a doctoral candidate in Archaeology and the Ancient World, will present his dissertation research in a public lecture. All are welcome.
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  • Dec
    1
    Guo Jue is Assistant Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures and Co-Chair of the Columbia Early China Seminar at Barnard College. She received her Ph.D (2008) in Early China from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to joining Barnard, she was an Assistant Professor of Chinese Religions at Western Michigan University (2008-2013) and a visiting research fellow at the Cluster of Asia and Europe at Universität Heidelberg (2012-2013), Germany. She specializes in Early China, especially from the Warring States period to Han times (5th century B.C.E.-3rd century C.E.). Her research interests are primarily in ritual practices, material culture, and social, religious, and cultural history of early societies. Using both received history and archaeological sources, she is interested in looking at the intersection and interaction between writing and object, and studying topics including divination, death rituals, tombs and burials, and everyday life in early to medieval China from anthropological and historical perspectives, as well as the way they are theorized in comparative studies.
    Co-sponsored by Brown University’s Department of History of Art and Architecture, Program in Early Cultures, and Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World
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  • Emily Booker, doctoral candidate in Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University, will present her research in an informal talk. Pizza and soda will be provided, or feel free to bring a lunch.
    For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit http://blogs.brown.edu/archaeology/events/brown-bag-series/.
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  • Nov
    28
    6:00pm - 8:00pm

    The Destruction of Memory: A Film Screening and Q&A with the Director

    List Art Building, Room 120
    The Destruction of Memory: A Film Screening and Q&A with the Director
    Tim Slade (Vast Productions USA)
    Over the past century, cultural destruction has wrought catastrophic results across the globe. This war against culture is not over - it’s been steadily increasing. In Syria and Iraq, the ‘cradle of civilization’, millennia of culture are being destroyed. The push to protect, salvage and rebuild has moved in step with the destruction. Legislation and policy have played a role, but heroic individuals have fought back, risking and losing their lives to protect not just other human beings, but our cultural identity - to save the record of who we are. Based on the book of the same name by Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory tells the whole story - looking not just at the ongoing actions of Daesh (ISIS) and at other contemporary situations, but revealing the decisions of the past that allowed the issue to remain hidden in the shadows for so many years. Interviewees in the film include the Director-General of UNESCO, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, as well as diverse and distinguished international experts, whose voices combine to address this urgent issue.
    This screening is the first event in the series, “Combating Crisis: New Responses to Cultural Heritage Preservation in the Middle East,” sponsored by the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology, in collaboration with the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, the Cogut Center for Humanities, and the Program in Middle East Studies.
    List Art Building, Room 120
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  • Meltem Toksoz, Visiting Associate Professor of Middle East Studies at Brown University, will present her research in an informal talk. Pizza and soda will be provided, or feel free to bring a lunch.
    For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit http://blogs.brown.edu/archaeology/events/brown-bag-series/.
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  • Mirjam Brusius is a Mellon Post-doctoral Fellow in the History of Photography, a post she holds in conjunction with the Bodleian Library, at Oxford University. She previously held Postdoctoral Fellowships at Harvard University, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz. Her research addresses the intersection of modern history of science and the history of European and Islamic art. It centres on the history of photography, museums, collecting, and scientific voyages in and between Europe and the Middle East.
    Co-sponsored by Brown University’s Center for Middle East Studies, Department of History of Art and Architecture, and Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World
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  • Benjamin Alberti, Chair and Professor of Sociology at Framingham College, will present his research in an informal talk, titled, “Body/Image: Towards an Ontology of Anthropomorphism in First Millennium CE Northwest Argentina”. Pizza and soda will be provided, or feel free to bring a lunch.
    For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit http://blogs.brown.edu/archaeology/events/brown-bag-series/.
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  • Naoise Mac Sweeney is Associate Professor in Ancient History at the University of Leicester, specialising in the study of ethnicity, identity and migration. She has published widely in the fields of ancient history, archaeology, race relations, international development and peacebuilding studies, and she is the author of Foundation Myths and Politics in Ancient Ionia (2013). She has also pursued her research interests through archaeological fieldwork in Turkey, in particular as part of the Kilise Tepe Archaeological Project.
    Co-sponsored by Brown University’s Department of Egyptology and Assyriology, and Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World
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  • Playing with Fire: Experimental Neolithic Cooking in Cyprus
    Andrew P. McCarthy (Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute, and University of Edinburgh)
    The Neolithic period in Cyprus had a range of site-types (permanent village, hunting camp, seasonal inhabitation, ritual centres, etc.) and mobility must be considered a factor in the use of the landscape. Without many more excavated sites, however, it is difficult to examine the relationships between sites of different type and their place in the landscape. The Neolithic remains at Prasteio Mesorotsos have recently revealed two cooking installations that can shed light on both mobility and sedentism and possibly provide the fulcrum between the various types of sites that we know about. One feature is a domestic -scale domed oven, which reflects the cooking habits of the inhabitants that resided at this location for at least some part of the year. Another feature is a remarkable large-scale pit oven that would have been capable of feeding a great many people, more than is presumed for a single community. These two features provide contrasting habits that reflect the interactions between mobile (possibly hunting or pastoral) groups and seasonal sedentary populations. In particular, the pit-oven can be thought to have been used in feasts that gathered multiple communities into a single place. In order to understand these activities, in 2015 and 2016 an experimental project was conducted reconstructing the the pit oven and a large feast was organized for local communities in order to test hypotheses about the labor involved in production, the number of people that could have been fed and the possibilities for inter-community interaction.
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  • Nov
    4
    4:00pm - 6:00pm

    Making a Mark: Graphs Beyond Language

    Smith-Buonanno 106
    Making a Mark: Graphs Beyond Language
    Sponsored by the Program in Early Cultures at Brown University
    4–5 November 2016
    Smith-Buonanno Hall, Room 106 (95 Cushing Street, Providence, RI)
    Humans have an urge, even a compulsion, to mark meaning through visible graphs. These signs range from coats of arms to emojis, potter’s marks to gang signs, and Paleolithic graphs to ISOTYPE or other cross-linguistic vehicles for communicating ideas. All can project meaning directly, without necessary recourse to language. For all their importance, however, there is little of a comparative nature to probe their use, meaning, makers, setting, and variance, or what they share as an expressive potential of all humans. In this conference, specialists in diverse scriptural and semiological systems explore semasiography, the phenomenon of non-linguistic forms of graphic communication organized into patterned, often codified ways. Talks address the techniques and systems employed in such mark-making, the media and modes of representation, and the uses and limitations of symbols and graphemes. The overall objective is to underscore the vitality of such visible signs at all times and periods, and to delight in their wondrous variety.
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  • Laura Hawkins, a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Egyptology and Assyriology at Brown University, will present her research in an informal talk, titled, “Uncovering Meaning in Undeciphered Writing Systems: The Role of “Postscripts” in Proto-Elamite Texts”. Pizza and soda will be provided, or feel free to bring a lunch.
    For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit http://blogs.brown.edu/archaeology/events/brown-bag-series/.
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  • Nov
    1
    5:00pm - 6:00pm

    Archaeology DUG Meet and Greet

    Rhode Island Hall
    Note: Date and time not yet finalized.
    The Archaeology & the Ancient World DUG will be hosting a social at 5pm in RI Hall, Room 108. All Archaeology concentrators, as well as all those interested in archaeology and the ancient world, are welcome to attend. It’s a wonderful chance to engage with others who share a love of archaeology! Refreshments will be served!
    Sponsored by the Archaeology Departmental Undergraduate Group
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  • Nov
    1
    4:00pm - 5:00pm

    Archaeological Fieldwork Information Session

    Rhode Island Hall, Room 108
    Note: Date and time not yet finalized.
    Where can you do fieldwork this summer? How can you pay for it? How do you apply? What’s an UTRA grant? Should you enroll in a field school or volunteer? What courses should you take to prepare? Do you have to be an archaeology concentrator? What is fieldwork, anyway? And what about study abroad?
    Sponsored by the Archaeology Department Undergraduate Group
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  • Oct
    27
    7:30pm - 8:30pm

    Prisoners of War: Durham and the Fate of the Scots in 1650

    Rhode Island Hall, Room 108
    Archaeologists from Durham University, UK, will tell the fascinating history of how prisoners from a seventeenth century battle between England and Scotland came to Massachusetts. Transported to the US as indentured servants, some of the men went on to become successful farmers and there are now hundreds of descendants of these soldiers living in New England and beyond. The talk will also set out the research methods used by the archaeologists on human remains, discovered during construction of a new café at Durham University in 2013. This research has helped solve the almost 400-year-old mystery of where hundreds of soldiers, who died whilst held captive in Durham, were buried. #ScotsSoldiers
    Sponsored by Durham University Department of Archaeology (@ArcDurham).
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  • Jeff Moser, Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture, will present his research in an informal talk, titled, “Excavating China’s First Archaeologist”. Pizza and soda will be provided, or feel free to bring a lunch.
    For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit http://blogs.brown.edu/archaeology/events/brown-bag-series/.
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  • Oct
    25
    What is Venice worth? To whom does this urban treasure belong? Internationally renowned art historian Salvatore Settis urgently poses these questions, igniting a new debate about the Pearl of the Adriatic and cultural patrimony at large. Venetians are increasingly abandoning their hometown—there’s now only one resident for every 140 visitors—and Venice’s fragile fate has become emblematic of the future of historic cities everywhere as it capitulates to tourists and those who profit from them. In If Venice Dies, a fiery blend of history and cultural analysis, Settis argues that “hit-and-run” visitors are turning landmark urban settings into shopping malls and theme parks. He warns that Western civilization’s prime achievements face impending ruin from mass tourism and global cultural homogenization. This is a passionate plea to secure the soul of Venice, written with consummate authority, wide-ranging erudition and élan.
    Salvatore Settis is Emeritus Professor of the History of Classical Art and Archaeology at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa.
    Co-sponsored by Brown University’s Departments of Italian Studies and History of Art and Architecture, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, and Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research.
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  • Oct
    22
    11:00am - 3:00pm

    Joukowsky Institute Open House: Archaeology in Action

    Rhode Island Hall
    Come visit the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World in Rhode Island Hall. Faculty and students will be on hand to tour you through the building, as well as to show you artifacts and images, both from some of our current fieldwork (in the Caribbean, Italy, Turkey, and Rhode Island) and from the Institute’s collections.
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  • Oct
    22
    11:00am - 3:00pm

    Archaeology of College Hill Community Archaeology Day

    >> OFF CAMPUS LOCATION: see description for details
    Watch Brown students digging (yes, really digging)! This year, students will be excavating at the Moses Brown School. Stop by the corner of Hope Street and Lloyd Avenue(with your family or on your own) during the dig between 11am and 3pm to see what we’re up to or try your hand at digging.
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  • Oct
    20
    6:30pm - 8:30pm

    Lecture by Mary Bachvarova (Willamette University)

    Rhode Island Hall, Room 108
    Mary Bachvarova is Professor of Classics and Department Chair of Classical Studies at Willamette University. She is the author of the forthcoming book, From Hittite to Homer: The Anatolian Background of Greek Epic, and co-editor of Anatolian Interfaces: Hittites, Greeks, and Their Neighbors: Proceedings of an International Conference on Cross-Cultural Interaction, Sept. 17-19, 2004, Emery University, Atlanta, GA.

    Co-sponsored by Brown University’s Department of Egyptology and Assyriology, and Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World
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  • Bathsheba Demuth, Assistant Professor of History and Fellow at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, will present her research in an informal talk titled, “Agency Sits in Places: Arctic Ecology and Modern Ideology in the Bering Strait, 1840-1980”. Pizza and soda will be provided, or feel free to bring a lunch.
    For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit http://blogs.brown.edu/archaeology/events/brown-bag-series/.
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  • Owen Doonan is Associate Professor of Art in the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Program at California State University Northridge. He focused on early Sicilian Architecture and society in his PhD (1993) at Brown University’s Center for Old World Archaeology and Art. Since 1996 he has led the Sinop Regional Archaeological Project, a regional study of archaeology, culture and environment in the Sinop Province, northern Turkey. He has authored one book (Sinop Landscapes: Exploring Connection in the Hinterland of a Black Sea Port), edited another and published more than forty articles relating to the archaeology of the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions. In 2010 he co-founded the New Sahara Gallery in Northridge, the first Los Angeles area gallery to specialize in the contemporary fine art of the Middle East and North Africa.
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  • Tamar Hodos is a Reader in Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Bristol. She is a specialist in the archaeology of the Mediterranean’s Iron Age, a period that extends between c.1200-c.600 BCE, with particular interest in the impact of colonisation, and the construction and expression of social identities. Until 2012, she co-directed the Çaltılar Archaeological Project, a collaboration between Bristol, Liverpool and Uludağ (Turkey) Universities. This project, based in the south-western Turkish region of Lycia, examined the role this area played with the Aegean, Greek and wider Mediterranean worlds during the Bronze and Iron Ages. She is the author of the book, Local Responses to Colonization in the Iron Age Mediterranean, and co-editor of Material Culture and Social Identities in the Ancient World.
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  • During the Renaissance, Italian humanists attempted to recover the maritime golden age of ancient Greece and Rome. In resurrecting ancient warships, humanists looked at the most magnificent period in maritime history, the Hellenistic Age (323-31 B.C.), which produced a burst of unprecedented proportions resulting in warships of increasingly large size that eventually came to replace the trireme. Since no archaeological remains of ancient warships were available and have yet to be found, the study of ancient texts was crucial to the recovery of ancient naval architecture. Based on the study of several Renaissance naval treatises and unpublished archival sources, two shipbuilding projects are known: the quinqueremis built in 1529 by the Venetian humanist Vettor Fausto (1490-1546), and the grandiose and yet completely unknown attempt in 1570 by the erudite Filippo Pigafetta (1533-1604) to recover the design of the tessarakonteres of Ptolemy IV Philopator (r. 221-204 B.C.), the biggest ship ever built in the ancient Mediterranean. Both Fausto and Pigafetta believed that the knowledge of ancient texts was centrally relevant to the design of their ships and to the solution of practical problems of naval architecture in the material world.
    This lecture is co-sponsored with the Narragansett Society, the Rhode Island chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America. For more information, visit http://aianarragansett.org.
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  • Oct
    13
    12:00pm - 1:00pm

    Brown Bag Series in Archaeology: Sophie Moore (JIAAW)

    Rhode Island Hall, Room 108
    Sophie Moore, a Postdoctoral Fellow in Archaeology and the Ancient World, will present her research in an informal talk. Pizza and soda will be provided, or feel free to bring a lunch.
    For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit http://blogs.brown.edu/archaeology/events/brown-bag-series/.
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  • A discussion, led by faculty and graduate students, for current undergraduates planning for life after Brown. We will discuss applying to graduate schools in Archaeology and Classics, as well as types of jobs students with Archaeology and Classics concentrations might consider.
    View additional information on Life After Graduating from Brown with an Archaeology Degree here: http://brown.edu/Departments/Joukowsky_Institute/undergrad/grad.html
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  • Carolina López-Ruiz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Classics at the Ohio State University. Her research focuses on understanding Greek culture in its broader ancient Mediterranean context, particularly looking at cultural exchanges and processes of integration and adaptation in Near Eastern and Greek interaction. She edited Gods, Heroes, and Monsters: A Sourcebook of Greek, Roman, and the Near Eastern Myths in Translation (2014) and is the author of When the Gods Were Born: Greek Cosmogonies and the Near East (2012), as well as many other publications.
    Co-sponsored by Brown University’s Department of Egyptology and Assyriology, and Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World
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  • Sep
    29
    Katherine Brunson, a Postdoctoral Fellow in Archaeology and the Ancient World, will present her research in an informal talk, titled “Zooarchaeological and Genetic Evidence for Cattle Domestication in Ancient China”. Pizza and soda will be provided, or feel free to bring a lunch.
    For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit http://blogs.brown.edu/archaeology/events/brown-bag-series/.
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  • Sep
    28
    7:00pm - 10:00pm

    Gods of Egypt: See the Movie...Then Think About It...

    Salomon Center, Room 001
    A free screening of the movie “Gods of Egypt”, on a giant screen, with surround sound! Followed by commentaries by Brown professors, examining the themes and historical basis (or lack thereof…) of the movie.
    And free popcorn! Free and open to the public.
    Sponsored by the Archaeology Department Undergraduate Group
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  • John Baines is Professor Emeritus of Egyptology and Fellow of The Queen’s College at the University of Oxford, where he taught from 1976 to 2013. His principal areas of interest are Egyptian art, literature, religion, self-presentation, the position of writing in Egyptian society, and modelling social forms. He is currently working on elite uses of the wider environment, particularly in forms and practices, such as hunting, that must be approached indirectly because they leave little physical trace.
    Co-sponsored by Brown University’s Department of Egyptology and Assyriology, and Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World
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