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Amy Gansell (St. John's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences)

“What Archaeology Can Tell Us About Ancient Assyrian Queens of Nimrud’s Northwest Palace (c. 865-705 BCE, Iraq)" 

Archaeology has most prominently revealed the “treasures” with which ancient Assyrian queens were buried beneath the Northwest Palace at Nimrud. Rather than emphasizing individual objects, however, I present these treasures, and other major palace assemblages, in archaeological context. In particular, I investigate the regalia and ritual equipment preserved in the queens’ tombs, the architecture and luxury installations of the queens’ throne room suite, and a corpus of ivory carvings that may once have clad the queens’ furnishings and personal belongings. Through the study of these archaeological assemblages and contexts, we can learn about both the material culture of queenship and the queens themselves. Indeed, archaeology reveals the beauty, power, and presence of ancient Assyrian queens as a palpable force, eternally enmeshed in palace and empire.

Holly Pittman (University of Pennsylvania)

“Cultures in Contact: Seeing Interaction through Imagery on the Iranian Plateau during the Bronze Age of Exchange”

Among the minor arts in the ancient Near East, engraved seal stones are closely associated with personal or corporate identity expressed through iconography and style.  In settings where administrators from different communities interact, such small portable objects can be particularly sensitive markers of cultural identity when other evidence, textual or ceramic, is absent.  This feature of personal seals makes them an especially useful window into cultural interaction during the third millennium Early Bronze Age when the ancient world from the Euphrates to the Indus was linked together through a vast network of exchange and interaction along which merchants, craftsmen, emissaries and later soldiers and diplomats passed.  While the Mesopotamian cuneiform texts provide us with hints of this interaction, we can evaluate it directly through the material traces left of the minor arts, especially the administrative residue of glyptic art.  This talk will illustrate through the rich and varied finds from the recent excavations at Konar Sandal South in the Halil River valley of Kerman province in southeastern Iran the evidence for this cultural contact.  Among them are impressions of imported seals, local seals, hybrid seals that merge traits of various cultural styles reflecting the cultural identities of the merchants and officials who interacted at the heart of mercantile interaction sphere.  Through this residue we can imagine who the players were and how they were affected by their interlocutors.

Asil Yaman (Villanova University)

“Agricultural Organization in the Chora of Hellenistic Phoenix (Rhodian Peraia)”

The ancient Phoenix, strategically located in Rhodian Peraea, was founded in the archaic period and flourished during the Hellenistic era. It left behind a unique legacy of agricultural practices and organizational methods. Since 2021, new-gen archaeological pedestrian surveys and excavations by the Phoenix Archaeological Project have shed light on this sophisticated agricultural organization, relating it to settlement patterns and land use. By integrating geophysical data, digital archaeological tools, and botanical studies, I reveal how the agricultural landscape was meticulously organized to optimize both crop production and urban development. This presentation will illuminate the rural agrarian economy of Phoenix and its implications for understanding regional trade with Rhodes and rural economic strategies in Hellenistic societies.

Tyler Franconi (Brown University)

“The Environmental History of the Roman Rhineland” (tentative title)

Jeffrey A. Becker (Binghamton University – SUNY)

“Situating the Roman city: form and function”

The landscapes of Republican Italy are often characterized in relation to the phenomena of urbanism, particularly those related to the expansion of the Roman state. The establishment of colonies under various legal frameworks transforms “pre-Roman” landscapes into “Roman” ones, following the conventional narrative. The “Roman city” thus becomes not simply a place but also a node in a socio-economic network that reshapes the Italian peninsula and the wider Mediterranean. Finding Romanness in all of this expansion is also often a desideratum, often in the hopes of being able to expertly unravel the phenomena of urban expansion into independent cultural threads. The Romans themselves were also looking for identity in these threads, coming to define their world and themselves in terms of urban vs. non-urban dichotomies. An examination of middle to late Republican instances of urbanism in light of later Republican identity building can help in situating the topos of the Roman city and in understanding its forms and functions.

Jason Herrmann, University of Pennsylvania

“Space and Identity in Ancient Motya (Sicily)” (tentative title)

C. Densmore Curtis Lecture with Daniele Morandi Bonacossi (University of Udine)

Old Library 110, details forthcoming

“Settlement, Irrigation and Landscape Commemoration in the Core of the Assyrian Empire. Sennacherib’s Irrigation System in the Nineveh Hinterland and the Salvage of the Assyrian Faida Canal and its Rock-reliefs (Iraq)”

Peter van Alfen (American Numismatic Society)

Title Forthcoming

Shannon Dunn (���ճԹ�)

Title Forthcoming

Brandon McDonald (Tufts University)

Title Forthcoming