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The Archaeological Institute of America
Western Illinois Society
CALENDAR OF EVENTS 2015-2016
Click on titles for more details.
Monday, September 28, 2015
“The Road Less Traveled By? History,
Archaeology, and Landscape in Southern Greece”
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
“Rethinking the Mycenaean
World” Dimitri Nakassis, Associate Professor, University of Toronto Saturday, October 3, 2015 “Ares' Dedication to Timagoras: The Curious Case of an Inscription, Powerful Poetics and Naval Victory” Kristian L. Lorenzo, Visiting Assistant Professor of Archaeology, Monmouth College
Saturday, October 17, 2015
International Archaeology Day
Trip to Visit the Native American Collection in Beardstown, Illinois
Thursday, October
22, 2015 Wednesday, November 4, 2015 “’So That She Will Be As Beloved As On the Day of Her Marriage’: Gender and Ritual Immersion in Early Rabbinic Judaism” Danielle Fatkin, Assistant Professor of History, Knox College
Thursday, February 18, 2016
Monday, April 18, 2016
“Hauarra: A Trajanic Auxiliary Fort on the Arabian
Frontier in Jordan” John Oleson, Professor of Greek and Roman Studies, University of Victoria
Tuesday, April 19, 2016 John Oleson, Professor of Greek and Roman Studies, University of Victoria
Saturday, April 23,
2015
Thursday, April 28,
2015 Kristian L. Lorenzo, Visiting Assistant Professor of Archaeology, Monmouth College
Detailed Descriptions
Monday, September 28, 2015
“The Road Less Traveled By? History,
Archaeology, and Landscape in Southern Greece”
At first
glance, the tranquil valleys and mountain passes of the western Argolid
give the appearance being of a rather isolated and unremarkable region
in southern Greece. In reality, this fertile area is crisscrossed by
ancient roads and dotted with ruins that testify to its importance to
the major powers of Greece from Classical antiquity to the Ottoman
Empire. The results on the ongoing Western Argolid Regional Project, an
archaeological project co-directed by the lecturer, demonstrate that the
western Argolid was a dynamic landscape whose study sheds new light on
some big questions in Greek history and archaeology.
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
“Rethinking the Mycenaean World”
Dimitri Nakassis,
Associate Professor, University of Toronto (nakassis@gmail.com)
This lecture proposes a new model for Mycenaean state and society. It
has been usual for scholars to imagine the Mycenaean states of Late
Bronze Age Greece as highly centralized and hierarchical centers of an
elaborate command economy. This picture has been significantly modified
by archaeologists who pointed out that the economic and administrative
control of the palaces over their territories was incomplete. This paper
argues that the administrative documents from Pylos provide evidence
that the internal constitution of the Mycenaean state was radically
different from the traditional model: instead of a hierarchical ranked
structure, a much more fluid picture of elite competition emerges.
Saturday, October 3, 2015
To commemorate Timagoras the son of Pidon’s victory in an important
naval battle, as the epigram IG XII3 211 (late fourth/early third
century BC) records, Ares set up a
kosmon or honorific statue dedicated to Timagoras’s fatherland, the
small Aegean island of Astypalaia. In this paper, I argue that the
epigram’s first word kosmon possesses deliberate metapoetic connections to the use of the
same term for statues in Pindar’s
Epinikia (cf. Nem. 2.6-8),
thereby making the epigram a précis of an epinician and granting
Timagoras “talismanic power,” like that of athletic victors. My
arguments examine the epigram’s context, the correlation between
kosmos in epigraphy and
Pindar, the language of IG XII3 211 itself, the specific usage of
kosmos
in Pindar’s odes, the resulting
kudos for Timagoras, and
kosmos in a victory context.
Kosmos in Timagoras’s epigram,
both firmly at home in its victory context and drawing on its lyric
forbears, provides us with a formerly unrecognized example of renewed
interest in Pindar outside of the early Hellenistic ruling elite and the
burgeoning Alexandrian intelligentsia.
Saturday, October 17, 2015
International Archaeology Day
Trip to Visit the Native American Collection in Beardstown, Illinois
Thursday,
Octrober 22, 2015 An illustrated informal account af a recent trip to Mexico to visit the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve and the three most important capital cities in Middle America: Teotihuacan; Tenochtitlan and Mexico City. The butterfly reserve located in the mountains above 10,000 feet approximately 60 miles northwest of Mexico City is the wintering ground for an estimated billion monarch butterflies from eastern North America. Teotihuacan was the religious and political capital of the civilization of the same name. At its peak during the Classic Period (300 to 900 ACE) its residential precincts covered seven square miles and included some of the largest pyramids in the New World. The “empire” controlled or strongly influenced much of central and southern Mexico, Guatemala and part of Honduras. Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital (1325-1521 ACE) was located where Mexico City now stands. The ceremonial heart of the Aztec Empire was the pyramid and temple now known as the Temple Major, which was largely, but not completely destroyed by Cortez. Due to the way the temple was constructed and demolished much of it was preserved along with a wealth of dedicatory offerings which fill a museum at the site. The Mexican National Museum of Anthropology is one of the great museums of the world illustrating the history of the various cultures and regions of Mexico for the last 13,000 years. All of these wonders are just a few hours by air from Chicago or St. Louis.
Wednesday, November 4, 2015
7:30 P.M., Pattee Auditorium, Center for Science and Business, Monmouth
College, Monmouth, Illinois
Following the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE by
the Romans, Judaism fundamentally re-organized itself. Part of this
re-organization involved re-conceptualizing ritual purity in the lives
of Jews. The archaeology of Palestine in the second through sixth
centuries CE reveals the evolution of ritual and family purity. The
archaeological evidence also demonstrates an array of ritual immersion
practices beyond those narrowly prescribed in rabbinic texts, indicating
a greater level of social dislocation and reformation than usually
allowed. One aspect of these changing dynamics relates to the role of
women and ritual purification. In the second century CE, women quite
suddenly emerge as important bearers of ritual and family purity. This
change coincides with the general democratization of Jewish ritual
practices in the post-Temple period. Though the early rabbis would have
us believe that they emerged directly from the Temple hierarchy to guide
the growth of Judaism in the absence of the Temple, the evidence
discussed in this lecture indicates that Judaism remained a diverse and
dynamic religious and social phenomenon during the second through sixth
centuries.
7:30 P.M., Pattee Auditorium, Center for Science and Business, Monmouth
College, Monmouth, Illinois
The goal of the Palatine East Pottery Project (PEPP) is the study and
publication of ca. 12 metric tons of Roman-period pottery excavated in
the Palatine East Excavations in Rome between 1989 and 1995. carried out
on the northeast slope of the Palatine Hill, near the Arch of
Constantine, in downtown Rome. Using a variety of traditional and
innovative research tools, PEPP is classifying, classification,
characterization, and quantification of this material and the
presentation of its results. The results will constitute a
methodologically ambitious exposition of an unusually large assemblage
of material that will shed important light on patterns in the
consumption of pottery and the array of amphora-borne foodstuffs in the
city of Rome over nearly the entire course of the imperial period.
The presenters will describe work done on this project during the
2015 season.
Thursday, February 18, 2016
No
sculptural objects are more familiar to students of Greek art and
archaeology than the Archaic kouroi, yet there is no scholarly agreement
about their purpose and function. Must we conclude with Andrew Stewart
that “the kouros is basically meaningless”? The problem of the kouroi
will be re-examined with reference to iconography, archaeological
context, and recent scholarship on human sacrifice as a mythic and
literary topos in ancient Greece.
Monday, April 18, 2016
“Hauarra: A Trajanic Auxiliary Fort on the Arabian
Frontier in Jordan”
John Oleson,
Professor of Greek and Roman Studies, University of Victoria (jpoleson@uvic.ca)
For more than twenty-five years the speaker has directed survey and
excavation at Humayma, the site of ancient Hauarra, in Jordan’s
spectacular southern desert, not far from Petra. The settlement was
founded by the Nabataean king Aretas in the first century B.C.,
flourished during the Roman and Byzantine empires, and was the site of
the Abbasid revolt against the Umayyad Caliphate in the mid-eighth
century. For centuries Hawara was an important caravan centre on the
Nabataean and Roman road system. The Roman fort at Hauarra was founded
as an administrative and military center soon after the conquest of the
Nabataean kingdom by Trajan in AD 106 and his establishment of the
Provincia Arabia. This complex, one of the best preserved principate
period forts in the Near East, was designed to accommodate auxiliary
units detached from one of the legions stationed in the region after the
conquest. An inscription found in the associated civilian settlement
mentions the Legio III Cyrenaica, but units from the Legio VI Ferrata
may also have cycled through the fort. Preparation of the final report
concerning the fort has lead to new conclusions concerning its design,
construction, layout, history, and function, and its relation to other
military architecture in the region. The fort and its interior
structures provide one of the clearest known examples of modular
planning in Roman military architecture. The talk will present these new
results in the context of the Roman occupation of the Near East.
Tuesday, April 19, 2016
“’Sand without lime’: Building
Disasters, Incompetent Architects, and Construction Fraud in Ancient
Rome”
John Oleson,
Professor of Greek and Roman Studies, University of Victoria (jpoleson@uvic.ca)
Roman architects and builders employed concrete and other materials with
great creativity and produced structures that in some cases have lasted
2000 years without significant decay. Nevertheless, the structures we
see today are a very small sample of those that were constructed, even
of those constructed with concrete, and that their survival is the
result of a long process of natural and unnatural selection. How or why
did the others disappear? Were the Romans in fact such good construction
engineers after all? Roman engineers constructed thousands of buildings
with opus caementicium over a period of 500 years: surely a significant
sample of these buildings would turn out to be remarkably durable even
by accident. In this regard, it is striking that a large, often
hilarious, corpus of Roman literary and epigraphic sources and legal
texts survives that documents construction disasters, incompetent
architects, fraudulent contractors, and cost over-runs. There is also
ample testimony to misjudged urban planning, and flawed codes or
regulations or inadequate enforcement of regulations, with resulting
losses of life and property from fire and other natural disasters. What
types of mistakes were made, what types of fraud committed, and what can
we learn from them about the structures that survive?
Saturday, April 23,
2015
In addition to ancient military demonstrations and
other events connected with the Greco-Roman world, this event will
include presentations on ancient technologies from around the world and
other archaeology-related events.
Thursday, April 28,
2015
Kristian L. Lorenzo,
Visiting Assistant Professor of Archaeology, Monmouth College (klorenzo@monmouthcollege.edu)
7:30 P.M., Pattee Auditorium, Center for Science and Business, Monmouth
College, Monmouth, Illinois
In 2010, Monmouth College received an anonymous donation of thousands of
prehistoric Native American artifacts, including spear points, pottery
sherds, axe heads, and arrow heads. The collection represents human
activity in Western Illinois for the last 12,000 years. The Monmouth
College Archaeology Research Laboratory now houses this collection which
is one of the largest locally available for study. Students have been
accessing and cataloguing artifacts from this collection under the
direction of three different lab directors. This talk sets the
collection within the chronological sweep of Western Illinois
prehistory, provides an overview--complete with videos--of current
student lab work and previews future avenues of student collection
management including website development, database management and
community outreach programs.
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