The Department of Classical Studies, in collaboration with the New Orleans Society of the Archaeological Institute of America, is pleased to announce our Lectures Series for 2016-2017. Creolization and Cosmopolitan Tastes: The Archaeology of Colonial New Orleans at the City s Tricentennial Dr. Ryan Gray Department of Anthropology University of New Orleans Tuesday, October 4, 2016 Loyola University Celebrating LOUISIANA ARCHAEOLOGY MONTH Recent years have seen a substantial increase in the body of archaeological data from sites with intact Colonial era components in New Orleans, allowing better insight than ever into the close ties between populations of African, Euroamerican, and Native descent in the early city. However, surprisingly, some of the most unique discoveries comes from sites on private property, ones that have few if any protections under existing legal frameworks. This talk will explore recent discoveries at sites in the French Quarter of New Orleans, including Madame John's Legacy, the St. Peter Street Cemetery, and 810 Royal Street, along with some of the possibilities for future directions in research as the city moves towards its tricentennial.
"The Ark Before Noah" Dr. Irving Finkel Curator, Department of the Middle East British Museum, London The Charles Eliot Norton Memorial Lectureship of the AIA** Sunday, October 30, 2016 5 pm British Museum expert Dr. Irving Finkel reveals how decoding the symbols on a 4,000 year old piece of clay enable a radical new interpretation of the Noah's Ark myth. A world authority on the period, Dr. Finkel's enthralling real-life detective story began with a most remarkable event at the British Museum - the arrival one day in 2008 of a single, modest-sized Babylonian cuneiform tablet - the palm-sized clay rectangles on which our ancestors created the first documents. It had been brought in by a member of the public and this particular tablet proved to be of quite extraordinary importance. Not only does it date from about 1850 BCE, but it is a copy of the Babylonian Story of the Flood, a myth from ancient Mesopotamia revealing among other things, instructions for building a large boat to survive a flood. But Dr Finkel's pioneering work didn't stop there. Through another series of enthralling discoveries he has been able to decode the story of the Flood in ways which offer unanticipated revelations to readers of THE ARK BEFORE NOAH. In addition, the lecture will describe how a replica of the boat following the ancient instructions was built in India, the subject of the documentary film The Real Noah s Ark.
"Mesopotamian Mischief: Evil Forces in the World of Babylon" Dr. Irving Finkel Curator, Department of the Middle East British Museum, London The Charles Eliot Norton Memorial Lectureship of the AIA Monday, October 31, 2016 This illustrated talk will explain how the belief in demons, witches and ghosts goes back into remote antiquity, and investigate what we know of the miscellaneous invisible troublemakers that Mesopotamian exorcists had to deal with. We have cuneiform texts (spells and incantations), pictures, amulets and other bits and pieces which allow us to peer back in time through a dark window and see how the Babylonians and Assyrians really understood misfortune and illness and what they did to improve things. The lecture will be light-hearted and attention-seizing, noisy and unsoporific, and at the same time will endeavour to tackle the interesting process of bringing frightened people who have been dead for three or four thousand years briefly back to life. **The Charles Eliot Norton Memorial Lectureship In 1879, Charles Eliot Norton, professor of the History of Art at Harvard University, founded, with a group of eleven associates, the Archaeological Institute of America. Norton was elected the first president of the AIA. During his presidency, which lasted for eleven years, Norton was involved in the supervision of Institute fieldwork in both the Old and New Worlds, in the founding of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, and in the publication of the first American Journal of Archaeology. In 1907, James Loeb, who had been one of Norton s students at Harvard, offered to pay the honorarium of some distinguished foreign lecturer thereby founding the Norton Lectureship. Professor D.G. Hogarth delivered the first Norton Lectures in 1907-1908. In 1909 James Loeb created the Charles Eliot Norton Memorial Lecture Fund to support one or more distinguished archaeologists for a course of
lectures preference to be given to European scholars, but in the discretion of the Council, invitations may also be extended to American scholars. Since its beginnings, the Norton Lectureship has undergone some transformations but it always was and continues to be to this day, one of the highest honors that the Institute can bestow. Today the Charles Eliot Norton Memorial Lecturers are distinguished archaeologists and eminent scholars who may be of any nationality and may work in any field of our discipline. The Norton Lecturers are chosen by the Lecture Program Committee and annually lecture to seventeen local societies. "Tomb Raiders and Terrorist Financing: Cutting off the Islamic State's Illicit Traffic in 'Blood Antiquities'"*** Tess Davis Executive Director Antiquities Coalition Tuesday, November 15, 2016 With the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the world rightfully asked how a militant faction too extreme for Al-Qaeda transformed itself into the world s richest terror group ever. ISIS boasts an annual budget worth $2 billion and a war chest of $250 million, which if true surpasses the Taliban s (and that of many states). Still more troubling, it is now financially self sufficient, and no longer dependent on foreign donors. How? Like organized criminal enterprises before it: extortion, ransom, robbery, and smuggling. It perhaps comes as no shock that it has been trafficking arms, drugs, and even oil. However, the public reacted with surprise to reports in June 2014 that ISIS jihadists had earned millions by looting the region s archaeological sites, and then selling its ancient treasures to the highest bidder. It shouldn t have. Archaeologists, criminologists, law enforcement agents, and military officials have long warned that the illicit antiquities trade is funding crime
and conflict around the world. However, under ISIS black flag, this looting and trafficking has become not just a side enterprise, but a massive illegal industry. In recent years, we have lost some of the Cradle of Civilization's most iconic masterpieces and sites, many of which had survived for millennia. This wanton destruction is erasing our shared history chapter by chapter. And it threatens us all: at this moment, ISIS is converting these "blood antiquities" into weapons and troops, which are seizing cities, slaughtering soldiers, and beheading civilians. Tess Davis, a lawyer who has dedicated more than a decade to combatting the illicit antiquities trade, will examine this growing threat to our national security and the world's cultural heritage. In doing so, she will trace the past of looted masterpieces from conflict zones to the very height of the global market, and explore how United States and international law is seeking to cut off this key means of criminal financing. Finally, she will discuss recent progress in this fight, as an unprecedented coalition of countries have joined forces to demand action from both governments and the art market. ***Honoring the memory of Khaled al'asaad who was tortured and decapitated protecting the treasures of Palmyra from ISIS in August 2015.
"A Tale of Two Sunken Harbor Cities" Dr. Bjørn Lovén Research Associate Professor SAXO Institute, University of Copenhagen Samuel H. Kress Lecture Lectureship in Ancient Art** Wednesday, February 1, 2017 Over the centuries the Mediterranean Sea has served to connect cultures with a wider world through trade, colonization, and military conquest and perhaps nowhere was it used more effectively than in the ancient Greek world. In the mountainous, peninsular and island-strewn regions of Greece, the vast majority of trade, communication and exchange of knowledge took place on the water, in anchorages and in harbor areas. In his lecture, A Tale of Two Sunken Harbor Cities The Harbors of Ancient Athens and Corinth, Professor Bjørn Lovén will explore how ancient harbor settlements evolved into focal points of human interaction and served as main gateways to the mainland, and how their use (commercial, military, or both) determined their design. The lecture will examine the archaeology and history of two very different ancient harbor types, focusing on the commercial areas of Lechaion harbor of ancient Corinth, and the Zea and Mounichia harbors which housed the Athenian navy. Professor Bjørn Lovén is a Research Associate with the Saxo Institute at the University of Copenhagen, and is an expert in the archaeology of ancient harbors and submerged sites; he is the Director of the Zea Harbor Project at ancient Piraeus in Greece, Co-Director of the Lechaion Harbor Project in Corinth, Greece, and has done extensive fieldwork at underwater and harbor sites around the Mediterranean. The Lechaion Harbor Project and the Zea Harbor Project are both collaborations between the Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities under the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports, the Saxo Institute, the University of Copenhagen, and the Danish Institute at Athens under the Danish Ministry of Education.
**The Samuel H. Kress Lectureship in Ancient Art (4th in a row for New Orleans) Since 1984 the Samuel H. Kress Foundation in New York has given the AIA several grants to support the Samuel H. Kress Lectureship in Ancient Art. The 1998/1999 program marked the first year of a three-year grant to continue the lectureship. In the first grant application to the Kress Foundation in 1983, the AIA proposed the establishment of a Kress Lectureship in Ancient Art "to be held by a foreign, preferably junior, scholar whose work in one or more fields of ancient art is, or deserves to be, internationally known and who would benefit from the opportunity to widen his horizons to U.S. scholarly communities and museums." The Kress Lectureship was to be "dedicated to ancient art in the widest sense, with an emphasis on Classical, ancient Near Eastern, and Egyptian art." It was further proposed that the Kress Lecturer reside for one semester or a portion thereof at a university chosen by the AIA "for the strength of its program in art and archaeology." In 2001 the program was expanded to two Kress Lecturers for each year; in 2015 a further expansion provided for specially chosen past Lecturers to return for a short tour as Kress Alumni. Kress Lecturers are chosen by the Lecture Program Committee and annually lecture to one quarter of all local AIA Societies.
"Pottery, Paintings, and Pinakides: the latest dirt from Petsas House, Mycenae" Dr. Kim Shelton Associate Professor University of California, Berkeley Martha Sharp Joukowsky Lectureship** Tuesday, March 28, 2017 This elaborately illustrated lecture will present the results of eleven seasons of excavation by the Archaeological Society of Athens at Petsas House in the settlement of the famous Bronze Age palatial center at Mycenae. A look into a complex structure of the 14 th century BCE reveals domestic and workshop use together with an expanding role in the socio-political life of the palace. Pottery, as the primary artifact type, is examined within its production, storage, and distribution contexts. A well, excavated within the building complex, provides evidence for the life of the building, for its violent destruction, and for human agency in a post-destruction reclamation phase. The excavator will present material produced in this workshop alongside a picture of life in the building together with evidence for a relationship to the palace through fragments of Linear B tablets and of contact with the greater Mycenaean and Mediterranean world during the 14 th c. BCE. **Martha Sharp Joukowsky Lectureship In 1989, an anonymous donor established the President's Lectures Fund to yearly support a special speaker, whose lectureship would be seen as a an adjunct to the AIA s prestigious Norton Lectureship. In 1993 the President's Lectureship became the Martha Sharp Joukowsky Lectureship, in honor of Martha Sharp Joukowsky, past President of the AIA and Professor of Old World Archaeology at Brown University. Professor Joukowsky has conducted archaeological research in Greece, Italy, Turkey and Jordan, mostly recently at the Southern Temple in Petra (Jordan). The Martha Sharp Joukowsky Lecturers are distinguished archaeologists and may be of any nationality and work in any field of our discipline. The Joukowsky Lecturers are selected by the Lecture Program Committee and together lecture to twenty-four local societies annually.