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University of California at Berkeley
The Graduate Group in Ancient History &
Mediterranean Archaeology
cordially invites you to the
Twenty-Second Annual W. Kendrick Pritchett Lecture
Monday, November 7, 2011
8:00 p.m.
Alumni House
A reception will follow
by
Susan Rotroff
Washington University, St. Louis
"The Agora Baby Well: Neonatal Mortality and the Disposal of the Dead in Hellenistic Athens"
In 1937, American archaeologists in Athens excavated a deep well on the brow of the Kolonos Agoraios, the hill that overlooks the Agora, or public center, of the ancient city. The well has been abandoned and filled in the second quarter of the 2nd century BCE with the usual trash of daily life: broken pottery and lamps, corroded bronze from a nearby workshop, even part of the scabbard of a sword. Unlike most other wells, however, this one contained a large collection of human bones: the remains of 450 new-born infants, along with the skeleton of an older child and one adult. It also had a rich collection of faunal material, including the bones of about 150 dogs, an unusually large collection. Perhaps because of its unsettling contents, the deposit has never been studied in detail.
The lecture will present the results of an interdisciplinary study of the contents of the well, concluding with hypotheses as to why and how the babies and the dogs found their way into the well. Plague? Famine? Infanticide? Or simply natural infant mortality?
SUSAN ROTROFF is Jarvis Thurston and Mona Van Duyn Professor in the Humanities at Washington University, St. Louis. Since her student days her work has centred upon the Athenian Agora, where she excavated from 1970 through 1974 and then joined the research staff. Focusing upon the Agora’s Hellenistic pottery, its functions, and its contexts, she has produced no fewer than three imposing “blue volumes” of the site’s final publication series, and a host of articles, conference papers, and invited lectures. Together, these contributions have established an authoritative chronological and methodological framework for Hellenistic pottery and material culture that extends far beyond the confines of the Agora. A much sought-after consultant for excavations in Greece, Turkey, and North Africa, and an incisive and engaging speaker, she has lectured and published on topics as diverse as Apiculture in Ancient Athens, Sulla and the Pirates, the Royal Tombs at Vergina, Women Worshiping on the Panathenaic Way, Coins and Stratigraphy, the Greeks and the Other in the Age of Alexander, the Parthenon Frieze, and Birds of the Athenian Agora (with her husband, Robert Lamberton). These and other activities have garnered her a host of prestigious awards, fellowships, and grants, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1988 and the Gold Medal of the Archaeological Institute of America in 2011. She and her husband are also skilled aqualung divers.
W. KENDRICK PRITCHETT (1909-2007) was Professor Emeritus of Greek at U.C. Berkeley and the founder of the Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology. He taught in the Classics Department from 1948 to 1976 and served four years as its chair. Distinctions and honors marked his academic path from its onset. He was twice named a Guggenheim Fellow; for six years was a member of the Institute for the Advanced Study at Princeton; and twice was Professor at the American School for Classical Studies at Athens. Upon his retirement, he received the Berkeley Citation, the campus’ highest award. In addition, he was a Fulbright Research Fellow, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy. His contributions to the fields of Greek topography, military history, epigraphy, and historiography put him in a class by himself among international scholars. His studies in Ancient Greek Topography reached eight volumes. His Greek State at War comprises five volumes, one of which won the American Philological Association’s coveted Goodwin Award of Merit. To visit an ancient battlefield or site with Kendrick was to be accompanied by a walking library, for inevitably he had mastered in advance all relevant ancient texts, the accounts of the early modern travelers, and all relevant contemporary scholarship. Also a noted wine connoisseur, he amassed an impressive cellar in his Berkeley home and was often invited for special tasting by wine merchants in Berkeley and San Francisco.