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Chris Bravo, David DeVore, and Laura Pfuntner, editors
At the beginning of Fall Semester two new students swelled our ranks: Christopher Bravo from the University of Arizona, and Erin Pitt from the University of Colorado at Boulder, both at post-MA level. And two more will join us this fall: Eric Driscoll (Chicago), winner of a Berkeley Fellowship, and Rhawn Friedlander (Berkeley and Penn), winner of our Pritchett Fellowship. We look forward to their arrival and wish them every success in the years ahead. Melissa Cradic (George Washington), admitted on a Pritchett Fellowship, has been allowed to defer for a year to attend classes at Cambridge, so we'll be seeing her in Fall 2011.
Among our continuing students, we congratulate David DeVore, Noah Kaye, and Greg Smay for passing their PhD exams and attaining the exalted status of ABD; Noah will take up the prestigious Heinrich Schliemann fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in the fall; while David has won the Jacobi-Stiftung Stipendium to spend the fall at the DAI’s Kommission für Alte Geschichte und Epigraphik in Munich. Our special congratulations go to Carolynn Roncaglia for gaining her PhD with a dissertation, StateImpact in Imperial Northern Italy, and Michael Laughy and Jeffrey Pearson will file their dissertations soon. As to last year's PhDs, Jason Schlude took up his one-year appointment as a lecturer in the History Department, and Amelia Brown took up her tenure track appointment as a lecturer (assistant professor) at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.
On July 1, 2009, Gary Spears replaced our office manager of many years, Susan Pulliam. He soon cheerfully buckled down to a thorough review of AHMA finances and funding—a situation much ameliorated in March by the arrival of an amazingly generous $92,000 check from an anonymous donor to strengthen our student support in these lean days. (Any and all matching donations—or even non-matching ones—will be gratefully accepted!) I look forward to working with Gary and other CASMA staff in the years ahead.
As to the faculty, we can report two new arrivals and one departure. In July, Ted (J. Theodore) Peña joined Classics and AHMA from SUNY Buffalo. Ted specializes in the archaeology of Etruscan and Roman Italy, the ancient economy, material culture studies, text-based archaeology, and pottery analysis, with a particular focus at present on Pompeii and the vast mound of transport amphorae in southern Rome known as Monte Testaccio. This welcome infusion of new blood on the archaeological side of our endeavors will help to ensure the Group’s vitality into the future. On August 8th, 2009, Emily Mackil and Max Christoff produced Lydia Grace Christoff, weighing in at a respectable 6 lbs 9 oz; we particularly applaud Emily's and Max's choice of first name and look forward to her application to the Group in 2032 and future work at Sardis. And talking of Sardis, in December we said a fond goodbye to Crawford Greenewalt, who after more than four decades of service on the Berkeley faculty and at the Sardis excavations had already handed over the latter to AHMA alumnus Nick Cahill (University of Wisconsin, Madison). Please accept our most heartfelt thanks for everything that you’ve done for us over the decades, Greenie, and our warmest wishes for the future—including, we trust, many years’ continued residence here in Berkeley.
To turn to this year’s activities, we’ve been ultra-busy once again. On November 2nd, the Twentieth Annual W.K. Pritchett Lecture was given by Amélie Kuhrt of University College, London. A brilliant and innovative scholar of ancient Near Eastern history and a leader of an international effort to rethink the Persian Empire and its legacy, Professor Kuhrt spoke on “Issues of Hellenization: The Case of Babylon”—a fascinating re-examination of Mesopotamian political and cultural continuities and discontinuities in the wake of Alexander’s conquests. In March, we co-hosted Dr. Dyfri Williams, Research Curator at the British Museum and Getty Villa Fellow, who spoke to us on “Polychromy and the Parthenon Sculptures.” He alerted us to the startling advances made by the British Museum conservation laboratory in the detection and reconstruction of the hitherto overlooked color traces on these and other sculptures at the British Museum, including considerable traces of gilding.
Our Noon Colloquia continued unabated, thanks to the enthusiasm and extraordinary organizational skills of Randy Souza (fall) and Lisa Eberle (spring). In addition to speakers from Berkeley, S.F. State, Sacramento State, and Stanford, we heard from colleagues from Auburn University and Jerusalem on topics as diverse as Authorial Presence in Ancient Egyptian Literature, Levantine Jewelry, Romans beyond the limes, Achaemenid Imperial Policy, Jesus and the Gods of Canaan, the Fate of the Canaanites, Roman Pottery, Experimental Archaeology at Çatalhöyük, and Eusebius! And under Nikolaos Papazarkardas’s able direction, the Aleshire Center has treated us to an excellent series of speakers and events as well (below).
Finally, even as I write, three AHMA faculty and their teams are gearing up for a busy summer in the field: Ben Porter at Dihiban; Carol Redmount at El Hibeh; and Kim Shelton at Nemea and Mycenae. They each take with them our very best wishes for a successful season ahead.
Andrew Stewart
Chair, AHMA
In the academic year 2009-2010, the Sara B. Aleshire Center for the Study of Greek Epigraphy continued its active support of the study of Greek inscriptions. This year’s distinguished visiting lecturer was Professor Gary Reger (History Department, Trinity College at Hartford). On March 1, Professor Reger delivered a public lecture entitled “Apollonios of Tyana and the Geography of the Imagination in Egypt.” On March 2, he led an epigraphical seminar on “A New Inventory from Mylasa in Karia”, one of the numerous unpublished Mylasan texts from the archive of Jean and Louis Robert which Professor Reger is preparing for publication. The seminar’s participants, faculty members and graduate students alike, could hardly expect a more fitting tribute to the memory of Sara Aleshire than a Greek temple inventory masterfully presented by one of the leading Hellenistic historians.
In these hard financial times, the Aleshire Center keeps on actively supporting students keen to continue their work on Greek inscriptions. Thanks to the generous endowment of the Center, two advanced Classics graduate students were awarded Aleshire Dissertation Fellowships for the academic year 2009–2010. Athena Kirk (Classics) won one of the two fellowships for her thesis on “Objects Lists in the Greek World”. Supported by the Center, Athena spent Spring, 2010 in Europe studying Greek inventories housed in museums in Paris, London, Copenhagen, Athens, Delos, and Samos. The other recipient of an Aleshire Dissertation Fellowship was Nathan Arrington (Classical Archaeology) for his thesis, “Framing the Warrior in Classical Greece”. Importantly, Nathan was offered and accepted a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in the Department of Art and History at Princeton University. Our warmest congratulations to Nathan.
Since our last communiqué, two excellent presentations have been given at the Berkeley Epigraphy Workshop. In April 2009, Christelle Fischer-Bovet (Post-Doctoral Fellow affiliated with the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri) gave a paper entitled “Negotiating power through asylia: soldiers, Egyptian temples, and the king in first-century BC Egypt”. And in November 2009, Nathan Arrington presented “The Athenian Casualty Lists: Monuments of Defeat?”
We are also pleased to report that the Center’s library of books and offprints continues to expand, and digitization of the squeeze collection proceeds apace. The contribution of our graduate assistants, Tiernan Doyle and Lisa Eberle, has been invaluable. Finally, the editors of SEG for Attica and the Peloponnese, Ronald S. Stroud and Nikolaos Papazarkadas, continue profitably to draw upon the wonderful resources of the Center.
—Nikolaos Papazarkadas
The Dhiban Excavation and Development Project (or, DEDP) conducted its third season during the 2009 summer. The project is co-directed by Benjamin Porter, Danielle Fatkin (Knox College), Katherine Adelsberger (Knox College) and Bruce Routledge (University of Liverpool). Tall Dhiban is a 14-hectare site situated on the semi-arid Dhiban Plateau in west-central Jordan. The site was occupied intermittently during the past 5,000 years, starting in the Early Bronze Age, and again during the Iron Age, the Nabataean, Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic Periods. Today, the site sits adjacent to a rural community of Jordanians, mostly from the Bani Hamida tribe, who settled at Dhiban during the British Mandate Era.
The DEDP's research design has a number of goals, including understanding how an agro-pastoral community persisting in a semi-arid environment managed imperial interventions from the Assyrian, Byzantine, Mamluk, and British Empires. The DEDP is also working with Jordanian government officials and local community members and businesses to develop the site into an archaeological tourism destination.
During the 2009 season, the project focused on excavating the Middle Islamic period building on the acropolis, exposing the edges of the Iron Age monumental building, excavating test trenches on the lower terraces to determine the extent of each occupation, and collecting geologic data from soil archives on and near the site. Information needed for planning the site's development was also collected. The DEDP was extremely pleased with the season's results. In particular, the discovery of a well-built Late Roman/Byzantine wall on the northern side of the tell determined that Classical period remains exist near the surface. This building will be investigated in future seasons.
UC Berkeley participants included Benjamin Porter (NES/AHMA), Jeffrey Pearson (AHMA), Alan Farahani (AHMA), Antonietta Catanzariti (NES), and Colleen Morgan (Anthropology). A summary of the Berkeley team's results will soon be published in the Journal of Associated Graduate Studies in Near Eastern Studies. Sponsors in 2009 included the University of California, Berkeley, the Stahl Fund, Knox College, and the American Philosophical Society. The DEDP's blog can be found at www.dhiban.wordpress.com. A short season is planned for the summer of 2010.
—Ben Porter
The Nemea Center for Classical Archaeology has had another great year in spite of the difficult economic situation both here in the States and in Greece, with operations in Greece and Berkeley running smoothly thanks to our great staff and devoted students.
2009 was a study season at Nemea, so the bulk of our work concentrated on research and publication preparation. In June, a four-week program took place in Nemea. Five teams made up of one graduate and two undergraduate students were assigned an area of the site, which had been excavated over several seasons; their task was to identify important ceramic deposits. The teams conducted on-site and archival research using the field notebooks, reports and other resources as available. They sorted, analyzed and identified the ceramics in the Museum workroom. This material was then used to create a photographic record, an informational database and a team analysis of the deposits and their importance in the understanding of the site history. Tours of other sites and museums in the local area and further afield (including Athens, Olympia and Epidaurus) were taken in afternoons and on weekends.
Two special treats this year were an exceptional visit to the new excavations at Mt. Lykaion in Arkadia, and thanks to a special donation, the group was able to spend an overnight visit in the magical site of Delphi.
Since 2010 will be the first season of renewed excavations, workmen and students cleared large areas of brush in preparation for next year. In addition, students participating in the archaeological field school, under the direction of AHMA graduate student Allison Kirk and our new project architect, Nefeli Mitrovgeni, used our total station to re-establish the grid plan on site and create convenient datum points for measuring distances and elevations for future excavation trenches and finds.
In July, a four-week field school was conducted at Mycenae as part of a study season on material excavated in past years from Petsas House, a Late Bronze Age habitation and ceramics factory. Four categories of major research were conducted: pottery conservation and cataloging, fresco cleaning, soil sample flotation and sorting, and architectural planning of the excavation site. Students were responsible for all of these tasks under the guidance of our experienced graduate students and the season was a great success. Tours of other sites and museums in the local area and further afield (including Athens, Pylos, Tiryns and Epidaurus) were taken in afternoons and on weekends. Highlights of the trips included extensive visits to two new museums: at Nafplion and the Acropolis Museum in Athens.
—Kim Shelton
At Sardis in 2009, the field season sponsored by Harvard and Cornell Universities again was directed by Nicholas Cahill (University of Wisconsin; AHMA 1982-1991). Recovery of more early Lydian coins stimulated Nick to have electrum examples analyzed, in order to determine their surface gold enrichment, which would have suggested a greater gold content. Nick also organized an exhibition sponsored by the Construction and Credit Bank in Istanbul (“The Lydians and Their World,” February 18-May 15, 2010) and edited and wrote much of its sumptuous catalogue. Randall Souza, excavating in a little-explored part of the city site, uncovered a complex sequence of Lydian-to-Roman occupation strata, which included a splendid Lydian terrace wall and handsome Hellenistic and Roman artifacts. Excavation by others focused on a Lydian house beneath the Roman theater, material of Lydian and Persian eras on the Acropolis, and city defenses of the 7th century BC.
—Crawford Greenwalt
Reports from Current Students
New Students
Chris Bravo says: “Year One has been a roller coaster ride of sorts. Having to adjust to a new city and a new school was a bit much at first, but the friendliness and awesomeness of everyone here made the transition much more pleasant. Academically, I've grappled with the AthPol, plunged headfirst into Akkadian, read Greek for hours on end, passed a French exam, and signed myself onto Laurie Pearce's “Hellenistic Babylonia: Texts, Images, and Names” digital database project. It's been a good year—I can't wait for Year Two to begin.”Returning Students
After passing his orals in May, David DeVore logged his first publication (a Bryn Mawr review) and is working on the second and third (another Bryn Mawr review, and an article about reading and writing in the biblical book of Jeremiah). He also co-taught a rewarding course on ancient identities at San Quentin State Prison in fall semester with Erich Gruen, Lisa Eberle, and Tim Doran, and delivered his first conference paper at an Ohio State graduate conference in April on Augustine's City of God as historiography. He has also researched, formulated, and begun writing his dissertation, a fresh evaluation of the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius of Caesarea. He delivers a short version of his research at the North American Patristics Society conference in Chicago at the end of May. This summer he plans to teach himself to read modern Greek and to continue hammering out this dissertation while teaching Latin 1. He has again enjoyed editing the newsletter, though he looks forward to seeing what others can do with it next year.
Brendan Haug reports: “I am continuing the early work on my dissertation, a study of the topography, economy and society of the Egyptian Fayyum between (roughly) the sixth and seventh centuries AD. I will also be visiting Cairo this summer for two months to work on my Arabic and, with luck, visit a few sites in the Fayyum and elsewhere in Egypt.”
Noah Kaye comments, “The academic year 2009/10 has been my first of dissertation research. I have started planning, and as a participant in Erich Gruen's dissertation group, even writing a dissertation on the Attalid administration of Asia Minor after the Peace of Apamea. Meanwhile, I have been sitting in on seminars in economic sociology and economic history. I plan to continue work on my die study of the silver coinage of the Hellenistic Bithynian king Prousias II this summer in Berlin. For the academic year 2010/11, I will be at the ASCSA as a regular member. I hope that my stay in Athens will be preceded by a month in Thessaloniki, improving my modern Greek and working in the library of the Aristotelian University.”
John Lanier spent Fall 2009 finishing exams in Latin and Greek. This spring he is teaching Latin and preparing to begin Field Exams at semester's end.
Jeffrey Pearson reports, “I have had another busy year. Following a successful excavation season in Dhiban, Jordan last summer, I have been making steady progress on my dissertation, entitled ‘Contextualizing the Nabataeans: a critical reassessment of their history and material culture.’ After a year's respite, I have enjoyed the return to teaching this spring. On the non-academic side, I continue to be engaged in various musical projects in San Francisco. I am also proud to have become a first-time uncle as of April 2.”
Amy Russell is spending a glorious year as the Ralegh Radford Rome Scholar at the British School at Rome. A brief snapshot: ‘The sun is shining, the dissertation is coming along, and life is good.’
Randall Souza says: “I did indeed read a lot of Greek in the Fall, and having finished with language exams, I'm preparing for my first (minor) field exam at the end of this semester. I presented a paper based on my M.A. thesis at a graduate student conference at the University of Pennsylvania in March. It rained the entire time. This summer I'm returning to Sardis to continue excavating the sector I worked in last year—meaning that I get to enjoy deciphering my own field notebooks for the first time.”
Eli Weaverdyck has spent 2009-2010 working on his master's thesis on settlement patterns and urban-rural economic relations in Pannonia, which he presented at a LAReS colloquium in March. He's also been learning about archaeological theory, Roman historiography, Ostia, and ancient medicine. He will spend this summer curled up with his Latin reading list, preparing for his Latin exam in the fall.
Faculty Reports
Daniel Boyarin discloses: “In December of 2009, my book Socrates and the Fat Rabbis was published by the University of Chicago Press. I am currently working on a book for The New Press entitled How the Jews Came to Believe that Jesus Was God.”Erich Gruen spent the spring term of 2009 as Visiting Fellow in Oxford where he ran the faculty seminar in ancient history on the topic of "Roman Representations of the Alien." The job was not too taxing, a matter of selecting good speakers each week, introducing them, presiding over the sessions and Q & A, and sitting back and looking wise. The gig also allowed him to spend quality time with two former Groupies who now have permanent posts at Oxford, Lisa Kallet and Jo Quinn. Lecture invitations in the UK also brought him to Cambridge, Edinburgh, Warwick, and Reading. The return to Berkeley gave an opportunity to help prepare and teach a general ancient history course at San Quentin, together with four of our graduate students, a challenging but, in many ways, rewarding experience. Various trips for lectures or conferences have had him traveling this year to BYU, Ohio State, the SBL, Oxford, Munich, Penn, and Princeton. The spring will be spent as a Visiting Fellow at Tel Aviv University. He looks forward to the appearance of two books perhaps by the time of the AIA/APA meetings, an edited volume, Cultural Identity in the Ancient Mediterranean, and Rethinking the Other in Antiquity.
Marian Feldman says: “I returned from my sabbatical year to take up the mantle as AHMA graduate advisor, which has involved a steep learning curve on my part (the students are trying their best to educate me!). I ended my sabbatical with two research trips last summer to improve my acquaintance with the Etruscans and the central Mediterranean – one to Italy for a 5-day marathon to Etruscan sites and collections and one in conjunction with my husband (along with my 2.5 year old twin daughters and the grandparents) to Corsica. I’m still wondering how I ended up specializing in desert cultures located in countries without great wine! In fall, my article, “Hoarded Treasures: The Megiddo Ivories and the End of the Bronze Age,” appeared in the journal Levant 41.2. Also in fall I participated in a conference on “Qatna and the Networks of Bronze Age Globalism” held in Stuttgart, Germany, to celebrate the opening of an exhibit of the recent Qatna finds at the Landesmueseum Württemberg. My short essay on Qatna’s Aegean connections was translated into German and appears in the exhibition catalogue, Schätze des Alten Syrien: Die Entdeckung des Königreichs Qatna (2009). Over spring break, I returned to Germany to present a paper in a conference on “Materiality and Practice: Transformative Capacities of Intercultural Encounters,” held at Heidelberg. I am looking forward to another two weeks there in June, when I have been invited to spend a short research break at the university.”
For Emily Mackil, 2009 brought two major projects to fruition. Her article on a fourth-century Boiotian proxeny decree and relief in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, was published in Chiron (2008). And in August her daughter, Lydia Grace, was born. Despite being on parental leave for the academic year 2009/10, she presented a paper on the 2010 APA Presidential Panel on "The New Institutionalism and the Ancient World," and will be speaking at two more conferences before the summer is over. From Carlos Noreña: “This year I put the final editorial touches on a co-edited volume, The Emperor and Rome: Space, Representation, and Ritual, which will appear with Cambridge University Press in 2010, and also completed my own book, Imperial Ideals in the Roman West: Representation, Circulation, Power, which will also appear with CUP, either in late 2010 or early 2011. I am currently at work on a group project to produce a series of maps of urbanization in the Roman Empire, and have also begun a short book project for Princeton, Anatomy of the Roman Empire: An Interpretive Introduction, which seeks to explain how the Roman empire actually worked as a particular configuration of power.”Nikolaos Papazarkadas writes, “Yet another volume I co-edited (with A. A. Themos, Epigraphical Museum) has now come out: ΑΤΤΙΚΑ ΕΠΙΓΡΑΦΙΚΑ: Μελέτες πρὸς τιμήν τοῦ Christian Habicht, Greek Epigraphy Society: Athens 2009). The volume (in effect the proceedings of an international symposium held in 2006 in honor of Professor Habicht) contains epigraphical material in English, French, German, Greek, and Latin. My own article is entitled “The decree of Aigeis and Aiantis (Agora I 6793) revisited.” In the meantime I have been working with Professor Stroud on the Attic and Peloponnesian sections of Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum LV (2005) was published in October 2009, and volume LVI (2006) is approaching completion.
Benjamin Porter has spent much of this year processing data from his Dhiban Excavation and Development Project and the Dilmun Bioarchaeology Project. The writing never ends, spending much of his energy on a handful of articles, and (of course) book manuscripts. A long (7 years!)- anticipated book chapter, co-authored with Jennifer Jacobs, was finally published: "Excavating turaath: Documenting local and national heritage discourses in Jordan” in Archaeologies and ethnographies: Iterations of ‘heritage’ and the archaeological past. Benjamin also taught a very rewarding graduate seminar in the fall, entitled "Vignettes of Near Eastern Social Life" for AHMA and Near Eastern Studies graduate students, and gave an AHMA noon brown bag talk on "The possibility of the neighbor." He is currently preparing for a short field season at Dhiban this summer in which he will gather information for the site's development as an archaeological tourism destination.Carol Redmount has been curating a new exhibit at the P.A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology entitled “The Conservator's Art: Preserving Egypt's Past” in memory of Egyptology professor Candy Keller, who passed away two years ago. Candy was involved in the initial planning of the exhibit and selected the core pieces. The show highlights conservation through the lens of ancient Egyptian artifacts, and a number of pieces on display have never before been exhibited. Opening day to the public is Friday, April 30th; the exhibit is scheduled to run for over a year. Fieldwork at Hibeh in northern Middle Egypt will take place next winter (not summer for once--even the Egyptians think we're crazy for digging in summer) when we undertake the first of two planned study seasons. After one more year as chair of Near Eastern Studies, Carol is looking forward to a sabbatical.Francesca Rochberg is working on an edition of Assyro-Babylonian solar eclipse omens while spending spring semester as Visiting Research Professor at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität under the Berkeley-LMU Cooperation. During her stint at LMU she will give a number of lectures in Munich, as well as in Copenhagen at a conference about “Problems of Canonicity and Identity Formation in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia,” and in Cambridge at the McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research. Her book In the Path of the Moon: Babylonian Celestial Divination and Its Legacy (Brill, 2010) will be out in the spring.
From Martin Schwartz: “Just now, under hurried circumstances, I'd like merely to direct the AHMA folks to some articles posted as PDFs on the so-called ‘Electronic Publications’ appendix to the selected bibliography on my page of the Near Eastern Studies website. What I think will interest the AHMA group most is my recently appeared ‘Apollo and Khshathrapati, the Median Nergal, at Xanthos,’ Bulletin of the Asia Istitute 19. The gist of this I had presented to a Noon Colloquium. Another publication of mine, whose conclusions were first aired at a Noon Colloquium, is ‘From Healer to Hyle: Levantine Iconography as Manichean Mythology’ in Journal of Inner Asian Art and Archaeology I, which profited from the remarks of a former Group student, (now Prof.) Jessica Nitschke. Another article posted among the PDFs of interest for classical and late antiquity, etc., is ‘Kerdir's Clairvoyants...,’ where ‘Extra-Iranian Perspectives’ in the subtitle doesn't mean ‘really Iranian,’ but refers to Greco-Roman, Hellenistic Egyptian, Byzantine, etc., material. What I personally find most exciting in my recent work is the discovery of the astounding compositional complexity in the Old Avestan hymns of Zoroaster, reported in my article ‘Pouruchista's Gathic Wedding and the Teleological Compositions of the Gathas,’ which takes forward some other recentish publications of mine on Gathic composition posted on the website. Speaking of which research, I had better get back to my current sabbatical semester, to be devoted to a book on the Gathas—or some of a book.... Tempus fugit, those nuisance insects time flies....”Andy Stewart is proud to have won Distinguished Teaching Award for 2009. For his research, he continued work in the Athenian Agora and on Samos in summer of 2009 and submitted a massive article on Aphrodite in Hellenistic Athens, including publication of two dozen statues and statuettes from the Agora, which is now under consideration for Hesperia. He delivered the following invited lectures: the Lansdowne Lectures at the University of Victoria and the Classics Department Annual Lecture at Wabash College, in Fall 2009, and was the Brittingham Foundation Visiting Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin in March 2010. He is also pleased to announce that his son Colin married his longtime girlfriend Olivia.David Stronach writes from his now more than one-year old ‘garden study,’ which he shares with his elder daughter, Keren, to say that he and NES Alumnus Ali Mousavi (Assistant Curator of Ancient Iranian and Near Eastern Art at LACMA) are joint editors of Irans Erbe in Flugbildern von Georg Gerster (Philipp von Zabern, 2009). He also contributed a paper, ‘Riding in Achaemenid Iran: New Perspectives’ to the recently published Festschrift for Ephraim Stern (in Eretz-Israel 29). Finally, while in Armenia during the latter part of the year, he again excavated at Erebuni before reading a paper on ‘Silver Rhyta from Erebuni’ at a conference marking the 50th anniversary of the founding, in Yerevan, of that city’s noted Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography.
Holger Zellentin enjoyed co-teaching the AHMA seminar with Ron Hendel. The seminar explored group formation in the Second Temple period). He also has several articles in preparation.
Alumni Updates
Ory Amitay (Ph.D. 2002) reports: “For me, the last year marked the beginning of the last stretch of the tenure track. As usual, this means a serious bout of paper-writing. So what has changed since the graduate years? Only the salary. Otherwise, I am eagerly awaiting the publication of my first book, From Alexander to Jesus, sometime before next Christmas. Another main activity I've embarked on last year is the wikification of my academic work. That means that I've moved all my research and teaching to a wiki platform. The Hebrew readers among you are invited to check it out at: http://amitay.haifa.ac.il. Will this be the new face of academia? Time will tell.”
Jorge Bravo (Ph.D. 2006) writes: “This is my last year as a visiting assistant professor at Carleton College. I will be heading to Connecticut to take up a one-year position at Wesleyan University in the Department of Classics, where I will fill a vacancy created by fellow AHMA alum Celina Gray. Last summer I returned to the Kenchreai Excavations in Greece as an area supervisor and was delighted to be able to take five Carleton students with me to gain field experience and study the remains of ancient Greece. In the fall my essay ‘Recovering the Past: The Origins of Heroes and Hero Cult’ was published by the Walters Art Museum as part of the catalogue for the exhibition ‘Heroes: Mortals and Myths in Ancient Greece.’ The exhibition is in Nashville for the spring, and in conjunction with it I have been invited to speak at Vanderbilt University on the topic of the role of Opheltes in the history of the Nemean Games. This summer I will continue to work on my chapters for Nemea IV on the hero shrine of Opheltes.”
Amelia Brown (Ph.D. 2008) writes, “My biggest news is that I have just started a new job, as Lecturer in Greek History and Language in the Classics and Ancient History discipline of the School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. It's a beautiful campus and city, and I'm excited about pursuing my teaching and research here. My husband Graham also has work in this part of the world, and we recently got a cat. “I spent the fall of 2009 as the Hannah Seeger Davis Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Hellenic Studies Program at Princeton University, my undergraduate alma mater. I worked on turning my Dissertation into a book on Corinth in Late Antiquity, and had a great time catching up with old friends and meeting new ones. I sat in on seminars on Rhodes, Malta and Sicily, and had three articles accepted for publication: "Last Men Standing: Chlamydatus Portraits and Public Life in Late Antique Corinth," in Hesperia; “Islands in a Sea of Change?: Continuity and Abandonment in Dark Age Corinth and Thessaloniki,” in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology; and “Justinian, Procopius and Deception: Literary Lies, Imperial Politics and the Archaeology of Sixth-Century Greece,” in Private and Public Lies: The Discourse of Despotism and Deceit in the Ancient World, ed. K.O. Chong-Gossard, A. Turner and F. Vervaet, forthcoming from Brill. “In recent months I visited Oxford University to participate in the project on the Last Statues of Antiquity, directed by Bryan Ward-Perkins and R.R.R. Smith, who are building an online database of Late Antique sculpture. I also went to the Modern Greek Studies’ Association’s biannual meeting in Vancouver, and delivered a paper on “Ancient Corinth from the Ottoman Empire to the Archaeologists.” This was as part of the first-ever archaeology panel at this meeting, sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America’s Interest Group on the Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology of Greece (MAPMAG), of which I just became the chair. At the AIA in Anaheim I presented a paper on “A New Isis Fortuna from Roman Malta,” and had the chance to meet Dr Ernestine Elster of UCLA, who conducted excavations on Malta in 1983-1984, which I am involved in publishing.”
Judy Gaughan (Ph.D. 1999) writes: “I am pleased to report the publication of my book Murder was not a Crime: Homicide and Power in the Roman Republic, University of Texas Press, 2010 (http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/g aumur.html). I have extended my teaching portfolio to include an introductory course on World Literature to 1500. This course is great fun; last semester I made my students do an interpretive dance of a character from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Recently, I realized I am a true Renaissance Woman: I have knowledge of many fields, but only know things that happened before the Renaissance. I spend much of my time parenting my energetic and acrobatic nine-year-old daughter who, last winter in Rome - with true eight-year-old attitude - found the Colosseum ‘not so big.’”
Matthew Gonzales (Ph.D. 2004) reports: “The summer of 2009 and the 2009-2010 academic year have been rewarding and fruitful. I began working with my colleagues at the Department's dig-site at Coriglia, near Orvieto, Italy, where I have been appointed director of the project's field-school. Last year's work gave us the first clear indications of what sort of site we have - the floor and hypocausts of an early imperial bath complex have begun to emerge and we made further progress in defining the road and entrance of the complex, which, on the basis of coins in the latest road stratum, seems to have its last surge of activity in the fifth century CE and been abandoned thereafter. Earlier, probably Etruscan, levels have produced evidence of metal-smelting and working.”
“We have begun working on the preliminary site reports for publication and I continue massaging a couple of more articles on Ares into more manageable shape. I was happy to be promoted to Associate Professor at the end of last year and was granted tenure this December.”
Jeremy McInerney says, “This past year I was promoted to full professor here at Penn, where I am chair of the Ancient History Graduate Group. Two highlights this year: the imminent publication of The Cattle of the Sun with Princeton and Erich Gruen's visit to Penn as the Hyde Fellow, just earlier this month. I attended his two graduate seminars and was just like the bad old days in Dwinelle Hall, except the seminars only ran for three hours. Erich was accompanied by Ann Hesse, and it was a genuine pleasure to show her that Erich's network reaches to the east coast.”In January, Elisabeth O'Connell (Ph.D. 2007) began her fourth year as a curator – formerly "Research Curator," now "Assistant Keeper" - in the British Museum Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan where she is responsible for the department's Roman and Late Antique collections. She reports a successful field season at Hagr Edfu, an ancient Egyptian necropolis reused for settlement in Late Antiquity. She continues to enjoy life in London and, in 2009-2010, gave a handful of lectures in the UK, USA and Egypt.
John Pollini (Ph.D. 1978) reports: “This past year has been a very busy one. I gave papers at the ASMOSIA conference in Tarragona, Spain in June, and at the national meetings of the AIA in Anaheim in January on the new use of computer technology in detecting the way Roman portraits were recut from one individual to another. This paper will be published in a volume of the MAAR under the title Recutting Roman Portraits: Problems in Interpretation and the New Technology in Finding Possible Solutions. I am presently revising a book manuscript, From Republic to Empire: Rhetoric, Religion, and Power in the Visual Culture of Ancient Rome, to be published by the University of Oklahoma Press with a substantial subvention. I continue to work on my book ‘Christian Destruction and Desecration of Images of Classical Antiquity: A Study in Religious Intolerance in the Ancient World.’ I have also been invited by the Secretary General of the D.A.I. to be a resident scholar at their institute in Berlin in the fall of 2011 to continue my work on this topic. The following year (2012-13) I will be giving the Martha Sharp Joukowsky Lectures at 12 AIA societies across the U.S. This summer I will be conducting an excavation course for our students at USC in conjunction with the American Institute for Roman Culture in Rome at their excavation, ‘Villa delle Vignacce’ on the outskirts of Rome.”
“This past year I was appointed Research Associate at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA. I also spearheaded an effort to create a Visual Culture of the Ancient World Initiative under the aegis of USC’s International Museum Institute. VCAW-IMI is comprised of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, the Getty’s International Research Institute, the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Villa in Malibu, the L.A. County Museum of Art, and the Natural History Museum. The mission of VCAW-IMI is to bring together museums and academia by promoting research and collaborative planning of a variety of projects and activities in the form of lectures, conferences, seminars, and exhibitions as a means of exploring a wide range of issues of common interest pertaining to the study of the ancient world globally. We have just celebrated the creation of this new initiative with an inaugural lecture series this spring, featuring Dr. Dyfri Williams, the former Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum and Getty Villa Scholar. And in April, Dr. Trinidad Nogales Basarrate, the Head Curator and Director of Research at the National Archaeological Museum in Merida, Spain will give two lectures on Roman Spain at USC and at the Getty Villa Museum. One of our projects for next year will be on the ancient art, religion, and culture of China. We are also planning several years from now an international conference on the ‘Archaeology of Destruction,’ with a consortium seminar at the Getty Research Institute and an exhibition on this subject at the Fisher Museum of Art at USC and satellite exhibitions at our other participating local museums.”