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This workshop will take place online. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants. Expanding the Ancient World is a series of professional development workshops and online resources for teachers.

The domestication of plants in prehistory allowed humanity to demographically expand, form dense population congregations (urbanism and social hierarchies), and advance the arts and sciences. For millennia, humans drove the evolution of domestication traits in crops and animals. Archaeologists, ecologists, and geneticists are all working to develop new theories about how domestication in antiquity occurred; one of these theories – the ecological release hypothesis – suggests that crops and animals evolved traits of domestication as a response to humans simply removing predators and herbivores. Dr. Spengler will briefly explore a few key themes in this theory and the rich history of domestication and culture, which he traces in his recent book, Nature's Greatest Success: How Plants evolved to Exploit Humanity.

Please join illustrator and teaching artist Joan Chiverton for an afternoon of sketching and watercolor in the galleries in conjunction with our new exhibition Rodin’s Egypt. Develop your drawing skills and discover a new way of seeing the human form, as you sketch masterpieces from Rodin’s collection of Egyptian antiquities and masterpieces made by the sculptor.

This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. Ancient Egyptian images of the body are at the same time both highly recognizable and foreign to the modern viewer. From impossible composite figures of human-animal hybrids to seemingly stiff and block-like human forms in sculpture, Egyptian depictions were meant not simply to capture a likeness, but to manifest powers in order to establish the presence of, and relations between, depicted entities.