AIA Lecture: Troy and Gordion

The Historiography of Excavation at Two Legendary Sites in Anatolia

C. Brian Rose

University of Pennsylvania

Note: We are now fully booked for this event and are only accepting names for the wait-list.

I have had the good fortune to direct or co-direct excavations at two legendary sites in Turkey -- Troy and Gordion, and the fieldwork that I have conducted there over the course of the last 25 years has continually required me to assess the most effective strategies for presenting them to the public and the scholarly community. In this talk I attempt to place my own work at these sites in historiographic perspective -- highlighting the positive and negative aspects of the projects, with a focus on the extent to which regional, national, and global developments have shaped our research agendas. I also reflect on the discipline of archaeology in Turkey and the Near East at the end of the talk.

C. Brian Rose (BA, Haverford College; MA and PhD, Columbia University) is James B. Pritchard Professor of Mediterranean Archaeology and Curator-in-Charge of the Mediterranean Section of the University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Since 1988 he has been Head of Post-Bronze Age excavations at Troy, and between 2004 and 2007 he directed a survey project in the Granicus River Valley that focused on recording and mapping the Graeco-Persian tombs that dominate the area. In 2013 he became director of the Gordion Excavations in central Turkey. His research has concentrated on the political and artistic relationship between Rome and the provinces (Dynastic Commemoration and Imperial Portraiture in the Julio-Claudian Period, Cambridge, 1997), and on the monuments of Troy during the Classical periods (The Archaeology of Greek and Roman Troy, Cambridge, 2014). He served as president of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) between 2007 and 2011, and received the AIA's Gold Medal in 2015. He has been a Trustee of the American Academy in Rome since 2001, and currently serves as Chair of the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees.

Registration is required at isaw.nyu.edu/rsvp

Admission to lecture closes 10 minutes after scheduled start time.

Reception to follow. 

Please check isaw.nyu.edu for event updates.