Academic Year 2020-2021

This lecture will take place online. Registration is required, click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants. This lecture about how administrators and business managers were trained in Late Antiquity grows out of our joint project to publish a fourth-century codex now divided between the Princeton University Library and a private collection. The codex as we have it dates to the 360s and comes from the Oxyrhynchite nome. It contains three types of material, in no particular order as far as we can tell: metrological texts, that is, treatises on measures and their relationship to one another; mathematical problems; and model contracts.

ISAW's open house for prospective doctoral students will take place online. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants. The event will include an opportunity to meet the ISAW faculty; an information session about our academic program; a Q&A session with current students; and sessions on archaeology, digital humanities, exhibitions, and the library at ISAW.

This talk introduces the connections between early medieval societies that have previously been studied in isolation. From Oceania to Europe and beyond, it transcends conventional disciplinary boundaries and synthesizes parallel historiographical narratives.

This multi-day conference will take place online on November 11th, 12th, and 13th. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants. Analog and digital games (e.g. video, role play, board, card, pedagogical, and alternative games) are platforms for modeling and experiencing events in fantastic, modern, or historical settings. When devising games based on ancient historical and archaeological contexts, an informed and critical approach is essential, lest games perpetuate problematic narratives or provide inaccurate representations of the past. “Rerolling the Past” builds off of the recent increase in academic studies of games to show how games can serve as a fruitful avenue for communicating information about the ancient world.

This multi-day conference will take place online on November 11th, 12th, and 13th. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants. Analog and digital games (e.g. video, role play, board, card, pedagogical, and alternative games) are platforms for modeling and experiencing events in fantastic, modern, or historical settings. When devising games based on ancient historical and archaeological contexts, an informed and critical approach is essential, lest games perpetuate problematic narratives or provide inaccurate representations of the past. “Rerolling the Past” builds off of the recent increase in academic studies of games to show how games can serve as a fruitful avenue for communicating information about the ancient world.

This multi-day conference will take place online on November 11th, 12th, and 13th. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants. Analog and digital games (e.g. video, role play, board, card, pedagogical, and alternative games) are platforms for modeling and experiencing events in fantastic, modern, or historical settings. When devising games based on ancient historical and archaeological contexts, an informed and critical approach is essential, lest games perpetuate problematic narratives or provide inaccurate representations of the past. “Rerolling the Past” builds off of the recent increase in academic studies of games to show how games can serve as a fruitful avenue for communicating information about the ancient world.

This lecture will take place online. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants. What does it mean to say a society has collapsed? Who is affected, and how do they respond to changing circumstances? In this lecture, these questions are addressed using new archaeological evidence from the collapse of the Hittite empire in ancient Turkey, part of a massive regional collapse that affected much of the Eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Late Bronze Age, ca. 1200 BCE.

The contact between Han China and Central Eurasia had been drastically intensified around the turn of the Common Era when the so-called Silk Road network took shape. The northern frontiers of Han China, as important nodes of the network, were the prominent arenas in which diverse cultural, economic, and socio-political interactions took place among the people who lived a pastoral, agricultural or mixed mode of life.

This lecture will take place online. Registration is required, click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants. Anatolian step monuments are a typology of rock-carved landscape monuments spread on rocky hills and mountains of west-central Anatolia. They consist of a series of steps cut in the stone and, in some cases, an altar shaped as a stone seat with backrest. In some other cases, a platform is flattened on top of the steps, and in both cases they can count one or two carved, semi-lunate aniconic idols as well as a few Phrygian inscriptions engraved in the stone.

On December 16th, ISAW Associate Director for Exhibitions and Gallery Curator Clare Fitzgerald gave a Virtual Tour of our recent exhibition, Devotion and Decadence: The Berthouville Treasure and Roman Luxury. This online presentation was given in collaboration with NYU's Alumni office, and we are pleased to be able to provide our community with the full recording.

This lecture will take place online. Registration is required, click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants.

This lecture will take place online. In stratified and hierarchical societies, ancient and modern, accessibility to those in power – divine and human – was always a topic of explicit articulation, regulation, negotiation, and performance. The interaction with the human ruler in the palace, was each highly regulated: it was bound to a particular space and time, and it was an exclusive privilege to attend it. The right to access, as well as the possibility for personal interaction that issues forth from it, constitute an essential component in the visual and cultural representation of sacred and political power.