Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
https://isaw.nyu.edu
MATERIA III: New Approaches to Material Text in the Ancient World
https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2018/materia-iii
The MATERIA Conference is a series of colloquia dedicated to presenting new research on books and other media in antiquity, bringing together scholars from a variety of disciplines—history, literature, epigraphy, papyrology, archeology, manuscript studies, etc. The first two MATERIA meetings, held at 2016 (Columbia University) and 2017 (MIT), pursued a more traditional focus on the book and the literary in order to advance a broader understanding of the history of the book in the Roman world. With MATERIA III at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, we extend this discussion to consider approaches to material text in Greco-Roman antiquity and other ancient civilizations between 500 BCE and 500 CE in terms of, but also beyond, the category of “the book.”No publisher2019/03/07 17:30:00 GMT-4EventNew York Aegean Bronze Age Colloquium: Bringing the Minoan Fragmentary Relief Frescoes from Pseira to Life
https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2018/pseira-fresco-fragments
No publisher2019/01/25 15:55:00 GMT-4EventManuscript Networks and the Evolution of Technical Texts in Early China
https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2018/manuscript-networks
No publisher2019/01/25 15:55:00 GMT-4EventRostovtzeff Lecture Series: Feeding Civilizations: A Comparative Long-Term Consideration of Agricultural and Culinary Traditions across the Old World
https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2018/rostovtzeff-2019-lecture-4
Lecture 4 in a four-part series — Baked bread is both basic to west Asian civilization and distinctive of it in the global context. The origins of cereal agriculture in Western Asia preceded the development of cooking pots, but instead processing focused on production of flour and breads. This is most obvious in the widespread archaeological distribution of ovens from southeastern Europe through the Indus and up the Nile to Nubia. It is also reflected in the relative prominence of querns for grinding, as well as new archaeobotanical techniques for identifying crumbs of bread or crusts of porridge. At first bread may have been the distinctive new cereal food, unlike anything that was easily cooked from wild gathered foods. But later bread lent itself to portability, and therefore to sharing among traders, travellers, and across the echelons of society. It complemented the cheeses and butters that pastoral producers might also make portable. Bread could be shared as offerings to distant gods alongside odours of incense and roast sacrificial meats.No publisher2019/02/14 16:05:00 GMT-4EventRostovtzeff Lecture Series: Feeding Civilizations: A Comparative Long-Term Consideration of Agricultural and Culinary Traditions across the Old World
https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2018/rostovtzeff-2019-lecture-3
Lecture 3 of a four-part series — While regional variation in the production of food and farming systems underpinned trajectories towards civilization, these foodstuffs were transformed in distinctive ways that defined, or perhaps flavoured, regional civilization. In other words how the raw became the cooked constructed distinct regional styles of culinary civilization. This can be derived from the observation that the early Near East developed cereal farming in the absence of cooking ceramics, with an emphasis on flour and bread (a theme of the next lecture), whereas East Asian societies were making pots and boiling in them millennia before the first hint of cultivation. This lecture explores the patterns of cooking and brewing in East and South East through a triangulation that includes the archaeological tools of food processing, the genetic variations in crops that indicate past selection for aesthetic or culinary traits like stickiness, and ethnographic or historical sources on how foods were prepared, and understood as they were consumed routinely or ritually.No publisher2019/02/14 16:05:00 GMT-4EventRostovtzeff Lecture Series: Feeding Civilizations: A Comparative Long-Term Consideration of Agricultural and Culinary Traditions across the Old World
https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2018/rostovtzeff-2019-lecture-2
Lecture 2 in a four-part series — Between the Neolithic origins of agriculture and the establishment of hierarchical, urban societies, key agricultural transformations took place. These included both the expanded production of staple grains, underpinned by innovations in agriculture, and the development of additional domesticated crops, especially perennial trees and shrubs. Innovations varied across Old World regions, but included the deployment of animal labour in tillage (in West Asia), control of water (in Yangtze China), new crop combinations and rotations that improved maintenance of soil fertility (in North China), but also interdependent specialization in pastoral versus crop production (in parts of Africa). Post-Neolithic agricultural innovation also included the domestication of perennial tree fruits and vines, from olives, grapes and dates in the West, to peaches and jujube in the East, to cotton, mango, and citron in India. These new perennial crops required a new time perspective, investment for yields 5, 10, or 20 years in the future, and with nothing like the caloric return of grains. This only became possible through the development of secure, longer-term land tenure, and made sense in terms of a logic of production for trade, as agricultural produce became part of the emerging commodification that was early cities.No publisher2019/02/14 16:00:00 GMT-4EventReturn to Sumer
https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2018/return-to-sumer
The region surrounding the ancient city of Umma is of great historical significance. It has been the arena of the first documented water conflict between the city-state Umma and its neighbor Lagash in the 3rd millennium BC. Later, Umma became a well-known province of the kingdom of the 3rd Dynasty of Ur (aka Ur III Period), which unified Mesopotamia at the end of the 3rd and the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC. The Ur III Period is known for its exceptionally rich historical record – in particular on the workings of an early state economy. Hence, the available historical record of the 3rd and 2nd millennium BC provides us with a detailed insight into the regions’ history. However, this insight remains one-sided, as the Umma region has never been adequately investigated archaeologically until recently. The lack of archaeological data has not only hampered our interpretation of the available ancient texts but also prevented us from gaining a nuanced understanding of the regions historical and environmental development. The mission of The Umma Survey Project aims to address this shortcoming by conducting an intensive archaeological reconnaissance over the course of five years.No publisher2019/01/04 13:40:00 GMT-4EventRostovtzeff Lecture Series: Feeding Civilizations: A Comparative Long-Term Consideration of Agricultural and Culinary Traditions across the Old World
https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2018/rostovtzeff-2019-lecture-1
This lecture, the first in a four-part lecture series, will reconsider the origins of agriculture based on recent empirical evidence that tells us both how grain crops were domesticated and how slowly this process unfolded, in West Asia, East Asia, parts of Africa, and India. Archaeobotany is providing a growing evidence base for the ways in which plants became adapted as crops through morphological changes, which were in turn tied to shifts in human practices. The co-evolution was slow, however, and it will be argued that the more revolutionary shift towards agricultural economies was substantially later (a few millennia) than the start of domestication itself. Agricultural economies can be defined as those systems in which wild foraging came to make a much reduced or even marginal caloric contribution to diet, and efforts at food production began to take place at a landscape scale. No publisher2019/02/14 16:00:00 GMT-4EventMastering Speed
https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2018/mastering-speed
The use of horses has had a tremendous impact on the history of societies, in the Old as well as in the New World. While existing narratives focus on the impact of the horse in warfare, our work counters current narratives of the development of horse riding and the social changes associated with it. The data we recovered from our in-depth study of a ritual landscape in central Mongolia allows for a new reconstruction of the cultural changes during the Bronze and Early Iron Age (ca. 1900 to 400 BCE). In this talk, I discuss the social dynamics we observe in connection with horse riding which eventually led to the establishment of the famous armies of mounted warriors that were troubling neighboring powers and Chinese Dynasties.No publisher2019/01/04 13:40:00 GMT-4EventJoan Breton Connelly
https://isaw.nyu.edu/people/faculty/affiliated-faculty/joan-connelly
No publisher2019/01/23 16:55:56 GMT-4ProfileThe Archaeology of Colors
https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2018/archaeology-of-colors
Researchers of Hellenistic art have long recognized that many statues that now appear as works of pure white marble were originally polychrome. In early Chinese art, in contrast, the hallowed works of China's classical antiquity—the bronzes—are generally believed to have been unpainted. After all, why would artisans paint over an expensive bronze surface? In recent years, however, many varieties of bronzes have been uncovered with colorful ornamentation including sacrificial vessels, figural sculptures, mirrors, lamps, weapons, and personal ornaments. Using this data, this talk will survey China's polychrome bronze tradition from the Shang to the Han (1600 BCE-220 CE), considering the diverse functions assumed by painted ornamentation and identifying two major transitions in polychrome bronze art in the 5th c. BCE and the mid-2nd century BCE. Special attention will be paid to technical aspects of painting craft in early China, particularly the development of new binding agents in the Western Han.No publisher2019/01/04 13:40:00 GMT-4EventNew York Aegean Bronze Age Colloquium: The Recently Discovered Kiln Complex at Gournia
https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2018/new-york-aegean-bronze-age-colloquium-the-recently-discovered-kiln-complex-at-gournia
In 2014, a series of ceramic kilns was discovered on the northern edge of the Gournia settlement. Together the kilns formed a large complex that included multiple phases of construction. The complex dates exclusively to the Late Minoan IA period, and the kilns generally conform to the Minoan cross-draught channel type. Although this type is known from other sites in Crete, there are none that represent so many individual phases of construction. In total, 16 separate kilns were identified, which consisted primarily of fragmentary channels and fuel chambers often built over top of one another. While none of the pottery found in or around the kilns comes from an actual firing episode, an examination of the facility's construction and location could help to answer important questions regarding the organization of production.No publisher2019/01/04 13:40:00 GMT-4EventOpening of the Digital Exhibition: “The Sogdians: Influencers on the Silk Roads”
https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2018/influencers-on-the-silk-roads
This “born-digital” event celebrates the going “live” of the first exhibition, digital or otherwise, devoted to the Sogdians, a Central Asian Iranian people who served as “middlemen” in the circulation of people and commodities as well as religious and artistic ideas, along the Silk Roads, during the 5th to 8th centuries CE. The exhibition combines the latest academic research with a variety of digital media– from interactive maps to 3D photogrammetry, drone footage of archaeological sites to video interviews with leading scholars. It is a case study of how the digital humanities can bring scholarship on the ancient world to new audiences.No publisher2019/01/04 13:36:36 GMT-4EventAIA Lecture: Discourses on Empire
https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2018/roman-baths
No publisher2019/01/25 15:58:33 GMT-4EventTheodore N. Romanoff Lecture (ARCE): "The Medium is the Message"
https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2018/living-rock-stelae
We usually think of ancient Egypt as a culture of 'big building,' especially at the hands of the king. Yet there are some cases where royal stelae, bearing the officially sanctioned messages of the royal establishment, were inscribed into natural features rather than being set up in architectural spaces. These stelae were carved directly into 'living rock'--outcrops that are still where they were formed geologically. How did Egyptian views of living rock as a material inform this practice, and how was this monument type perceived to 'work'? This lecture explores the circumstances that led Egyptian kings to use the landscape as a monumental medium, and what those messages can tell us about how the landscape was understood.No publisher2019/01/04 13:38:47 GMT-4Event