The Teen Friends of Archaeology is excited to invite you to a lecture on the extensive site of Çatalhöyük by Dr. Ian Hodder:

The joys and blunders of 25 years of work at the 9000 year-old town of Çatalhöyük

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Ian Hodder is the Dunlevie Family Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford, and Director of the Stanford Archaeology Center. He previously taught in the Cambridge Archaeology department. Professor Hodder has also been conducting the excavation of the 9,000 year-old Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in central Turkey since 1993. He is a well-published author who is known for his numerous books and papers on a wide variety of archaeological subjects. 

Photos by Jason Quinlan, courtesy of the Çatalhöyük Research Project.

UCLA SNF Center for the Study of Hellenic Culture | UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology | Archaeological Institute of America–LA County Society | Pan-Laconian Federation of United States and Canada present

Stavros Vlizos Associate Professor, Ionian University
Vicky Vlachou Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels

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The Sanctuary of Apollon at Amyklai (Sparta) was inextricably associated in antiquity with the celebrated festival of the Hyakinthia. Ancient literary sources describe salient aspects of the festival and the cult that was centered around the tomb of the hero Hyakinthos and the altar of Apollo in two succeeding stages that never overlapped each other. Material evidence from the sanctuary area demonstrates the early beginnings of the cult and ritual, already since the mid-10th century BC. By the late 8th to early 7th century BC, the formal delimitation of the sanctuary area, the quantity and quality of the material deposits support the importance of the sanctuary and its festival within the formal institutions of the Spartan polis. It can be argued that the importance of the sanctuary may be related with the seniority of the shrine and the continuity of the ritual activities in this area over the centuries. The lecture shall focus on shifts in use and function of material culture that are parallel to transformations and changes of the social, political, and religious landscape of Sparta. Furthermore, the connection of the cult site to neighboring areas in proximity, further away, and parallel trajectory to the rest of the Spartan sanctuaries shall be discussed.

After completing his studies at the University of Ioannina and the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich (Dr.Phil.), Stavros Vlizos first worked as a contract archaeologist at the Ministry of Culture (1997-2001) and then as a researcher and scientific associate at the Benaki Museum (2002-2013). As an Associate Professor, he teaches a wide range of courses in Museology and Archaeology in the Department of Archives, Library Studies and Museology at Ionian University. He is director of the Amykles Research Project, associate of the Athens Archaeological Society, corresponding member of the German Archaeological Institute, and co-founder of the Athens “Roman Seminar.” His research interests and publications refer to issues of promotion and management of cultural heritage and archaeological goods, as well as topics highlighting the material culture of Ancient and Roman Greece and the importance of ancient sanctuaries diachronically.

Vicky Vlachou studied History, Archaeology and History of Art at the University of Athens. She is currently a scientific member (Belgian) at the École française d’Athènes (EfA, membre). She is a scholar of the Early Iron Age Aegean (ca. 1000-600 BC). Her doctoral thesis (2010) was awarded the G.P. Oikonomos prize of the Class of Letters and Fine Arts of the Academy of Athens. She is a member of fieldwork and publication projects at Xobourgo on Tenos (Cyclades), Amykles (Sparta), Itanos, and Anavlochos (Eastern Crete). She is the editor of the collective volume Pots, Workshops and Early Iron Age Society: Function and Role of Ceramics in Early Greece (Études d’archéologie 8, Brussels 2015).

Join us for a virtual Round Table to celebrate Marija Gimbutas (1921–1994), UNESCO's 2021 Centennial honoree. Marija Gimbutas was a professor of archaeology at UCLA and internationally renowned for her study of the arrival of the Proto-Indo-European languages and culture in Europe. One of her most original (and controversial) contributions has been validated recently by aDNA: the Kurgan Hypothesis and the arrival into Europe of the Proto-Indo-European speakers around 3500 BC. Introduced by Ernestine S. Elster, the participants include James Mallory, David Anthony, and Dorcas Brown with Willeke Wendrich as moderator.

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James Mallory was born in 1945 in California and educated at Occidental College (AB, 1963) and UCLA where he received his PhD in Indo-European Studies (European Archaeology) in 1975. In 1977 he joined the Archaeology Department at Queen’s University Belfast from which he retired as Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology in 2011. He has specialized in both Indo-European archaeology where he has published In Search of the Indo-Europeans (1989), The Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture (1997), and The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (2006) and Irish Archaeology (The Archaeology of Ulster, 1991; The Origins of the Irish, 2013; and In Search of the Irish Dreamtime, 2016). He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy. 

David Anthony is an archaeologist of the Eurasian steppes (esp. Russia, Ukraine, & Kazakhstan), known for his interdisciplinary research on the origins and spread of Indo-European languages, combining evidence from archaeology, ancient human DNA, linguistics, and comparative mythology. His most significant book, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, won the Society for American Archaeology prize for best scientific book in 2010. His entry into the Indo-European debate was facilitated by Marija Gimbutas’s groundbreaking English-language syntheses of eastern European archaeology. He is an associate in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, working in David Reich’s ancient DNA lab; and an emeritus professor at Hartwick College, Oneonta, NY. 

Dorcas Brown was co-director of grant-supported studies of museum collections in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Hungary (her advanced degree is in Museum Studies); and later of archaeological excavations in the steppes near Samara, Russia and Razdolnoe, Ukraine. Singly or together, Brown and Anthony have published 70+ articles and chapters, including since 2015 three co-authored in Science and three in Nature on a variety of related topics: Bronze Age migrations out of the steppes proven by ancient DNA, with profound implications for the Indo-European debate; the domestication of the dog, from ancient wolf & dog DNA; the domestication of the horse, from ancient horse DNA; the origin of dairying in the steppes, based on dairy peptides preserved in dental calculus; and male adolescent initiation-into-warrior rituals, connected with their discovery and excavation of a Bronze Age boys’ initiation site in the Volga steppes. She is retired from Hartwick College.

Introductions by Ernestine S. Elster. Elster was a graduate student of Gimbutas and participated in four of her archaeological expeditions. She is currently the director of the Mediterranean Laboratory at the Cotsen Institute. 

Moderated by Willeke Wendrich, Professor, UCLA Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, is the Director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.

UCLA SNF Center for the Study of Hellenic Culture | Embassy of Greece in USA | UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology | Archaeological Institute of America–LA County Society | present

Vassilis Lambrinoudakis
Professor Emeritus of Classical Archaeology
University of Athens

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The unexpected finds during recent excavations in the sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidauros shed new light on the origins, cult, and function of Asclepius, the main Divine Healer of the Graeco-Roman world. An amazing ground-floor building that features α peristyle and basement hewn into the rock was excavated at the Tholos, the famous classical circular building with underground, meander-like passages. It defines the highly debated and mysterious function of the Tholos as the cult place of chthonic Asclepius, and explains his presence in Epidauros in the 7th century BC. A small portico, found under the later Abaton, preceded the latter as a primitive dormitory hall. It provides evidence for healing through incubation already in early archaic times. An ash altar and accommodations for ritual meals around it explains the parallel magic cure through the consumption of sacred food from the very beginning of the cult. The new finds enrich our knowledge of the sanctuary’s history and general healthcare in antiquity.

Her Excellency Alexandra Papadopoulou, Ambassador of Greece to the United States, will provide introductory remarks.

Vassilis Lambrinoudakis is professor emeritus of the University of Athens; corresponding member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Paris; and the Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna. He studied History and Archaeology at the Universities of Athens, Munich and Bonn. He is member of the German Archeological Institute and the Austrian Archaeological Institute. He excavates mainly in Epidauros/Argolid and the island of Naxos in the Aegean See. He also conducted excavations on the island of Chios, in Marathon/Attica and in Palaiomanina/Acarnania. He directs projects of enhancement of archaeological sites in Naxos and Epidauros. In 2003, he earned the first prize of Europa Nostra for the excavation and the enhancement of the sites Yria and Sangri/Naxos. He has published 14 books and monographs, as well as 186 papers on ancient Greek architecture and art, ancient topography, ancient Greek religion, epigraphy, theory of Archaeology, and management of monuments. He was co-editor of the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (LIMC I-VIII) and of the Thesaurus Cultus et Rituum Antiquorum (ThesCRA I-VIII). In 2003, he was honored by the President of the Hellenic Republic “for promoting the Archaeology and the History of Greece throughout the world.”