Dr. Avinoam Shalem
Department of Art History and Archaeology
Columbia University

Abstract:

In this lecture, I would like to challenge the specific art historians’ interest in the question of the earliest and the first-in-sequence work of art. My inquiry does not aim at disregarding this query as a legitimate one or criticizing the art historian’s obsession with this mode of investigation. On the contrary, I would like to ponder on the benefit that art historians gain from locating specific art works as the earliest or the first of their kind. Moreover, I would like to disclose the historical trajectory of this method, namely the first medieval scholarly quests for defining and demarcating the earliest. Thus, my aim is to set this mode of research in its historical context and, hopefully, raise further critical points about our regarding of this approach as scholarly method, for its bad and good reasons alike.

Nadine Moeller 

Associate Professor of Egyptian Archaeology

University of Chicago

Abstract:
The ongoing excavations by the Oriental Institute team directed by Nadine Moeller and Gregory Marouard have during the most recent seasons focused on settlement remains dating to the Old Kingdom. Located 20 m to the west of the much later Ptolemaic temple of Horus of Edfu, excavations revealed several phases of domestic installations from the second part of the 6th Dynasty that covered an older administrative complex with several massive mudbrick structures dating to the late 5th Dynasty that had been installed directly onto the natural Nile sand deposits in an area never settled before that date. Based on their size, architectural details and related finds, the two large buildings are of official nature and constitute a newly founded settlement quarter in the ancient town of Behdet (Edfu). Among the finds are more than 220 clay sealings naming king Djedkare-Isesi (late 5th Dynasty, ca. 2434 BC), in addition to official titles that regularly mention a group of specialized workers involved in prospection and mining activities, the so-called sementiu. Additional finds such as numerous pieces of copper ore, important traces of metallurgical activities, Red Sea shells and a significant amount of Nubian ceramics found on the floor levels during the excavation further confirm the link to royal expeditions and mining activities in the Eastern desert areas. 

The second area that has been the focus of fieldwork since November 2018 provided new evidence for a vast domestic quarter dating to the beginning of 18th Dynasty. Excavations have focused on a large urban villa of about 400 square-meters, which dates from the early Thutmoside period (ca. 1500-1450 BCE). This building is characterized by several rooms with columns. The largest and main room, a 6-columned hall, contained in one of its corners a well-preserved domestic sanctuary dedicated to the cult of the family ancestors. Numerous elements attesting to the cult activity have been found near a small fire place and offering table, including a very rare example of an ancestor bust and a statuette of a seated scribe

Dr. Stacie King

Associate Professor of Anthropology
Associate Faculty for the Center for
Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Indiana University Bloomington

Abstract:

This talk explores the challenges that ethnonyms create when trying to reconstruct
histories of multiethnic landscapes in the ancient world. My larger project in the Nejapa
region of Oaxaca, Mexico addresses various aspects of conquest and colonialism along
interegional trade routes, including identifying fortresses in mountain landscapes, the
meaning of unoccupied land, the relationships entailed by trade and exchange, and
reconciling archival documents, oral history, and archaeology. In this talk, I use my work
to demonstrate how ethnonyms have pervaded interpretations of the past, archaeological
reconstructions, and Colonial period registers, such that it remains difficult to envision a
different kind of thriving, multiethnic world. Taken together, archaeological data, archival
information, and oral history from rural multiethnic Nejapa, Oaxaca show us that
different indigenous communities across this landscape experienced Aztec, Zapotec, and
Spanish conquests and colonialisms differently between the years A.D. 1350 and 1650, and
that these differences do not fit well with traditional reconstructions of Nejapa’s
indigenous ethnic groups (Mixe, Chontal, and Zapotec). Instead, the data complicate
entrenched notions of ethnicity and challenge their basic formulation. The long-standing
multiethnic past of ancient Nejapa set the stage for a different form of indigeneity that
Nejapa’s resident experience in the present.

The Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas and Coahuila, Mexico house some of the most spectacularly complex rock art of the ancient world. Approximately 4000 years ago, hunter-gatherers began transforming this region into a painted landscape. Perhaps the greatest of these masterpieces is the White Shaman mural, an intricate Pecos River style painting that spans twenty-six feet in length and thirteen feet in height. Drawing on twenty-five years of archaeological research, as well as insight from ethnohistory and art history, Carolyn Boyd identifies patterns in the art that relate, in stunning detail, to the mythologies of Uto-Aztecan speaking peoples, including the Aztec and the contemporary Huichol. Analysis of these patterns led to the identification of the White Shaman mural as an ancient visual narrative relating a story of the birth of the sun and the beginning of time.