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Wednesday, November 6, 2024 @ 7PM
Eaton Humanities 250 & Zoom
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ABSTRACT

Sensory studies of embodiment have gained traction in recent years as unparalleled tools for examining the vicissitudes of ancient lived experience.  When used in conjunction with cognitive studies, it becomes possible to tease out the links between (over)stimulation, deprivation, and religious transformation.  Kinesthetics, in particular, can facilitate a nuanced embodied account of approach, (in)accessibility, and viewshed orchestration, by prioritizing the role of the body in movement within the landscapes and edifices of the built environment.  The intersection of space, place, and body within the religious setting of the sanctuary thus becomes a nexus of gradually unfolding experience, understanding, and transformation.

Through a series of three case studies drawn from the 5th-3rd c. BCE, this paper focuses on how divine epiphany, made manifest through the multisensory experiences within the Greek sanctuary, served as the key to the transformative effect of ritual, a crucial component to understanding ancient religion.  Eleusis, the site of the renowned Mysteries, serves as an example of how the combination of sensory overstimulation and deprivation can prime the body of the worshipper to receive the divine knowledge at the root of the ritual.  Delphi, the oracular heart of Greece, showcases how physical exertion in service to the gods constituted its own form of worship and prepared both worshippers and priestly attendants to communicate with the god.  And Samothrace, home of the Sanctuary of the Great Gods, ties together the strains of sensory stimulation and physical expenditure of energy into a synesthetic encapsulation of ritual transformation within a charged sacred landscape.

Ultimately, this paper reveals the role of multisensory experience in the religious transformation that lies at the heart of Greek ritual practice by foregrounding kinesthetics as the link between the human participant and sacred built environment.

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Caesar’s Cervisia

Wednesday, October 16, 2024 @ 7PM
Eaton Humanities #150 & Zoom
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ABSTRACT

Examinations of Roman cuisine often downplay the role of beer in the ancient Roman diet seeing it as a symbol of barbarity. This presentation examines the plausibility of beer as a standard component of the Roman soldier’s diet and seeks to highlight when it may have become necessary for military advancement. Julius Caesar’s reliance on auxiliary forces to campaign in the North from 58-51 BCE ensured that cultures known for producing beer influenced legionary forces reliant on local resources to survive. This lecture also asserts the implausibility of wine consumption amongst Caesar’s men and concludes that the acceptance of beer as a standard component of the Roman soldier’s diet begins with Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul and Britain.

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Power of the Ancestors at Pylos, Greece

Wednesday, February 21st at 7:15pm
Eaton Humanities
Free and open to the public

Abstract

Tholos tomb near Palace at Pylos

Over the past few decades, archaeologists have assigned ancestors significant roles in the supernatural orders of most ancient societies. They argue that ancestors, through their connection to the divine or supernatural, wielded a power that could transform society and grant exclusive rights over limited resources to those who could argue either for a familial connection to the ancestor or have access to the dead. These arguments are primarily derived from ethnographic research carried out on communal, formal burial areas that were used for long periods of time. Several scholars have argued that Mycenaean elites (16^th-12^th c. BCE) in Greece drew power from their ancestors and were reliant on that source of power for their continued success.

Based on a detailed examination of the dates of the tombs’ use, the wealth of the artifacts in them, and location of the tombs at Pylos, I argue that the metaphysical components and significance of the mortuary arena and ancestors at Pylos fluctuated and instead of having a constant static function the manipulation of the ancestors cycled in relation to the changing political economy at the palace.

The varied lengths of time during which individual tombs were in use, the different locations of the tombs at different periods in relation to the palace, the changing quantities and values of the objects deposited in the tombs during the burials, and the chronologically limited evidence for any non-funerary rituals at the tombs all indicate diachronic changes in the importance of ancestors among the elite groups at Pylos.

Joanne Murphy is Associate Professor with the Department of Classical Studies, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.  She holds her degrees from the University of Cincinnati (Ph.D.), and University College Dublin, and her fields of study are Greek archaeology, archaeological methods and theory, the archaeology of religion, and the archaeology of mortuary systems.  She is Director of the Kea Archaeological Research Survey, and Co-director of the restudy of the Pylian tombs.  Publications include Ritual in Archaic States (edited volume, University Press of Florida, 2016), and Death and Palaces: A Detailed Study of Pylian Tombs (in preparation).

Short bibliography and/or website on lecture topic:

C.W. Blegen, M. Rawson, W. Taylour, and W. P. Donovan, The Palace of Nestor 3. Acropolis and Lower Town. Tholoi and Grave Circle. Chamber Tombs. Discoveries Outside the Citadel (1973).

J. Murphy, J. Davis, S. Stocker, and L. Schepartz, “Late Bronze Age Tombs at the Palace of Nestor, Pylos” in J. MURPHY (ed.), Variations on a Theme: Late Bronze Age Mortuary Practices in Greece (2021), pp. 26-44 

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Interconnectivity and Local Responses: A View from the eastern Adriatic island of Brač

Wednesday, January 24th at 7:15pm
Eaton Humanities & Zoom ()
Free and open to the public

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Environmental Change in Ancient Anatolia

Professor John M. Marston

Wednesday, November 8th at 7:00pm
Eaton Humanities & Zoom ()
Free and open to the public

ABSTRACT

Identifying how societies make decisions about agricultural practices is important for understanding why some agricultural systems flourish over hundreds or thousands of years while others lead to environmental degradation and societal collapse. Archaeological data offer a unique long-term perspective on the sustainability of agriculture and how societies adapt to complex, intertwined changes in environment and economy on both local and regional scales.

In this lecture, Dr. John M. Marston (Boston University) presents recent work from the ancient urban center of Gordion in central Anatolia (modern Turkey), where complex agricultural strategies were employed to adapt to coincident environmental and social change on both local and regional scales. By situating Gordion within its regional agricultural setting over time, Marston concludes that an understanding of local political economy is necessary to reconstruct agricultural decision making and helps to understand patterns of anthropogenic environmental change.

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Imagining a Greek Home for an Egyptian Goddess: Time, Landscape, and Architecture in Greek Sanctuaries to Isis 

Professor Lindsay Mazurek 

Wednesday, January 25 at 7:00pm
Hale Sciences 270 or via Zoom
Free and Open to Public

ABSTRACT

When Isis first arrived on Greek shores in the 3rd century BCE, her new followers had to build sanctuaries appropriate to an Egyptian goddess. In the process of imagining a place for their Greek Isis to dwell, devotees came up with a wide range of eclectic solutions that intertwined local needs, imperialist fantasy, and fantastical chronology. These sanctuaries do not draw from contemporaneous Egyptian art and architecture, but rather from Greek stereotypes about Egypt and the Nile River. Isis’ Greek temples, I argue, allowed Greek devotees to imagine Egypt in a way that responded to their own experiences as provincial subjects of the Roman Empire. 

I begin with a brief overview of Isis’ and Sarapis cults’ arrival in Greece in the early Hellenistic period. Then, I turn to literary evidence, in which Greco-Roman authors from Herodotus to Pliny the Younger characterize Egypt as a timeless and strange place and highlight its unique flora and fauna. I next trace the popularity of these ideas in wall paintings and mosaics, where depictions of the Nile convey ideas of otherness and imperial control. I conclude by discussing the sanctuaries of the Egyptian gods at Marathon and Gortyna. The sanctuary at Marathon combines imaginative architecture that resembles Pharaonic Egyptian temples, archaizing sculpture that evoked a timeless Greco-Egyptian past, and a riverine setting that recalled the Nile Delta. At Gortyna, the sanctuary includes both an underground water crypt that echoed the Nilometers used to measure the river’s annual flood and cattle statuettes that personified the river’s waters. Taken together, this evidence suggests that Greek devotees used sanctuary spaces to explore Greek conceptions of Egypt as an imagined, far-off, and ancient place that they could control in much the same way that Rome controlled and imagined Greece.  

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King Midas of the Golden Touch in Context: Death, Belief, Behavior, and Society in Ancient Phrygia

Professor Beth Dusinberre

Wednesday, October 12 at 7:00pm
Paleontology Hall (CU Museum of Natural History) or via Zoom
Free and Open to Public

ABSTRACT

The spectacular burial tumuli at Gordion (Turkey), the capital of ancient Phrygia and seat of the legendary (but historical) King Midas of the Golden Touch, are presented in this lecture by CU's Elspeth Dusinberre. Its focus will be on the tombs dating from ca. 850-525 BCE, beginning with Gordion’s oldest burial tumuli and then look at the largest, the so-called Midas Monument, before exploring the last century or so of tumulus construction. The later tombs display radical changes that reflect Gordion’s complex and shifting society and illuminate issues of power structures and display, gender, burial customs, afterlife beliefs in ancient Phrygia.

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