Archaeological Institute of America-Milwaukee Society
2012-2013 Lecture Series
AALL lectures except the first one on September 30, are held on Sunday afternoons at 3:00 p.m. in Sabin Hall room G90 on the UWM Campus, (3413 North Downer, corner of Newport and Downer Avenues). The Sept. 30 lecture will be held in the Golda Meir Library, 4th floor Conference Center and will be followed by a special reception in the American Geographical Society Library where the Napoleon Expedition's publication Description de l'Egypte will be on display.
All lectures are free and open to the public and followed by refreshments. They are co-sponsored by the Departments of Anthropology, Foreign Languages and Literature-Classics and Art History at UWM. Additional co-sponsors for the September 30 lecture on the Egypt include the Map Society of Wisconsin, the American Geographical Society Library, the Friends of the Library, and UWM Libraries.
Fall, 2012
Sunday, September 30, 2012, 3:00pm
Bob Brier, Long Island University
Title: Napoleon in Egypt: The Beginning of Egyptology
Saturday, October 20, 2012, 1:00-3:00pm
National Archaeology Day Celebration
See Special Events for details
Sunday, November 4, 2012, 3:00pm
Carrie Hritz, Pennsylvania State University
Title: Spying on the Past: Satellite Imagery and Archaeology in Southern Mesopotamia
Sunday, December 2, 2012, 3:00pm
Nam Kim, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Title: Legends, Kingdoms, and Archaeology: A Case from Ancient Vietnam
Spring, 2013
Sunday, February 10, 2013, 3:00pm
Jo Ellen Burkholder, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
Title: Non-residential Architecture and the Sacred Landscape of Pisanay, Peru
Friday March 1 and Saturday March 2
Fourth Annual Milwaukee Archaeology Fair
10am to 3 pm, Milwaukee Public Museum
See Special Events for more information.
Sunday, March 24, 2013, 3:00pm
Carolyn Willekes, University of Calgary
Title: Fans, Factions and Favoritism: Horses and Charioteers of the Roman Circus
Sunday, April 14, 2013, 3:00pm
Joanne Berry, Swansea University, UK
Title: The People of Pompeii: Gladiators, Prostitutes and the Common Man
Sunday, April 28, 2013, 3:00pm
Holley Moyes, University of California, Merced
Title: The Dark Side of Archaeology: Sacred Caves of Ancient Mesoamerica
Lecture Descriptions
Sunday, September 30, 2012, 3:00pm
Bob Brier, Long Island University
Title: Napoleon in Egypt: The Beginning of Egyptology
Description: When Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt in 1798, along with his army he brought 150 artists,
linguists, and scientists of all kinds to describe Egypt. Together they conducted the first ethnographic study of its kind but also laid the foundations for the beginning of modern Egyptology. Among their important finds they discovered the Rosetta stone, the key to deciphering hieroglyphs. When the savants returned to France in 1801, they published a set of illustrated tomes called the Description de L'Égypte (1809-1829). This publication was the first accurate representation of Egyptian antiquities presented to the western world. The massive work took 20 years to complete and started a wave of Egyptomania that continues today. Dr. Brier's lecture will trace Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign and show how much modern Egyptology owes to it.
Dr. Bob Brier is currently Senior Research Fellow at the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University. He has written widely on many topics related to Egyptology and has starred in several TV documentaries, including "Secrets of the Great Pyramid" for National Geographic in 2008 and the TLC program "Napoleon's Obsession: the Quest for Egypt," in 2000. Bob Brier holds the AIA's Norton Lectureship for 2012-13, AIA's oldest and most prestigious endowed lectureship.
Venue: Please note that this lecture will take place in a special location: it will be held in UWM's Golda Meir Library, 4th floor Conference Center and will be followed by a special reception in the American Geographical Society Library where the Napoleon Expedition's publication Description de l'Égypte will be on display. The library is located at 2311 East Hartford Avenue (between Downer to the east and Maryland Ave to the west) in the heart of the UWM campus.
Co-sponsors for this lecture: the American Geographical Society Library, the Map Society of Wisconsin, UWM Libraries, and the Friends of the Library as well as UWM Departments of Anthropology, Art History and FLL-Classics.
Sunday, November 4, 2012, 3:00pm
Carrie Hritz, Pennsylvania State University
Title: Spying on the Past: Satellite Imagery and Archaeology in Southern Mesopotamia
_150.jpg)
Description: After many years of turmoil, archaeological investigations are returning to southern Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq). Modern researchers in the Tigris River valley east of Baghdad are using past archaeological surveys as well as more recent technology, including satellite imagery, digital elevation models (DEMs), geographic information systems (GIS), and image analysis, to question long-held assumptions concerning the nature and relationship of settlement patterns and river channel systems in antiquity. How complete is our picture of landscape and settlement? How can gaps in settlement be interpreted? What was the course of the Tigris River throughout much of antiquity? These are just some of the questions being addressed by current research. In her lecture, Carrie Hritz proposes a methodology for unweaving and mapping preserved pieces of ancient landscapes, and addressing larger issues of human modification of the landscape.
Dr. Carrie Hritz is Assistant Professor of Archaeological Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University,and holds her degrees from the University of Chicago (Ph.D.), St. Cloud State University, and New York University. Her areas of specialization include Mesopotamia, Syria, and Anatolia, the archaeology of complex societies, and landscape archaeology. Professor Hritz is a 2012/2013 AIA Kershaw Lecturer.
Read more about Carrie Hritz at: http://www.anthro.psu.edu/faculty_staff/hritz.shtml
Sunday, December 2, 2012, 3:00pm
Nam Kim, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Title: Legends, Kingdoms, and Archaeology: A Case from Ancient Vietnam
Description: Vietnamese oral traditions and legendary narratives describe powerful 
, proto-Vietnamese kingdoms in the Red River Valley of modern-day Vietnam, purportedly in existence during the first millennium BC. By the first century AD, this area had become colonized by the Han Empire of emergent Chinese civilization. Interestingly, ancient Chinese texts generally deny the presence of local and indigenous forms of sociopolitical sophistication. Given these conflicting depictions, archaeology can serve as a means to gather and furnish important new evidence. To help us understand these issues, Dr. Nam Kim will describe his findings from recent fieldwork at the massive site of Co Loa. Believed by many to be an ancient capital of proto-Vietnamese civilization, legend and folklore suggest Co Loa was founded during the closing centuries BC by a local kingdom. Kim's recent archaeological investigations have helped to enhance our understanding of the site and of the florescence of social complexity in the region. The project findings have broad implications for early Vietnamese history, as well as theories on Southeast Asian urbanism and the formation of ancient complex polities.
Dr. Nam Kim is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UW-Madison. His current research is geographically focused on Southeast Asia and specifically Vietnam. Since 2007, he has been conducting ongoing archaeological fieldwork at the Co Loa site of Vietnam's Red River Delta. A heavily fortified, proto-urban site located near modern-day Hanoi, Co Loa is one of the largest prehistoric sites in Southeast Asia, and it may have been the seat of an early state-level society during the Iron Age. Ultimately, he plans to use the Co Loa case study as a starting point for cross-cultural research regarding warfare and social evolution both in Southeast Asia and worldwide.
To find out more about Nam Kim's work see:
http://www.anthropology.wisc.edu/people_kim.php
Sunday, February 10, 2013, 3:00pm
Jo Ellen Burkholder, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
Title: Non-residential Architecture and the Sacred Landscape of Pisanay, Peru
Description: The site of Pisanay sits on a promontory overlooking the Sihuas Valley of Southern Peru. While the food remains, grinding stones, and hearths indicate a residential purpose for the site, its most prominent features - round and semi-subterranean rooms, cist tombs, and petroglyphs - point to ceremonial activities at the site. In turn, these activities link Pisanay to a larger sacred geography extending throughout the Sihuas Valley and beyond. The concept of a sacred geography or a sacred landscape here refers to ideas about the powerful and animated spiritual qualities of snow-capped peaks, rivers, even the land itself. Based on her latest research, Dr. Burkholder will discuss how these ideas are expressed at Pisanay through the use of space at the site as well as the spatial relationship to other sites and prominent landscape features.
Dr. Jo Ellen Burkholder is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. She earned her doctorate in Anthropology at Binghamton University. Her primary research interests focus on social inequalities of gender, ethnicity and race. She is an expert on Latin America, especially Pre-Columbian cultures and cultures of the Andes mountains. Current research projects include a study of ethnic identity and material culture in Southern Peru. She is also very interested in Pre-Columbian art and iconography and has written a substantial amount on female images and the roles of women in Pre-Columbian South America. In North America her work has focused on identifying sites associated with abolitionism and the Underground Railroad, as well as the effects of the growth of transportation and communication networks on rural communities. In addition, she has experience working with issues of cultural resource management and heritage preservation.
To learn more about Jo Ellen Burkholder's work see:
http://www.uww.edu/news/archive/2010-01-jo-ellen-burkholder-andes
Sunday, March 24, 2013, 3:00 pm:
Carolyn Willekes, University of Calgary
Title: Fans, Factions and Favoritism: Horses and Charioteers of the Roman Circus
Description: Chariot racing had a long and illustrious past. The sport is first mentioned in the Iliad (XXIII.261-538) as part of the funeral games for Patroclus and was still going strong 1500 years later in the Byzantine world where two kinds of people were honored—the holy man and the triumphant charioteer. Chariot racing became part of the Olympic Games in 680 BCE and remained a staple of Greek games for hundreds of years. In the Roman world, however, chariot racing evolved into a highly organized industry. Chariot racing was popular in Greece, but in the Roman world it became an obsession.
In her lecture, Carolyn Willekes will trace the history of the Roman Circus from its Greek and Etruscan origins to the establishment of the racing teams – the Reds, Whites, Greens and Blues – that became professionally run factions during the Imperial period. She will explore the social impact of the Circus as an essential part of Roman society through the colorful partisans who raised victorious charioteers and their horses to near divine status, immortalizing their feats with monuments and inscriptions while the greatest poets of the day sung their praises. Even the Emperor was not immune to the lure of the Circus. Nero famously dyed the track of the Circus Maximus Green in support of his chosen team, while Caligula made his favorite chariot horse a Senator and built him a marble stable. Diocletian went so far as to create two new teams—the Golds and the Purples. In Byzantium the Circus and its factions became powerful enough to influence politics. In an unprecedented event the notoriously violent supporters of the Blues and Greens united to stage a mass revolt against the Emperor Justinian in the Nike riots.
Carolyn Willekes is completing her Ph.D. with the Department of Greek and Roman Studies at the University of Calgary, and holds her M.A. from there and her B.A. from the University of Guelph. Her research interests are the breeding, training and use of the horse in the ancient world, the art and history of the Near East and East-West relations, Central Asian and Near Eastern nomadic groups, and Greek history and archaeology, especially the late Classical and Hellenistic periods.
To learn more about ancient chariot racing see:
http://www.vroma.org/~bmcmanus/circus.html
http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/online_tours/rome/chariot-racing_in_ancient_rome/chariot-racing_in_ancient_rome.aspx
Sunday, April 14, 2013, 3:00 pm
Joanne Berry, Swansea University, UK
Title: The People of Pompeii: Gladiators, Prostitutes and the Common Man
Description: Because the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE preserved the town of Pompeii so well, we know a great deal about the art and architecture that was produced there. But what can be reconstructed of the lives of Pompeii's inhabitants? Joanne Berry will answer this question for us. She will start by considering a few named high status individuals from Pompeii, and the evidence that can be used to discuss their status, careers, property and families. She will then discuss the evidence for daily life more generally—what it was like to live in the town for different groups of people, such as slaves, prostitutes and gladiators.
Dr. Joanne Berry is a Roman historian and archaeologist with a particular interest in urban life and how this can shed light on wider issues of Roman society and culture. She is also interested in the intellectual history of archaeology. Much of her research to date has focused on the ancient site of Pompeii, although she is also the co-author of a forthcoming book on the Roman army (The Complete Roman Legions, with Nigel Pollard) and has co-edited (with Ray Laurence) a volume on cultural identity in the Roman world. In 2008 she founded Blogging Pompeii, a news and discussion site for Pompeii and the archaeological sites of the Bay of Naples. She is currently a Lecturer in Ancient History in the Department of History and Classics at Swansea University in the UK.
Read more about Joanne Berry and her research:
http://www.swan.ac.uk/staff/academic/artshumanities/hc/berryjoanne/
Sunday, April 28, 2013, 3:00pm
Holley Moyes,University of California, Merced
Title: The Dark Side of Archaeology: Sacred Caves of Ancient Mesoamerica
Description: Throughout the Americas caves have been used as sacred spaces for thousands of years and nowhere is this better illustrated than in Mesoamerica. Ethnography, ethnohistory, iconography, epigraphy, and archaeology all contribute to our understanding of the meanings of these spaces for Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican societies. Because caves have been utilized almost exclusively for ritual, they provide an unrivaled context for studying Pre-Columbian religion. In her lecture Holley Moyes looks at how we know what we know about Mesoamerican caves and presents archaeological examples of some of the most spectacular sites and what we have learned from them.
Dr. Holley Moyes holds her degrees from the State University of New York at Buffalo (Ph.D.) and Florida Atlantic University (M.A.). Her areas of specialization are Mesoamerica and the archaeology of religion, caves, and the dynamics of complex societies. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Belize and the Southwest.
Learn more about Holley Moyes' projects at:
http://www.oztotl.com/maya/
http://www.mesocave.org
Send your comments concerning the site to thhruby@uwm.edu
© Milwaukee Chapter - Archaeological Institute of America
Last Updated: August 14, 2012