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ABOUT ANNUAL MEETING

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2024 CALL FOR MEMBER-ORGANIZED SESSIONS

2023 CALL FOR PAPERS

2023 CALL FOR POSTERS

2024 RULES FOR PARTICIPATION

HOTEL RESERVATIONS

TRAVEL INFORMATION

2023 SCHEDULES

EXHIBITORS & SPONSORS

COVID-19 INFORMATION

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PAST & FUTURE MEETINGS

2023 LIST OF APPROVED SESSIONS AND WORKSHOPS

Chicago & Hybrid: November 15–18

ASOR’s 2023 Annual Meeting will take place November 15–18 at the Hilton Chicago. Instead of holding a separate virtual component at a different time, the meeting in November will be hybrid with both virtual and in-person participation.

All sessions (and workshops, when feasible) will be able to include both in-person presentations in Chicago and virtual presentations online via Zoom. Click here to learn more about the hybrid format.

Paper and workshop presentation proposals may be submitted per the instructions on the Call for Papers from February 15th – March 15th, 2023.
UPDATE: The deadline to submit paper abstracts and workshop presentation proposals has been extended to April 1, 2021.

ASOR Standing Sessions

Member-Organized Sessions and Workshops Approved for the 2023 Academic Program

*Sessions (and workshops, when feasible) will be offered as part of the hybrid program with virtual and in-person participation unless otherwise noted. This is subject to change as the meeting develops.

Descriptions of Sessions & Workshops

*Sessions (and workshops, when feasible) will be offered as part of the hybrid program with virtual and in-person participation unless otherwise noted. This is subject to change as the meeting develops.

ASOR-Sponsored Sessions

Ancient Inscriptions

Session Chairs: Jessie DeGrado, University of Michigan; Madadh Richey, Brandeis University

Description: This session focuses on epigraphic material from the ancient Middle East, North Africa, and eastern Mediterranean. Proposals may include new readings of previously published inscriptions or preliminary presentations of new epigraphic discoveries, as well as submissions that situate written artifacts in their social contexts and/or engage broader theoretical questions.

Approaches to Dress and the Body

Session Chairs: Neville McFerrin, University of North Texas; Josephine Verduci, University of Melbourne

Description: Traces of practices relating to dress and the body are present in many ways in the archaeological, textual, and visual records of the ancient world, from the physical remains of dressed bodies, to images depicting them, to texts describing such aspects as textile production and sumptuary customs. Previous scholarship has provided useful typological frameworks but has often viewed these objects as static trappings of status and gender. The goal of this session is to illuminate the dynamic role of dress and the body in the performance and construction of aspects of individual and social identity, and to encourage collaborative dialogue within the study of dress and the body in antiquity.

Archaeology and Biblical Studies

Session Chair: Stephen Cook, Virginia Theological Seminary

Description: This session is meant to explore the intersections between History, Archaeology, and the Judeo-Christian Bible and related texts.

Archaeology and History of Feasting and Foodways

Session Chair: Jacob Damm, University of California, Los Angeles

Description: The Archaeology and History of Feasting and Foodways session addresses the production, distribution, and consumption of food and drink. Insofar as foodways touch upon almost every aspect of the human experience—from agricultural technology, to economy and trade, to nutrition and cuisine, to the function of the household and its members, to religious acts of eating and worship—we welcome submissions from diverse perspectives and from the full spectrum of our field’s geography and chronology.

Archaeology of Anatolia

Session Chair: James Osborne, Oriental Institute, University of Chicago

Description: This session is concerned with current fieldwork in Anatolia, as well as the issue of connectivity in Anatolia. What, for example, were the interconnections between Anatolia and surrounding regions such as Cyprus, Transcaucasia, Mesopotamia, and Europe?

Archaeology of Arabia

Session Chair: Jennifer Swerida, University of Pennsylvania

Description: This session seeks contributions covering a wide spatio-temporal swath from the Paleolithic to the present centered on the Arabian Peninsula but including neighboring areas such as the Horn of Africa, East Africa, and South Asia. Contributions might be tied to the region thematically (e.g. pastoral nomadism, domesticates, or agricultural strategies), methodologically (e.g. Landscape archaeology, or satellite imagery technologies) or through ancient contacts such as trade along the Red Sea, Persian/Arabian Gulf or Indian Ocean.

Archaeology of the Black Sea and the Caucasus

Session Chair: Lara Fabian, Albert-Ludwigs-Universitaet Freiburg

Description: This session is open to papers that concern the archaeology of the Black Sea and Eurasia.

Archaeology of the Byzantine Near East

Session Chair: Alexandra Ratzlaff, Brandeis University

Description: This session is open to papers that concern the Near East in the Byzantine period.

Archaeology of Cyprus

Session Chairs: Kevin Fisher, University of British Columbia; Catherine Kearns, University of Chicago

Description: This session focuses on current archaeological research in Cyprus from prehistory to the modern period. Topics may include reports on archaeological fieldwork and survey, artifactual studies, as well as more focused methodological or theoretical discussions. Papers that address current debates and issues are especially welcome.

Archaeology of Egypt

Session Chair: Julia Troche, Missouri State University

Description: This session is open to research on all areas related to the archaeology of Egypt, including current and past fieldwork, material culture, textual sources, religious or social aspects, international relations, art, and history.

Archaeology of Iran

Session Chairs: Kyle Gregory Olson, University of Pennsylvania

Description: This session explores the archaeology of Iran.

Archaeology of Islamic Society

Session Chairs: Ian W. N. Jones, University of California, San Diego; Tasha Vorderstrasse, University of Chicago

Description: This session explores the archaeology of Islamic society.

Archaeology of Israel

Session Chair: Boaz Gross, Israeli Institute of Archaeology and Tel Aviv University

Description: This session seeks submissions in all areas of the archaeology of Israel: Current fieldwork and discoveries; new insights on past excavations; history, policy and methodology of the archaeology of Israel.

Archaeology of Jordan

Session Chairs: Monique Roddy, Walla Walla University; Craig Tyson, Deyouville; and Stephanie Selover, University of Washington

Description: This session is open to any research from any period relating to the archaeology of Jordan. The session is open to papers on recent fieldwork, synthetic analyses of multiple field seasons, as well as any area of current archaeological research focused on Jordan.

The Archaeology of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

Session Chair: Jason Ur, Harvard University

Description: This session highlights research on all aspects of history and archaeology focused on the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and adjacent areas.

Archaeology of Lebanon

Session Chairs: Marta D’Andrea, Sapienza Università di Roma; May Haider, Lebanese  University;  Elie Akiki, École Pratique des Hautes Études – PSL (Paris) and Institut Francais du Proche Oriend (Beirut)

Description: This session is focused on current archaeological research in Lebanon, including the results of fieldwork and/or other research projects. Papers dealing with the archaeology of Lebanon relating to any period, or the protection and promotion of the cultural heritage of Lebanon, are welcome.

Archaeology of Mesopotamia

Session Chair: Darren Ashby, University of Pennsylvania

Description: This session seeks submissions in all areas illuminated by archaeology that relate to the material, social, and religious culture, history and international relations, and texts of ancient Mesopotamia.

Archaeology of the Near East: Bronze and Iron Ages

Session Chair: J. P. Dessel, University of Tennessee

Description: This session is open to papers that concern the Near East in the Bronze and Iron Ages.

Archaeology of the Near East: The Classical Periods

Session Chairs: Simeon Ehrlich, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Robyn Le Blanc, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Description: This session is open to papers that concern the Near East in the Classical periods.

Archaeology of the Southern Levant

Session Chair: Sarah Richardson, University of Manitoba

Description: The focus of this session is on current archaeological fieldwork in the southern Levant.

Archaeology of Syria

Session Chair:  Caroline Sauvage, Loyola Marymount University; Kathryn Grossman, North Carolina State University

Description: This session is concerned with all areas of Syria that are illuminated by archaeology.
These include a discussion of recent archaeological excavations, history, religion, society, and texts.

Art Historical Approaches to the Near East

Session Chairs: Amy Gansell, St. John’s University; S. Rebecca Martin, Boston University

Description: This session welcomes submissions that present innovative analyses of any facet of Near Eastern artistic production or visual culture.

Bioarchaeology in the Near East

Session Chairs: Megan A. Perry, East Carolina University; Sarah Schrader, Leiden University

Description: This session welcomes papers that present bioarchaeological research conducted in the Near East. Papers that pose new questions and/or explore new methods are encouraged.

Career Options for ASOR Members: The Academy and Beyond (CANCELLED)

Session Chair: Emily Miller Bonney, California State University, Fullerton

Description: Applicants for tenure-track positions at universities and colleges confront diminished demand for faculty. Increasingly, junior scholars are forced to look for adjunct or temporary appointments and face the possibility of no appointment at all. This session aims to provide insights into alternative careers for both the next generation of ASOR scholars and those interested in a career change.  Each year one or two panels of four to six scholars who developed careers outside the academy will discuss their careers, answering fundamental questions in 15- to 20-minute presentations. How did they discover the job opportunities that became a meaningful career? Did they begin in the academy and leverage that experience to gain access to a different career or were they able to move from graduate school into this work? How important, if at all, was a post-doc in the choices they had?  How long did it take to get into the position where they have spent most of their professional lives? What additional training did they need? Have they been able to continue their research and/or excavation projects: that is, what was the overall impact of the career choice on their scholarship? Sessions will include time for questions and discussion.

Cultural Heritage: Preservation, Presentation, and Management

Session Chair: Kiersten Neumann, Oriental Institute, University of Chicago

Description: This session explores theory and practice in the areas of archaeological site and collections conservation, presentation, education, and management. Discussion of community-engaged projects is especially welcome.

Digital Archaeology and History

Session Chair: Tiffany Earley-Spadoni, University of Central Florida; Matthew Howland, Tel Aviv University

Description: This session will present papers that describe significant advances in or interesting applications of the digital humanities. Topics may include public digital initiatives, 3D scanning and modelling, spatial analysis (GIS and remote sensing), social network analysis, textual analysis, textual geographies, digital storytelling, data management etc. In addition to methodological topics, the session also welcomes papers that focus on broader debates in the digital humanities.

Environmental Archaeology of the Ancient Near East

Session Chairs: Brita Lorentzen, Cornell University; Elise Laugier, Rutgers University

Description: This session accepts papers that examine past human resource (flora and fauna) uses and human/environment interactions in the ancient Near East.

Gender in the Ancient Near East

Session Chair: Stephanie Lynn Budin, Near Eastern Archaeology; Debra Foran, Wilfrid Laurier University

Description: This session pertains to on-going archaeological, art historical, and/or anthropological work and research into the construction and expression of gender in antiquity, ancient women/womanhood, masculinities (hegemonic and otherwise), Queer Theory, and the engendering of ancient objects and spaces.

History of Archaeology

Session Chair: Nassos Papalexandrou, The University of Texas at Austin, Art and Art History; Leticia R. Rodriguez, Trinity University

Description: Papers in this session examine the history of the disciplines of biblical archaeology and Near Eastern archaeology.

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Seals, Sealing Practices, and Administration

Session Chairs: Sarah Scott, Wagner College; Oya Topçuoğlu, Northwestern University

Description: This session invites submissions touching on any aspect of glyptic studies. Papers may approach seals and sealings as object, text, and/or image, and rely on multiple strands of evidence.  Applied methodologies from a variety of disciplines are encouraged. While seals and sealings form the core subject of investigation for this session, papers that rely on a wide range of comparative objects are welcome. Glyptic-related topics covering the full geographical and chronological horizon of the ancient Near East are considered

Isotopic Investigations in the Ancient Near East and Caucasus

Session Chairs: G. Bike Yazıcıoğlu-Santamaria, University of Chicago; Benjamin Irvine, Koç University

Description: Biogeochemical research on the human condition in the ancient past is a rapidly growing field. Isotopic investigations targeting questions about climate change, human mobility, animal trade, herding strategies, crop management, diet and subsistence, and infant-feeding practices in the broader ancient Near East have increased in number over the past decade. However, biogeochemical techniques and understandings continue to develop and be re-evaluated, necessitating venues for scholarly exchange, comparison, and discussion. The objective of this session is to encourage a dialogue among researchers conducting and using biogeochemical techniques in the region, integrating analytical methods with social and historical questions. In consecutive years the session will incorporate the results of most recent and ongoing research in the region with methodological advances in techniques and approaches, in tandem with the developing agenda of the “Archaeological Isotopes Working Group” Business Meetings.

Landscapes of Settlement in the Ancient Near East (CANCELLED)

Session Chair: George Pierce, Brigham Young University

Description: This session brings together scholars investigating regional-scale problems of settlement history and archaeological landscapes across the ancient Near East. Research presented in the session is linked methodologically through the use of regional survey, remote sensing, and environmental studies to document ancient settlements, communication routes, field systems and other evidence of human activity that is inscribed in the landscape. Session participants are especially encouraged to offer analyses of these regional archaeological data that explore political, economic, and cultural aspects of ancient settlement systems as well as their dynamic interaction with the natural environment.

Maritime Archaeology

Session Chair: Tzveta Manolova, Université Libre de Bruxelles; Traci Andrews, Texas A&M

Description: This session welcomes papers that concern marine archaeology in terms of methods, practices, and case studies in areas throughout the Near East.

Prehistoric Archaeology 

Session Chairs: Austin “Chad” Hill, University of Pennsylvania; Blair Heidkamp, University of Texas, Austin

Description: This session is open to papers that concern the prehistoric Near East, particularly in the Paleolithic, Neolithic, and Chalcolithic.

Reports on Current Excavations—ASOR Affiliated & Non-ASOR Affiliated

Session Chair: Daniel Schindler, Bowling Green State University

Description: This session is for excavation reports from projects with or without ASOR/CAP affiliation.

Recent Work in the Archaeological Sciences

Session Chair: Zachary Dunseth, Brown University

Description: This session welcomes papers that apply one or more archaeological sciences, broadly defined, to investigate aspects of the ancient world.

Theoretical and Anthropological Approaches to the Near East

Session Chair: Darrell J. Rohl, Calvin University; Matthew Winter, University of Arizona

Description: This session welcomes papers that deal explicitly with theoretical and anthropological approaches to ancient Near Eastern and eastern Mediterranean art and archaeology.

Member-Organized Sessions and Workshops approved for the 2023 Academic Program

*Sessions (and workshops, when feasible) will be offered as part of the hybrid program with virtual and in-person participation unless otherwise noted. This is subject to change as the meeting develops.

The Aims of Scribal Education in the Ancient Middle East

Session Chairs: Susanne Paulus, Oriental Institute, University of Chicago; Jana Matuszak, Oriental Institute, University of Chicago

Description: This section is proposed in conjunction with the exhibition “Back to School in Babylonia,” opening in fall 2023 at the Oriental Institute Chicago. It presents for the first time a comprehensive overview of the textual and archaeological finds from House F, a scribal ‘school’ in Old Babylonian Nippur. The visitor can follow a scribal student through the different stages of education but also explore the central question about the aims of (Babylonian) scribal education.

Scholars have studied various aspects of scribal education but mainly focused on reconstructing the curriculum, pedagogy and learning methods, as well as understanding the different textual genres used in the training of scribes. Nevertheless, many questions remain. Recent studies on literacy, for instance, invite new points of departure for critical inquiry, as they show that literacy could be achieved without following the traditional curriculum. Moreover, a discrepancy between the knowledge and skills gained by standard scribal education and their practical application after ‘graduation’ has been noted, raising new questions: What was the purpose of the advanced stages of scribal education? Who was engaged in the selection, composition, and distribution of educational materials? Which texts were selected, and which were omitted? Are there regional and/or diachronic preferences? What kinds of knowledge, skills, and values were deemed essential for the formation of scribes, and how did scribes gain other professional skills apparently missing from the curriculum? Beyond those ideas, we welcome papers covering other aspects of scribal training.

Archaeology of Connectivity

Session Chair: Laura Pisanu, University of Melbourne

Description: Current societies are involved in mutual and continuous exchanges of resources, technologies, workforce, and ideas as a result of alliances between or immigrations from different countries. Similar networks and events happened during previous millennia too, and these ancient connections can be traced through the analysis of archaeological remains, such as those found at Bronze and Early Iron Age sites across the Mediterranean shores. During this time, the Mediterranean Sea acted as a bridge rather than a barrier that linked ancient societies leading to the spread of ideas, technological innovations, and materials. This session aims at discussing connectivity between eastern and the western Mediterranean societies that resulted in the archaeological evidence found in Crete, Israel, Cyprus, south Italy, and Sardinia showing they were tied nodes of long-lasting and complex networks. Presentations may focus on issues concerning human mobility, agents involved, cultural and technological impacts on societies, and a wide range of topics may be considered in these parameters including excavation records illustrating data from Bronze and Iron Age contexts. Due to the wide chronological and geographical extent involved, the first year (2023) will be focused on interaction networks and dynamics over the Bronze Age, while the second year (2024) will be focused on the Iron Age.

Archaeology of Deserts: Theoretical and Methodological Approaches

Session Chair: Laurel Darcy Hackley, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Description: A considerable part of the Mediterranean and Ancient Near East is partly or entirely arid. Aridity affects how people conceptualize landscapes, ecologies, and cultures in desert zones. Frequently, this has led to assumptions about emptiness and cultural sterility. As survey and excavation projects increasingly cover desert landscapes, however, scholars working in many different regions are calling for a reassessment of the cultural significance and impactful histories of arid places. Despite this, the specific theoretical and practical aspects of conducting archaeological research in deserts are seldom explicitly discussed, especially across regional boundaries. This three-year session creates a forum for this discussion.

Year 1 (2023) will focus on theoretical approaches to the desert: how are arid landscapes conceptualized? How are they unique? What theoretical frameworks should be applied to best understand how deserts operate culturally, and how does this differ from landscape archaeology more broadly? How might this vary between regions and periods?
Year 2 (2024) will turn to practical aspects of conducting research in desert landscapes. Papers will consider the differing practical challenges of excavation and survey, and the strategies, including remote sensing, that are being used to tailor and optimize field methods to desert environments.
In Year 3 (2025), papers will focus on the analysis of archaeological data and primary sources from or relating to desert contexts, including texts and material and visual culture. What do these sources tell us about conceptions of desert landscapes and the reality of inhabiting them in the past?

Archaeologies of Memory

Session Chairs: Janling Fu, Harvard University; Tate Paulette, North Carolina State

Description: The concept of memory has come to play an increasingly prominent role in a diverse collection of theoretical conversations that crosscut the discipline of archaeology. From the study of mortuary remains, landscapes, and object biographies to identity, heritage, and community-based archaeology, a series of subdisciplines have built up their own discourses surrounding memory, sometimes along parallel theoretical trajectories. This three-year session seeks to bring these discussions together and establish some common ground in the study of memory in the ancient Near East. The session will explore three overlapping themes, each designed to be accessible to those working with archaeological, art historical, and/or written evidence. In the first year (2022), we will think through space, place, and the built environment. In the second year (2023), we focus on things, bodies, and assemblages. In the third year (2024), we consider events, rituals, and routines. This lengthy engagement with memory should offer ample space for exploring the complex intermingling of past and present and the many modes of remembering and forgetting. Following the sessions, a substantive volume of proceedings is projected.

Archaeology of the Near East and Video Games

Session Chair: Tine Rassalle, Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience

Description: For centuries, the written word was the preferred medium for transferring archaeological academic knowledge to the broader public. With the advent of modern communication technology like radio, TV, and the internet the possibilities to interact with the audience were broadened. Video-games have since the 1980’s been a part of this new wave of telecommunication, but they remain underrepresented as a field of study in academic scholarship. In this session, we aim to correct this by offering a multidisciplinary discussion of theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of archaeology and video gaming. Archaeogaming, as it is often called, is a systematizing framework that includes the use of archaeological methods within game worlds, the creation of video-games for, or about, archaeological practices, or the critical study of how archaeology is represented in video-games. Themes can include using archaeological tools and methods to conduct archaeological investigations into synthetic worlds, exploring heritage through play, and the use and ethics of virtual reality in digital spaces. In this session, we aim to present a diverse array of topics that sit on the intersection of the archaeology of the Near East and video games, opening up debate on the multifunctionality of this medium for research, education and heritage management.

Archaeology of Petra and Nabataea

Session Chairs: Cynthia Finlayson, Brigham Young University; David F. Graf, Emeritus, Department of Religious Studies, University of Miami (Florida)

Description: The purpose of this session is to include projects not only at Petra, but also from throughout the vast Nabataean kingdom and beyond where ever Nabataeans were active (the Mediterranean, Yemen, and Mesopotamia). The capital city of the Nabataeans has been the focus of numerous recent international archaeological projects, including many ASOR projects: the Great Temple, the Temple of the Winged Lions, and the Byzantine Church in the past, and currently the North Ridge, the Hellenistic Petra Project, the Garden Pool and Terrace, and the Ad-Deir Plateau complex. The art and architecture of Petra continues to be the subject for art historians. The immediate environs of Petra (Wadi Musa, Baydh, Ba’aja, and Humayma) have also seen renewed interest. In addition, there are recent projects in the Nabataean regions of Saudi Arabia (French, Italian, Polish), Syria (French), the Negev (Israeli), and the Sinai and Egypt (French, American). New Nabataean inscriptions also continue to emerge that illuminate Nabataean culture. We believe the session(s) will attract a host of scholars within ASOR and beyond. Additionally, by separating an independent session on the Nabataeans away from the already existing Jordan Sessions, more scholars will be able to present in all venues.

Archaeology of Religion in the Levant during the Second and First Millennia BCE

Session Chairs: Lidar Sapir-Hen, Tel Aviv University; Ido Koch, Tel Aviv University

Description: The Archaeology of Religion in the Levant during the Second and First millennia BCE is a three-year session aiming at fostering a scholarly stage for an interdisciplinary discussion on a wide range of approaches, perspectives, and interpretative frameworks of religion and its materiality. We encourage papers covering aspects of religion, such as belief, ritual, cosmology, and ontology, based on studies of material remains as well as their reflection in textual and pictorial sources.

The first year is dedicated to introductory papers on methodological and material aspects of the study of religion. Papers will deal with the developments in the study of religion and their impact on the archaeological discourse, the extrapolation of religious texts in the understanding of material remains, current approaches in the study of statuary and figurines, and domestic cult.
The second and third years will be thematic-based sessions: the second dedicated to human–animal relations, and the third to sacred spaces.

The Archaeology of the Roman Army and the Occupation of the East

Session Chairs: Matthew J. Adams, The Center for the Mediterranean World; Avner Ecker, Bar-Ilan University; Yotam Tepper, Israel Antiquities Authority and The University of Haifa

Description: From the time of the Battle of Actium to the establishment of new Rome in Constantinople, the Roman army of the Principate maintained its control over the eastern provinces through direct military occupation. As a force of occupation, the army’s role was not just to ensure Imperial control, but also to maintain the peace, support the development of infrastructure, and facilitate the spread of imperial ideology in the provinces. Following in the footsteps of Benjamin Isaac’s classic The Limits of Empire, this session seeks to explore the various ways in which the many elements of the Roman Army in the East engaged the occupied population, from units garrisoned in cities to full scale Legions ensconced in their bases. To be sure, there is room for the usual studies of legionary deployments, legionary studies, the wars with Parthia, and so on. However, this session specifically emphasizes the interaction between soldiers and civilians. Over the course of two years, this session will explore these ideas. In the first year, we solicit papers presenting new data of military occupation in the East, both archaeological and historical. In the second year, we seek out papers that collaborate interdisciplinarily between archaeological work at Roman military sites and nearby civilian settlements. The goal of the session is to encourage and facilitate dialogue between archaeologists of the Roman army and archaeologists of the occupied populations.

The Archaeology of Rural Communities

Session Chair: Helena Roth, Tel Aviv University

Description: This session aims at placing rural communities in the center of discourse. The term “rural” is commonly used to describe the opposite of “urban” or as background to a discussion revolving around urban societies. However, and with the understanding that most of the population in antiquity was residing in rural sites, a direct and thorough investigation of these communities is overdue.

This session aims at creating a diversified discussion, unbound by geographic or temporal boundaries, to share methodologies and research approaches, and, most importantly, to outline the research potential of investigating the rural sphere. The session during the first year out of the planed three will focus on subsistence strategies and how they shape the rural communities. The second years will devote the discussion to the topic of social and spiritual rites in rural communities. The Third and final year will revolve around the social structure and complexity of rural communities, a topic which embodies, amongst others, the subjects dealt with in the first two years. This tripartite plan is this founded on firm archaeological analyses, elaborated via anthropological, textual and psychological investigations, and concluded with a synthesis of the various approaches with social studies.

Archaeology of Yemen (CANCELLED)

Session Chairs: Zaydoon Zaid, American Foundation for Cultural Research; Will Raynolds, Heritage Conservation Program Director -The J.M. Kaplan Fund

Description: This session provides Yemini colleagues from the Yemen Department of Antiquities (GOAM), local universities, law enforcement, civil society organizations and international scholars to present the latest results of archaeological work in Yemen.
This session will also provide opportunities to present and discuss the disturbing effects of the ongoing conflict on Yemen’s rich and vibrant cultural heritage and traditions.

The session will introduce the extraordinariness of Yemen’s past and highlight specific heritage sites and/or cultural traditions that have been destroyed, damaged, or threatened due to the country’s extended conflict.In addition, this session will highlight the problems surrounding cultural heritage preservation or sites in divided Yemen. It will show the need to ensure that Yemen’s cultural heritage is protected from additional destruction through both direct supports aimed at emergency preservation and longer-term programming that will help rebuild the capacities of the local Yemeni authorities responsible for sustained preservation and management.

ASOR and the Archaeological Field School: Are We Doing Enough? (Workshop)

Session Chair: Ian Cipin, University of Haifa

Description: Archaeological field schools have been an integral part of excavation projects in the Southern Levant for many years now, having evolved and developed since William Dever invited students to earn credit for taking part in archaeological fieldwork at Gezer in 1966. Archaeology has changed tremendously since then, as has the place and role of the field school. Since 2007, ASOR has awarded over $1 million to more than 900 researchers and students through excavation grants, dig and survey scholarships and other research fellowships. Yet there is no mechanism in place to ensure that this money is being well spent. An essential source of funding for many excavations, archaeological field schools in the region attract hundreds of students each year who are eager to earn credits while also gaining valuable fieldwork experience. This will often be funded through their own resources, sometimes with the additional benefit of an award such as ASOR’s Scholarship for Fieldwork Participation. What do these students know about what to expect? What do we, those responsible for the delivery of the field school, believe are such appropriate expectations and what are our responsibilities and obligations towards them? Research has shown that students are having varying experiences. It is intended that this workshop will begin a dialogue among ASOR members on the roles and responsibilities we have toward this essential educational rite of passage for students.

Biblical Texts in Cultural Context

Session Chair: Christine Palmer, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary; Kristine Garroway, Hebrew Union College

Description: This session explores the biblical text within its ancient Near Eastern cultural and intellectual environment. Our aim is to provide a forum for collaboration and scholarship across disciplines that contextualizes the Bible in the broader world of the ancient Near East through the three overarching themes of memory construction, ethnicity and identity formation, and biblical ritual. We invite contributions that utilize a variety of approaches — archaeological (material culture), philological (comparative literature), and iconographic (visual exegesis) — to explore biblical texts as cultural products and ‘textual artifacts’ of ancient Israel. A secondary aim is to pursue publication of the themed papers presented in the three-year session.

The first year (2023) of this multi-year session will focus on memory construction. We welcome papers that consider social memory through texts and inscriptions, monumentality, and embodied practices. The topic for year two (2024) will be ethnicity and identity formation, inviting scholarship on conceptualizations of self and the other that intersect with the biblical text. The final year (2025) will be dedicated to biblical ritual in light of ritual spaces, personnel, and practices of the ancient Near East.

Celebrating Thomas E. Levy’s Career: Archaeology in the Eastern Mediterranean and Beyond

Session Chair: Erez Ben-Yosef, Tel Aviv University; Ian W.N. Jones, University of California, San Diego

Description: This session celebrates the academic career of Thomas E. Levy, a prominent scholar in Levantine and Eastern Mediterranean archaeology and a long-time active member of the ASOR community. On the occasion of his 70th birthday and recent retirement from the University of California, San Diego, several of his former students will present recent achievements in research, with topics that allow a glance into Tom’s varied academic interests, from the archaeology of protohistoric periods to biblical archaeology and from archaeological science to cyber archaeology. In this session we will also present Tom with a Festschrift in his honor, which contains contributions by more than 140 scholars – Tom’s students, post-doctoral fellows, and many colleagues. The two-volume book, co-edited by the session’s chairs and entitled “And in Length of Days Understanding” (Job 12:12): Essays on Archaeology in the Eastern Mediterranean and Beyond in Honor of Thomas E. Levy,” is published by Springer as part of their series “Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology.” The session will be followed by a reception.

Ceramic Building Materials in the Roman and Late Antique Near East (Workshop)

Session Chair: Craig A. Harvey, University of Western Ontario

Description: In recent years, scholars working in the Near East have increasing recognized the potential of ceramic building materials (or CBM) for the study of industry, trade, building practices, and cultural contact and change. Although commonly used as a standard building material in other parts of the ancient Mediterranean world, the use of CBM (such as bricks, rooftiles, and pipes) in much of the Near East was largely limited to imported building elements such as terracotta roofs and hypocaust systems. As such, the examination of this material can shed light on the transfer of technology and changing cultural practices. The resource intensity of CBM production and its bulky weight also presents a useful avenue for the study of issues concerning the exploitation of resources, the organization of industry, local economic networks, as well as recycling and reuse.

This workshop will, for the first time, bring together international scholars working on CBM in the Near East to share ideas and advance the study of this material. With the intent of maximizing discussion among participants and audience members, it will be organized around brief presentations on current research projects, which may include those on the development of local and regional typologies, the production and distribution of this material, and methodologies for its study, among others. By bringing scholars into closer dialogue with each other on this topic, this workshop will facilitate discussion on current issues and future directions of the study of CBM in the wider region.

Cultural Heritage in Crisis: People Oriented (Workshop)

Session Chairs: Tashia Dare, Independent Scholar; Jenna de Vries Morton, Umm al-Jimal Archaeological Project

Description: This multi-year workshop centers on the people behind cultural heritage before, during, and after conflict: heritage professionals and local communities. The workshop is concerned with mitigating risk, building resiliency, and forging and maintaining healthy and meaningful relationships.
The first year’s theme (2023) explores the needs of cultural heritage professionals. Questions to consider include: How do we mitigate the risks heritage professionals face? What resources are needed to protect heritage professionals? How do we prepare local heritage professionals before conflict happens? How do we build resiliency and assist heritage professionals as they move forward post-conflict?

The second year (2024) focuses on the local community. When everyday survival and livelihoods may be at risk due to conflict how do we meet the needs of local communities and the preservation of cultural heritage? What impacts does conflict have on local communities being able to access, participate, and contribute to their cultural heritage (including archaeological sites and museums)? What role do archaeologists and other related professionals have in addressing these issues and other similar concerns? How do we build resilient communities?

The third year (2025) is dedicated to cultural heritage and peacebuilding. What does cultural heritage as a peacebuilding tool look like on the ground? What issues might there be to this? What are the benefits? What can we learn from successes and failures of efforts already taken in this area? Can cultural heritage be a proactive tool to preventing conflict? If so, what does this entail?

Cultures of Mobility and Borders in the Ancient Near East

Session Chairs: Eric Trinka, James Madison University; Shane M. Thompson, North Carolina Wesleyan College

Description: Studies of movement, mobility, and migration in the ancient world are becoming more numerous. Despite recent growth in some important research areas, a key methodological component remains absent from archaeological and textual studies: Few, if any, present works on mobility or movement in the ancient world integrate findings from modern mobility studies. Failure to do so has left noteworthy lacunae in researchers’ epistemologies of movement and place that require redress. The key contribution of this new session is to provide a more solid theoretical grounding for discussing the processes of human movement and contact. We assert that mobility is to movement as place is to location; social construction lies at the core of their distinction from, and relationship to, one another. Mobility does not simply occur in space. It is a constituent element of spatial production. To this end, we seek scholarly contributions that enable us to better understand ancient perceptions of emplaced-ness, movement, and general cultures of mobility in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age Near East. We propose that the first three-year series will center the topics borders, bodies and cultures of mobility.

Yearly Themes
2021: Bringing Mobilities Studies to Bear in the ANE – Theoretical basis
2022: Defining and Controlling Mobile Bodies
2023: Drawing Boundaries / Disrupting Borders

Defending the Past in the Present: Making the Case for the Study of the Ancient World (Workshop)

Session Chairs: Emily Miller Bonney, California State University, Fullerton; Leann Pace, Wake Forest

Description: ASOR members may feel forced to defend the study of the ancient past to students, donors, university administrators, elected officials, board members, and the general public. Why spend time and money on ancient people when we face very real problems in the present? The apparent exoticism of early kingdoms can make it easier to overlook the current populations or to see local communities as stand-ins for the past. This session offers members a chance to hone their skills at answering these very real questions. Participants will use a single object to make an argument for how we can deal with past and present so that the shared humanity of both is connected while preserving our awareness of the cultural distinctness of each. How, in our teaching or in our advocacy, can we bring the past into the present and not engage in presentism, that is, expecting people in the ancient world to think the way we do yet makes clear how knowledge of that past enriches and expands our understanding of the present?

Presentations should conform to the 6-slides/6 minute format. The format itself should suggest that no participant is expected to “solve” this quandary of defending the study of ancient people, places, and things but is an opportunity to get some fresh takes on disciplinary elevator speeches and maybe have some fun. All presentations will take place back-to-back in the beginning of the session and the remainder of the session will be spent in conversation.

Dialogues Across Landscapes: New Challenges to Practicing Landscape Archaeology in Western Asia

Session Chairs: Dan Lawrence, Durham University; Omur Harmansah, University of Illinois Chicago; Claudia Glatz, Glasgow University; Jennie Bradbury, Bryn Mawr College

Description: Landscape archaeology represents a rich assemblage of field practices that document and analyze traces of the past, and reconstruct human-environment relationships in diachronic perspective. From pedestrian surveys to remote sensing, geomorphology to climate and vegetation change, landscape archaeologists address research questions on a regional scale with a fine grained understanding of deep time and deep history. This richness of tools and perspectives allowed archaeologists to forge unique collaborations with other disciplinary fields such as the environmental sciences and anthropology. Decolonial shifts in the discipline bring to focus the incorporation of public and collaborative archaeologies and engaged/activist scholarship. What is the current state of landscape archaeology in the contemporary world of climate change, ecological challenges, the pandemic, immigration and displacement of communities and endangered cultural heritage? We invite landscape archaeologists of Western Asia to discuss the state of the discipline, and to reflect on what makes Western Asian landscape archaeology unique in the broader field of landscape research. What are the specific challenges landscape archaeologists face in carrying out their research in the field? Our goal is to give voice to some of the creative and resilient research carried out by landscape archaeologists in contemporary Western Asia. In 2023, we focus on imperial, colonial, resistant, and decolonial landscapes, linking colonial and imperial histories of landscape archaeology to contemporary attempts to decolonize the discipline, and on landscape histories from non-state and non-imperial perspectives. We also welcome contributions addressing infrastructure, whether as organizational networks, material flows or contested sites of ecological politics.

Digging Up Data: A Showcase of Ongoing Digital Scholarship Projects (Workshop)

Session Chairs: Melissa Cradic, The Alexandria Archive Institute/Open Context; Tiffany Earley-Spadoni, University of Central Florida; Leigh Anne Lieberman, Princeton University

Description: Building on the successes of both the “Best Practices for Digital Scholarship” workshops, led by Sarah W. Kansa and Charles E. Jones at ASOR from 2019-2021, and “Digging Up Data: A Showcase of Ongoing Digital Scholarship Projects,” led by Tiffany Earley-Spadoni and Leigh Anne Lieberman in 2022, this workshop will highlight the individual journeys of scholars who have spent the previous year developing digital, data-driven, public-facing projects as a part of Digging Up Data: Turning an Idea into Digital Scholarship, an experimental professional development program developed and sponsored by ASOR’s Early Career Scholars Committee and The Alexandria Archive Institute/Open Context. Their projects represent a range of methodologies and approaches that have allowed them to develop skills and practices around data literacy and digital storytelling. The workshop will focus on the process of building, storytelling for and in collaboration with multiple publics, and the practical steps needed to realize an idea in an engaging and feasible way. Participants in this workshop will benefit from the panelists’ successes and failures, have an opportunity to interrogate digital tools and methods, and be encouraged to network with other early career scholars interested in digital scholarship.

Digital Ethics in Ancient Near Eastern Research (Workshop)

Session Chairs: Ellie Bennett, University of Helsinki; Sara Mohr, Hamilton College

Description: 3D models, networks, databases, and computational linguistics have all seen rapid development in Near Eastern studies. Such a rapid pace risks researchers neglecting to pause and reflect upon the ethics involved in these methods. In this workshop series, we will develop a ‘Best Practices’ resource for Ancient Near Eastern digital projects. A workshop on the ethics of digital humanities projects will complement existing digital research sessions (such as ‘Digital Archaeology and History’), which have hosted presentations exploring the finer points of digital humanities work, such as data sharing and preservation. The workshop will also engage ASOR members looking to make the leap into digital research.

We will start a community-led document to understand the issues, concerns, and guidelines already used. Speakers will introduce and raise ethical issues they have come across during their own research, serving as inspiration for the attendees, who will build upon an online collaborative document shared during the discussion. The chairs will use the document as the basis of the ‘Best Practices’ guidelines, which will be hosted on a stable platform for members of the community to use and refer to.

The Early Iron Age in Canaan, Israel, Judah, and Philistia

Session Chairs: Jeffrey R. Chadwick, Brigham Young University; Aren M. Maeir, Bar-Ilan University

Description: The aim of this session will be to provide a forum for presentations targeted to the specific periods encompassed by the phrase “Early Iron Age” – the span between the end of LB II and the beginning of Iron Age II, including Iron IIA – in the areas of the southern Levant which are specifically identified as Israel, Judah, and Philistia. Presentations may focus on issues of archaeological research and historical geography, and a wide-ranging variety of topics may be considered within these parameters, including excavation reports with a primary focus in the Early Iron Age.

Empires of the Broader Ancient Near Eastern World: Subsistence and Distribution

Session Chairs: Petra M. Creamer, Emory University; Rocco Palermo, University of Pisa

Description: Studies devoted to empires and imperialism in the ancient world have long contributed to modern scholarship regarding political, economic, and cultural organization. This session serves as a space to present research on the empires of the ancient Near East, with a focus on cross-imperial comparison and perspectives. Scholars may approach the topic from a variety of methodological and theoretical standpoints. A wide geographical and chronological extent is included in this session with the aim of facilitating a larger discussion among participants on themes of imperial landscape construction and administration, subsistence strategies, and networks of power. We invite presenters to especially consider spatio-temporal trends within their subjects, in the interest of discussing similar trajectories in imperial development.

The first year (2022) will introduce conversations on settlement strategies and infrastructure within imperial spaces, particularly looking at dynamics of landscape and population. The second year (2023) narrows this conversation into methods of subsistence and its distribution employed by the empires of the ancient Near East – including both agricultural and pastoral components. Finally, the third year (2024) will center ideas of power and control, looking at imperial mechanisms via both top-down and bottom-up approaches to understand both the immediate and lasting effects of imperial hegemony.

Figuring Violence: Images of Terror and Terror of Images

Session Chair: Laura Battini, CNRS-PSL, Paris

Description: Violence as a destructive impulse that turns outside itself characterizes human societies today as well as in the past. Whether it is innate or socialized, it is a constant component of history. It is concretized in various forms that this workshop attempts to clarify for the Ancient Near East. After a first session devoted to violence in the 3rd mill. BCE (2022), the next session will be more thematic: the human violence expressed in texts through imaged metaphors and in iconographic representations is a justified and accepted violence: it is directed against a real or imagined enemy. The 2023 session targets this type of violence and its justifications. It can take different forms: to be expressed by the images and the official texts, by the destructions of biological bodies, to be preserved in the archaeological remains (osteological, bullets, destruction of city walls, fights). It can also be used against the gods and the dead, in both cases especially those of the enemies.

Gardens of the Mediterranean and the Ancient Near East – A New Perspective

Session Chairs: Rona Shani Evyasaf, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

Description: Gardens have been part of the human habitat from the dawn of civilization, linked to gods, stories of creation, myths, kings, and laypeople.
They were connected to domestic architecture as utility or pleasure gardens but also to death and burial.
In many ancient Mediterranean and Near East cultures, gardens were part of the public sphere: in temples within and outside the city walls, in the Agora and the Forum, and next to, or inside, entertainment buildings, among others.

While gardens played a part in the house’s economy, supplying necessary food for house its residents, they were also a place for entertainment and recreation, a place to grow expensive exotic imported plants.Gardens evolved into symbols of power and success of the ancient kings, rulers and upper-class nobles, thus becoming an integral part of the royal palaces and elite Villas and being used as a governing tool. Royal gardens were the main topic of last year’s session, which also focused on raising awareness of the importance of gardens and introducing new methods for garden archaeology and research. This year we would like to extend the scope of the discussion to include domestic and public-space gardens, the use and symbolism of unique elements and plants, and the evidence of cultural influences in the gardens.
+C22

Giving it Back: Repatriation and the Ownership of Antiquity (Workshop)

Session Chairs: Frederick Winter, DC-AIA; Jane DeRose Evans, Temple University

Description: The session is sponsored by ASOR’s Cultural Heritage Committee.
Headlines are highlighting recent examples of repatriation—the return of cultural properties, predominantly from the West, to the countries where they were found and frequently produced. The session will examine this trend from various perspectives, reviewing current examples, with a view toward establishing formal policies that could be adopted by ASOR. In addition to examining specific examples, the workshop will focus on differing models justifying repatriation (the restoration of objects seized through past military operations; of objects looted through unauthorized excavations or removals; of materials exported with permission of colonial administrations, the authority of which are no longer recognized by current national entities) and the current legal frameworks for repatriation.

Glyptic Databases: Collaboration and Integration in the Digital Humanities Transition (Workshop)

Session Chairs: Ben Greet, The University of Zurich; Nadia Ben-Marzouk, The University of Zurich

Description: As we move through the digital humanities transition, the study of glyptics in Southwest Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean is entering a new phase focused on establishing databases that foster collaborative, integrated, and standardized data to facilitate assessing broader questions of production, distribution, and other historical trends. As such, several projects have established outward-facing glyptic databases across various institutions in the Americas, Europe, and Southwest Asia, yet these projects often operate in silos, pursuing similar goals and facing the same challenges. This workshop aims to bring together both researchers involved in these projects and those working in independent databases within the broader discipline with several aims: (1) To discuss, collaborate, and troubleshoot existing databases in order to work toward establishing a shared methodology; (2) To move towards a standardized and shared descriptive glyptic typology and iconographic taxonomy that fosters robust and integrated data across platforms; (3) To broaden the potential research questions on glyptics by using these databases as new analytical tools. This workshop will be held over the course of three years, with each year focusing on a new topic as follows:

Year 1 (2023): Assessing the needs, challenges, and best practices of glyptic databases

Year 2: Toward establishing a shared and standardized taxonomic language

Year 3: Asking new questions with digital technologies: Moving towards broad glyptic studies

Islamic Seas and Shores: Connecting the Medieval Maritime World

Session Chairs: Veronica Morriss, University of Chicago; Asa Eger, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Description: While the importance of Islamic seafaring has been historically overlooked, a new wave of research is revealing the many ways that the Islamic world was shaped by water. Outdated paradigms, such as the decline of maritime commerce following the conquest, and old tropes such as the “Arab fear of the sea” are being overturned by studies focusing on how the Mediterranean, Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Indian Ocean connected far-flung cultures, communities, and economies. This multi-year session will explore these connections region-by-region, to create a broader understanding of the development, expansion, and impact of Islamic maritime networks. This session aims to create a comprehensive view of the Islamic maritime world through archaeological and historical studies on seaborne trade and travel, mercantile networks, commodity production and maritime industry, as well as ports, coastal communities, and their associated hinterlands.

This session will be organized around the following the regions:
2021: The Red Sea and Western Indian Ocean
2022: The Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean
2023: The Mediterranean

Islamic Society in the Western Mediterranean and Atlantic Coast

Session Chairs: Kathleen M. Forste, Boston University; Alexander J. Smith, SUNY Brockport

Description: This session focuses on research on Islamic societies in the Western Mediterranean and Atlantic coast, including Spain, Portugal, Italy, Malta, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. While the investigation of these regions is often conducted through the lenses of European or African history and architecture, recent years have seen a development of Islamic archaeology in its own right, and the application of anthropological questions and scientific methods to investigate these medieval societies. We propose this session be held for two years. For year one, we welcome papers on topics and themes including but not limited to agriculture, settlement patterns, land-use, foodways, craft/artisan economy, trade, religion, memory, empire, movement of peoples or ideas or technology, and other aspects of society, as well as methodological foci including field reports from active excavations, and papers focused on current debates or issues related to studying western Islamic societies. For year two, we welcome papers comparing medieval Islamic societies, especially those in the western Mediterranean with those in the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, those in Iberia with those in North Africa, or issues and debates in making such comparisons. We welcome papers from both young and established scholars. This session would be a complement to the standing session “Archaeology of Islamic Society”, which often focuses on Levant and Middle East, and to the 3 year session “Islamic Seas and Shores: Connecting the Medieval Maritime World”.

Jerusalem and the Archaeology of a Sacred City

Session Chairs: Prof. Yuval Gadot, Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures, Tel-Aviv University; Dr. Yiftah Shalev, Israel Antiquities Authority

Description: This session wishes to explore the sacred past and present of Jerusalem as it revealed and manifested through the archaeology of the city and its surrounding. Jerusalem, a city that is sacred for all three major monotheistic religions, is a place were the past is ever present in the current sanctified landscape. From its inception and until nowadays Jerusalem’s natural and urban landscapes were dotted with landmarks, buildings and burial places, each of them commemorating an event or a figure and serving for ritualistic needs. As such these places were webbed within a wider narrative regarding the city’s place and within different nation’s past. Furthermore, the sacred has always been intertwined with the economy, politics and social realia, thus shaping and being shaped by all those aspects.

Aspects of architecture, landscape archaeology, archaeology of the senses, pilgrimage, temple related economy, ritualistic objects and all other manifestations of the sacred within the archaeology of the city, will be presented and discussed. We also welcome presentations related to heritage management in today’s contested city: how to conduct research in a place that is actively being worshiped and visited by tourists?

The first year (2023) focuses on studies aiming at identifying the personal experience expressions of worshipers and pilgrims who visited Jerusalem’s holly places throughout the ages. During the second year (2024) we wish to explore how the city was physically, economically and symbolically shaped by sacred sites. The focus of the third year (2025) will be the interface between heritage and worship.

The Journey to Document Minorities’ Heritage in the Maghreb

Session Chair: Emna Mizouni, Carthagina

Description: In this session we will present the urge need to document the minorities heritage across the Maghreb. We will be able to go through the process from mapping to selection then to the storage and availability to the world (academia, historians, architects, individuals…). The speakers will cover the project’s process, the observations from the field work, the importance of the community to preserve that endangered heritage and of course we will cover the historic findings. Through this session the speakers, who work on this project, will be able to raise awareness about the importance of the minorities’ heritage sites and their current situation in order to influence the work of protection and preservation. Attendees will walk out of the session with a better idea about the minorities background in the Maghreb as well as the specifics of interfaith cooperation to protect religious and ethnic minorities’ heritage. In Year Two (2023) we will present the full state of ethnic and minorities’ heritage sites across the Maghreb with shedding light on the role of local communities to help finalize the work and protect some of those sites.

Museums and Social Justice

Session Chairs: Katherine Larson, Corning Museum of Glass; Caitlin Clerkin, Harvard Art Museums

Description: Public museums originated in 17th century Europe as trophies of imperialism, colonization, and proclaimed European supremacy. As such, they are monuments to white supremacist ideologies. In buttressing racist hierarchies and narratives of “Western Civilization,” museums have alienated many stakeholder communities from cultural heritage materials and from authority over the stories these materials can tell. Yet, museums retain potential as places where diverse publics can gather and access the materials of ancient cultures.

Museums have been negotiating this complex heritage for decades, but calls for museums to diversify their collections, their staff, their audiences, their stories, and their role in society are becoming louder and more frequent. The problem is clear and well defined; solutions are myriad and urgently needed. This session will explore current practices and future possibilities in museums and collections through the lens of social justice. We invite papers offering theoretical and practical perspectives on ways museums, particularly those with ancient middle eastern holdings, can reckon with their legacies to become spaces of and for equity. Potential topics could include collaboration and co-creation, accessibility, countering old and problematic narratives, integration of modern art with ancient objects, provenance, repatriation and restitution, and more.

Northwest Semitic Inscriptions, Languages, and Literatures

Session Chair: Simeon Chavel, The University of Chicago Divinity School

Description: This session comes in conjunction with the next iteration of the journal Maarav, now an ASOR journal with a new editorial board headed by a new editor, Simeon Chavel. The session aims to highlight Northwest Semitic verbal objects—inscriptions and inscribed material—as a complex site of inquiry that gives coherence to a wide range of fields and scholars. Such fields include: archaeology, materiality, performance, ritual, art and iconography, epigraphy, philology, literary theory and analysis, social and cultural history, empire, the ethics of modern procurement and analysis, and the technologies of decipherment and of presentation.

Olive Oil Production and Use in the Southern Levant in the Bronze and Iron Ages

Session Chairs: Jeffrey R. Chadwick, Brigham Young University, Jerusalem Center; Aren M. Maeir, Bar-Ilan University

Description: This session will explore the production and use of olive oil in the southern Levant, particularly in the region generally referred to as Canaan in reference to the Bronze Age periods, and the regions of Israel, Judah, and Philistia during the Iron Age periods. Topics may explore production equipment and methods, production capacity (industrial, cottage industry, and domestic), markets and demand, and varieties of usage (culinary, lighting, medicinal, etc.). It is expected that presentations will rely on discoveries and models of archaeological research in the present and recent past, in addition to historical sources and applicable cultural trends.

On the Edge: The Archaeological Exploration of Desert Communities

Session Chairs: Joe Uziel, Israel Antiquities Authority; Guy Stiebel, Tel Aviv University

Description: Often defined by their difficult physical settings, including dry, hot climate and limited agricultural opportunities, the Near Eastern deserts have served as a setting for diverse human activity. The close proximity to existing urban societies have provided a source of unique, at times exotic, natural resources, a haven for separation from the existing urban fragment (at times by choice and in certain situations coerced), and land bridges traversed that link between distant and distinct regions. These attributes have led to unique human pattern of activities in these regions, including the exploitation of resources hidden deep in desert areas to refugees fleeing danger, and from royal residences to individuals searching for isolation. The unique arid climate of desert regions enables the preservation of a variety of finds not often found in other archaeological settings. Furthermore, as many of the activity sites are short-lived, layers are often not damaged by later building remains or modern development. Therefore, the archaeological exploration of desert sites provides us with a unique opportunity to examine the various agents that formed its distinct archaeological record.

The proposed three-year session will focus on the exploration of communities and individuals who inhabited desert regions throughout the Ancient Near East. Although geographically distant from one another, desert sites share certain characteristics engrained in their environmental setting. The session will include lectures exploring different phenomena linked to desert communities in different regions. The session will explore a different aspect of human activity in varying desert regions in each year that it is offered. 2023: “Turning up the Heat” – Communities under Stress.

The Persians and the Phoenicians: Administration, Markets, and Trade (Workshop)

Session Chairs: James D. Moore, Humboldt University, Berlin; Helen Dixon, East Carolina University

Description: The Persian period represents an axial shift in human history. The Persian imperial presence in the Eastern Mediterranean disrupted the long-standing Mediterranean market economy; the result was the rise of the Greeks and the expansion of the Carthaginian kingdom, yet few have studied the dynamics of the clash of the Mediterranean market economy and the Persian imperial program. In recent years, scholars of Phoenician and early Punic have begun to ask questions beyond the site-specific queries that long dominated the field, and Near Eastern scholars have begun to consider the copious data that survives in documentary and archaeological forms. This is an exploratory workshop that will accept 8–10 minute presentations from a variety of perspectives. The goal is to stimulate discussion on this burgeoning research topic and provide a venue for scholars to begin collaborating on the topic.

Portrait of a (non) Artist?: Drawings, Models, Plans, and Molds, in Ancient West Asia

Session Chairs: Miriam Said, Tufts University; Nancy Highcock, British Museum

Description: A method and form often associated with later artistic endeavors, either as the intended final product or as an initial stage in a longer process, drawing was practiced across the ancient world on a spectrum from the most informal of cuneiform tablet doodles to the plans of great temples. Although certain Mesopotamian objects such as Gudea Statue B (“Architect with a Plan”) or the Babylonian Map of the World are well-studied objects that can be fit into the artistic category comprising drawings and plans–the type of art often rendered in two dimensions–the act of drawing is undertheorized and conceptualized in studies of ancient West Asia. This session will explore drawings and plans as well as molds and models–art that is often considered to be ephemeral or transitional. What can such representations and objects tell us about wider artistic practice and networks? In what ways do preparatory works nuance discussions around the status of ancient images? How can analysis of drawings, plans, molds and models help us move beyond artificial binaries such as art and artifact, artist and craftsperson, individual and workshop, and creativity and canon?

This session seeks to center this rich category of art in discourse about the people and practices involved in creating art and architecture across ancient West Asia (and neighboring regions). Contributions from art history, archaeology, and Assyriology (or any combination thereof) are welcome. Colleagues working on reception and/or the role of modern illustration, plans, molds, and models in exploring ancient artistic practice are also highly encouraged.

Preserving the Cultural Heritage of the Madaba Region of Jordan (Workshop)

Workshop Chairs: Douglas R. Clark, La Sierra University; Suzanne Richard, Gannon University; Andrea Polcaro, Perugia University; Marta D’Andrea, Sapienza University of Rome; Basem Mahamid, Department of Antiquities of Jordan

Description: This workshop, in its second three-year iteration, seeks to encourage collaborative presentations, panel discussions, and structured conversations focused on issues in the Madaba Region of central Jordan, as defined by the Department of Antiquities: the area between southern Amman, the eastern desert, the Wadi Mujib, and the Dead Sea. Archaeological issues—whether generically archaeological, geo-political, architectural, anthropological, ethnographic, conceptual and theoretical, cultural heritage- or community-related, technological, or museum-related—are enlarged, enriched, and enhanced when approached collaboratively in a regional context. The first three-year version of this workshop began with a view toward the entire Madaba region, then Madaba itself, then the Madaba Regional Archaeological Museum (MRAM). During this second cycle, we anticipate a more integrative approach throughout, tentatively scheduled as follows:

2022 – From a broad Madaba regional perspective, this year’s workshop will focus on archaeological excavations in the region and the emerging narrative themes excavators use to provide context and interpretive content for their projects. At present, the Madaba Regional Archaeological Museum Project (MRAMP) has proposed themes deriving from “Global History” approaches; these have been defined and, for now, embedded into the museum architectural floor plans to frame exhibits and the flow of visitors. While traditional historical/chronological (geo-political) approaches will appear in the Introductory Hall near the Burnt Palace in the Madaba Archaeological Park West (II), Global History has been proposed for the new museum itself. How, this year’s workshop asks, do regional archaeological projects envision the narrative themes best describing the cultural heritage of their sites and how might these relate to those of the proposed new museum? How can we foster a regional perspective on ancient life in and around Madaba? Is a Global History approach the best suited for this task or traditional geo-political? Or something else that would help to maintain a regional perspective?

2023 – Following on discussions from the 2022 component of this workshop, this year will carry the conversation directly into the proposed new museum. We encourage presentations on galleries, layout, displays, and themes, deriving from excavation project perspectives on the one hand and the museum’s architectural concept design and display themes on the other. In what ways might excavation teams recommend displays that reflect their site themes, while at the same time maintaining a regional approach and themes, as well as coherency and consistency, in the new museum? And how, following on the outcomes of 2022 conversations, will discussions about Global History and more traditional Geo-political/Chronological approaches inform regional and museum narrative themes?

2024 – This year’s workshop will encourage presentations and conversations on the relationship between the current (DoA) Madaba Archaeological Museum and excavation projects in the region. Thanks to generous grants from the US Department of State (Ambassador’s Fund for Cultural Preservation and the Cultural Antiquities Task Force), the current museum has been repurposed and renovated into a best-practices facility for the storage and conservation of the region’s 14,000 artifacts, in addition to a smaller but more focused and enhanced interpretive display area. What would conversations among DoA personnel and excavation teams contribute to best practices in onsite artifact handling and the storage and curation of those artifacts in Madaba? How would this more intentionally framed collaboration work? And, since the newly renovated display area maintains its former arrangement, as in the past, with each display cabinet dedicated to a site in the region, how would excavation directors and teams envision their displays and how they are organized? New labeling (artifact ID labels, cabinet site labels, interpretive cabinet panels with site summaries, maps, and timelines) has been designed by partners at the American University of Madaba and implemented by the DoA/MRAMP team.

Problematising the end of the Middle Bronze Age in Anatolia (Workshop)

Session Chairs: Müge Durusu-Tanrıöver, Temple University; İlgi Gerçek, Bilkent University; Yağmur Heffron, University College London

Description: Tapping into the perennial question of transition, this workshop will problematize archaeological and historical narratives of continuity and change at  turn of the 17th century BCE, during the late Middle Bronze Age. This is a time which marks the intersection between two historical periods richly yet asymmetrically documented in texts: the end of the so-called kārum period, and the formation of the Hittite state. Yet the very idea of transition runs a teleological risk when change and continuity are explained as leading up to known historical eventualities, rendering the agency of past communities largely irrelevant. Rather than clusters of immutability or passive absorbers of change, communities living through periods of disruptions and upheaval continuously make decisions about their ways of life – even survival – endlessly coloring outcomes beyond their lifetimes.

Beyond cataloging similarities and differences over time, this workshop specifically aims to generate discussion around the broader implications of what endures and what is transformed at the end of the Middle Bronze Age. To this end, we invite short presentations (10 min. maximum) that engage with theoretical, methodological, and/or empirical issues pertaining to (the study of) continuity and change, focusing on specific sites, regions, or datasets.

Possible topics of inquiry include (but are not limited to) questions around Hittite state formation, occupational continuity and discontinuity across the Anatolian plateau, diachronic accounts of architectural expression, enduring or abandoned habits in the production and consumption of material and visual culture, conservatism and novelty in ritual activity, and last but not least, writing practices.

Protecting Libyan Cultural Heritage

Session Chairs: Ahmad Emrage, University of Benghazi, ASOR Cultural Heritage Initiatives; Aida Ejroushi, Texas Tech University and ASOR Cultural Heritage Initiatives

Description: Since 2017, ASOR has partnered with Libyan colleagues to protect cultural heritage around the country, including archaeological sites, historic cities, and rare manuscripts as well as to counter and prevent the illicit trafficking of Libyan antiquities. This session provides members of the Libyan Department of Antiquities, local universities, law enforcement, and civil society organizations to present the latest results of these efforts and build greater collaboration with ASOR members with aligned goals. This session will also provide opportunities to discuss similar initiatives recently launched in other countries across North Africa and the Middle East. Regarding our session in ASOR’s 2023 Annual Meeting: we anticipate continued and increased efforts in documentation and protection of Libyan cultural heritage following new elections and the continuation of grants funded the U.S, the EU, and other foundations. These efforts will be taken by Libyan authorities, civil organizations, and local community groups. Therefore, the paper proposed for the 2023 session will very likely be including considerable updates. Moreover, ASOR’s cultural heritage initiatives plans activities to take place during this year in Tunis, Algeria, and Morocco. Undoubtedly, the results of these projects will provide an opportunity to make comparisons of the general state of the cultural heritage in countries of the Maghreb and Libya and the different methods of protection that can be adopted. We plan for these comparisons and regional conversations to be the subject of some papers that can be discussed in Chicago 2023.

Protect and Secure. Technology of Data Protection in the Ancient Near East

Session Chairs: Jana Mynářová, Charles University, Prague; Jacob Lauinger, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore

Description: Presentations and discussion that took place during the Secure Your Data! Security and Data Management in the Ancient Near East session, which was held at the 2022 ASOR Annual Meeting in Boston, clearly demonstrated that data security and management are crucial topics in Ancient Near Eastern Studies that have not yet received adequate attention. In particular, issues about methods of data protection, such as baking cuneiform tablets or the production of clay envelopes for cuneiform tablets, were a common theme in the papers and generated very lively discussion. For this reason we would like to organize a second session that focuses specifically on the Technology of Data Protection in the ANE for the 2023 ASOR Annual Meeting. Submissions would be encouraged from scholars from all fields of Ancient Near Eastern Studies, and we would specifically hope for a good balance of scholars working on texts and on material culture. If 2022 demonstrated the urgency of the topic, and 2023 will focus on technological aspects, in 2024, we would hope to study cultural (dis)continuities in data security and practices.

Reintegrating Africa in the Ancient World (Workshop)

Workshop Chairs: Brenda J. Baker, Arizona State University; Geoff Emberling, University of Michigan

Description: The archaeology of ancient northeastern African societies has been dominated by a focus on Egyptian civilization, viewed through the lens of western heritage that separates it from Africa. This session aims to confront this colonialist legacy by emphasizing archaeology, bioarchaeology, and history of northeast Africa. Presentations will identify perspectives rooted in colonialism and structural racism that persist in scholarship of the region. Themes addressed include formation and decline of ancient African states and cities, the role of pastoralism in complex African societies, and aspects of identity and interconnections (both cultural and biological) within and beyond Africa in antiquity. The session welcomes work on a range of ancient northeast African cultures, including but not limited to Nubia (Kush), Aksum, Garamantes, and Egypt. Presentations and discussion will be organized around a specific theme each year to highlight the rich prehistory and history of ancient Sudan and northeast Africa.

Year 1: Colonial and anticolonial perspectives on ancient societies of northeast Africa
Year 2 (2022): Ancient northeast African interconnections
Year 3: African models of social complexity

This session is sponsored by the American-Sudanese Archaeological Research Center (AmSARC), a nascent organization that aims to support archaeological research in Sudan (https://amsarc.org/).

(Re)Visiting the Past in the Present: Monuments in Place (Workshop)

Session Chair: Morag M. Kersel

Description: In her formative work The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, urban historian Dolores Hayden (1995) argued convincingly for the inevitable connection between the natural environment of a location and the culture which occupies it. Our identification with distinctive places and monuments is essential for the cultivation of national identities, what many refer to as geographies of identity. Rural and urban public landscapes commemorating individuals or events are active rather than passive spaces, requiring contemplation and engagement, resulting in place attachment. It is the notion of place and its importance as a storehouse of social memories that brings us together for this ASOR workshop. Each participant has considered monuments and landscapes in the archaeological areas in which they work (Cyprus, Israel, Jordan, Palestine, Turkey). Each participant has also considered, embraced, engaged, with monuments and landscapes in the city in which they reside – Chicago. Departing from traditional ASOR session/workshop models we will (re)visit the past in the present by walking from the conference hotel to the Balbo Monument, a 1st century column from Ostia, a gift to the city of Chicago by Mussolini in 1933 now located on the Lakefront Trail. Passing through Grant Park, the Museum Campus, and the Gold Star Families Memorial, workshop participants will compare their archaeological landscapes to the Chicago environment, discussing their conceptions of myths and memories, place-making, public ritual, the creation of social cohesion, mundane practices, and problematic public monuments.
Disclaimer: Participation in this workshop will involve about three miles of walking. An option to Zoom in may be available for those who are unable to do the walking tour. If there is inclement weather, the tour will be shown on screen in a session room at the conference hotel.

Sea of Change: Climate and Environmental Change on the Shores of the Sea of Galilee

Session Chairs: Miriam Belmaker, The University of Tulsa; Michal Artzy, Haifa University

Description: To fully understand the social landscape, we need to integrate it with the natural landscape. There is a wealth of evidence for the effects of climate change in Europe on the human sociopolitical economy; however, in Syro-Palestine, the situation is more complex. In this proposed series of ASOR sessions, we will discuss climate and environmental change in and around the Sea of Galilee throughout the past three millennia. Furthermore, we ask if changes in the natural landscape had a measurable impact on the socio-economy of the population or if the regional climatic conditions were mitigated by technological advances such as extensive trade networks and logistic infrastructures. These interdisciplinary sessions will bring together paleoecologists and environmental archaeologists specializing in a range of proxies with presenters with expertise on the social landscape to discuss the intersection of the social and natural landscape around the Sea of Galilee. The three-year sessions series will encompass three themes:
• The 2022 session will focus on the environmental landscape.
• The 2023 session will focus on the social landscape.
• The 2024 session will integrate both and focus on understanding the social landscape through the environment and climate change lens.

So Wicked and So Wild: Aging, Old Age, and Bodily Representation in the Ancient World and Modern Academy

Session Chair: Alison Acker Gruseke, Williams College

Description: Theorists now recognize identity, including ethnicity, age rank, and gender as “a construct and a shifting and mutable terrain” (Greenberg, 2013). Gender, ethnicity, and childhood have all been subjected to sustained enquiry among scholars of the ancient world, yet the nexus between the body and discourses on old age has been more lightly explored. Older women, for example “like the disabled, are mostly nonexistent in records and traditionally invisible…in science, philosophy and the arts” (Juárez-Almendros, 2017), while ancient poets and historians chronicle both the status and potential vulnerability experienced by older males.

In the wake of the postmodern, scholars recognize the situatedness of all kinds of knowing. Two decades after Rivkah Harris’ Gender and Aging in Mesopotamia, this panel, now in its third year, invites papers on age, representation, power, social construction, and the body in the context of lived experience— of ancient societies, the modern academy, and the spaces in between.

So What? Finding Meaning in Near Eastern Studies (Workshop)

Workshop Chairs: Susan Cohen, Montana State University; Marwan Kilani, Swiss National Research Foundation, Basel University; Regine Pruzsinszky, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg

Description: We believe that this seemingly simple question is in fact fundamental and should lie at the very core of our work. Asking “so what?” both challenges us to explicitly define the purposes of our disciplines and provides an effective framework in which to develop innovative and widely relevant research. We welcome submissions that explore these questions:

    1. Presentations that focus on the “so what?” question from a conceptual perspective. These presentations may examine the role of this question in the context of academic publications, or explore what purpose(s) our disciplines have (or might have) in today’s societies, or discuss how the aims and goals of these disciplines have (or have not) changed since their inception.
       
    2. Presentations that present original research, novel archeological interpretations, theoretical approaches and that explicitly define and explore a “so what?” question pertaining to open questions in current ancient Near Eastern studies.
    3. Presentations that discuss the intellectual reasons that drive how and why the “so what?” questions at the basis of such studies were chosen, or why these questions are relevant.

The workshop is organized by the co-editors of BASOR; however, it is important to stress that it will not focus only on BASOR and is not meant to be restricted to people involved in the publication of the journal. Every voice is welcome, as the goal is to stimulate discussion and reflection about what we do as Ancient Near East scholars, and why we do it.

Teaching about the Ancient World with Museum Objects (Workshop)

Session Chairs: Lissette Jiménez, San Francisco State University; Jen Thum, Harvard Art Museums; Carl Walsh, Barnes Foundation

Description: Teaching with ancient material in museums presents unique challenges for curators and educators. For example, ancient objects are sometimes unprovenanced or are of questionable authenticity, and teaching with them necessitates discussion of provenance. Museum collections often provoke conversations about human remains, for which ethical considerations must be woven into pedagogy. Likewise, contemporary stakeholder perspectives are often excluded from discussions about their ancient past and should be incorporated into stewardship and educational programming.

This workshop will focus on methods and approaches for teaching about the ancient world through its material remains in museums, but also the realities of doing so at this particular moment in time, when both museums and many ancient-studies subfields are reflecting on how to create more inclusive practices grounded in social justice and equity. The ethical museum pedagogies and equitable learning experiences we use to teach from ancient material will shape more critical views of both ancient and modern cultures among students and museum visitors. We invite participants to share practical examples of object-based teaching to facilitate open conversations about best practices in museum pedagogy, curation, and collection stewardship. We welcome contributions from all geographical regions and time periods that center on teaching about the ancient world with museum objects in creative and inclusive ways.

The Transition from the Neo-Assyrian to the Neo-Babylonian Periods

Session Chairs: Christopher W. Jones, University of Helsinki; Jonathan Gardner, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Description: This session seeks to inspire new research into the collapse of the Neo-Assyrian Empire and its replacement by the Neo-Babylonian empire in the late seventh and early sixth centuries BC. While of tremendous historical importance to the history of the ancient Near East, this transition remains little-studied and poorly understood. Can we better define the nature of this transition? To what extent does the Neo-Babylonian empire represent a continuation of Assyrian administrative and ideological practices? Can we expand beyond political history to better understand its cultural and social effects?

The first year of this session focused on the transition in Babylonia and in the Assyrian heartland. For 2023, we aim to expand the scope of this session to explore the effects of the transition around the periphery of these empires. We are interested in papers exploring all aspects of the transition on the imperial periphery: Why was the Neo-Babylonian empire able to rapidly absorb Neo-Assyrian territory in the west without extensive fragmentation? How did the transition between empires affect trade networks in the Mediterranean, the Arabian Peninsula, and elsewhere? Did this transition have effects beyond the borders of the empire? How did changing empires affect identities and loyalties of people on the imperial periphery, or deportees brought to the imperial center? We are interested in papers which utilize archaeological or textual sources, and are especially interested in papers which integrate material culture with texts.

Understanding Power in the Ancient World: Approaches, Manifestations, and Responses

Session Chairs: Jessica Tomkins, Wofford College; Shane M. Thompson, North Carolina Wesleyan College

Description: “Power” is referred to frequently in scholarship on the ancient Near East, but the meaning of the concept remains severely underdeveloped. Undertheorized and used heterogeneously by scholars, power is one of the most fundamental yet understudied concepts of the ancient Near East. This session brings together scholars of the ancient world to clarify different approaches and definitions used to study concepts and manifestations of power in the various subfields of the ancient Near East.

This three-year session seeks, first, to collaboratively define “power.” Subsequent years will use new approaches to this broad topic, focusing on how powerful entities exerted themselves in ways that aimed to alter the cultural fabric of society, as well as the responses and resistance to by those in lesser stations. The sessions will bring scholars of Anatolia, Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia into dialog with one another in order to synchronize our understanding of the complex mechanics of power across the ancient Near East. Topics may be broad, focusing on trends in the longue durée, or narrow, focusing on a specific locale, text, and/or time period. We will actively promote interdisciplinary discussions about the concept, use, and study of power across the ancient Near East.

Yearly Themes
2021: Approaches to Power in the Ancient Near East
This session will emphasize interdisciplinary discussions on the modern theories and methods by which scholars of the ancient world (broadly writ) can analyze power in the ancient Near East.

2022: Exerting Power in the Ancient Near East
In this session we seek papers which focus on the means by which certain entities dominate others. These strategies may be either intentioned and active, or tacit interventions to the cultural fabric of society (i.e. acts of social/religious/cultural/economic change).

2023: Resistance: Responses to Power in the Ancient Near East
In this session we seek papers which investigate how power is resisted and responded to. Papers may focus on active resistance to power, or on methods of acceptance of power.

Uniting Survey and Excavation Data from the Hesi Region (Israel)

Session Chair: Jeffrey A. Blakely, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Cobb Institute of Archaeology, Mississippi State University

Description: Over 130 years of excavational history and almost 200 years of survey in the Hesi region and among its sites provide a wealth of data of many types. The final report of the Hesi Regional Survey is complete, but not yet published. At the same time many aspects of the excavations at Tell el-Hesi have been published. Final reports of the PEF form a solid basis ripe for reinterpretation of Tell el-Hesi while many preliminary and specialized reports from the Joint Expedition’s excavation at Tell el-Hesi have appeared. Some significant final reports are still in preparation. At the same time excavations at Khirbet Summeily are winding down and a preliminary interpretation has emerged. The larger enterprise is at a crossroads, but it is only now that data from excavation and survey are being united to create interpretations truly interdisciplinary in nature and revolutionary in character that are rewriting our understanding of how the region was used throughout antiquity.

This session presents four such new interpretations that in one way or another describe how the site and region were used at one or more points in antiquity. Each is based in a different discipline that is integrated with both the survey and the archaeological record. At the very end our respondent will suggest where we have traction and where we may have missed the boat.

Urbanism and Polities in the Bronze and Iron Age Levant

Session Chairs: Omer Sergi, Tel Aviv University; Daniel Master, Wheaton College; Karen Covello-Paran, Israel Antiquities Authority

Description: Urbanism and urban centers were at the heart of political and economic life during the Bronze and Iron Ages, and throughout most of this time, they constituted the basic socio-political unit of the Levant. Urban centers throughout the Levant flourished and demised in the shadow of imperial forces from Mesopotamia, Anatolia and Egypt. Yet, there are profound differences between urbanism in the northern and the southern Levant. Moreover, the face of urbanism changed in the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, bringing about new socio-political formations, at least in the southern and central Levant, which are mostly thought of in terms of territorial polities. This session aims to discuss and ponder the formation and demise of Levantine urbanism within its socio-historical context. These session will call for papers discussing the changing faces of Levantine urbanism during the Bronze and Iron Ages, and how these were related to the formation of Levantine polities. It aims to scrutinize the relations between urban landscape and political hegemony, but also between the urban centers and their rural hinterlands. Thus, we hope, to provide a holistic view of Levantine urbanism from its very inception. We intend to dedicate the first year (2023) to discuss the formation of the urban landscape of the Middle Bronze Age and its impact on socio-political life in the Levant. Special attention will also be given to the formation of “Canaan” as a concept of social belonging (. The second year (2024) will be dedicated to discussing Levantine urbanism under the empires of the Late Bronze Age (Mittani, Hittites, Egypt), and the third year (2025) will be dedicated to discussing the changing face of urbanism in the world of the Iron Age kin-based territorial polities.

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