2026 LIST OF APPROVED SESSIONS AND WORKSHOPS
Chicago & Hybrid: November 18-21
ASOR’s 2026 Annual Meeting will take place November 18-21 at the Hilton Chicago. The meeting in November will be hybrid with both virtual and in-person participation in a similar format to the 2025 Annual Meeting.
All sessions and workshops will be able to include both in-person presentations in Chicago and virtual presentations online via Zoom. This is subject to change as the meeting develops.
Paper and workshop presentation proposals may be submitted per the instructions on the Call for Papers from February 15 – March 15.
ASOR Standing Sessions
- Ancient Climate and Environmental Archaeology
- Ancient Inscriptions
- Approaches to Dress and the Body
- Archaeology and Biblical Studies
- Archaeology and History of Feasting and Foodways
- Archaeology of Anatolia
- Archaeology of Arabia
- Archaeology of the Black Sea and the Caucasus
- Archaeology of the Byzantine Near East
- Archaeology of Cyprus
- Archaeology of Egypt
- Archaeology of Iran
- Archaeology of Islamic Society
- Archaeology of Israel
- Archaeology of Jordan
- The Archaeology of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq
- Archaeology of Lebanon
- Archaeology of Mesopotamia
- Archaeology of the Near East: Bronze and Iron Ages
- Archaeology of the Near East: The Classical Periods
- Archaeology of the Southern Levant
- Archaeology of Syria
- Art Historical Approaches to the Near East
- Bioarchaeology in the Near East
- Cultural Heritage: Preservation, Presentation, and Management
- Digital Archaeology and History
- Gender in the Ancient Near East
- History of Archaeology
- Interdisciplinary Approaches to Seals, Sealing Practices, and Administration
- Isotopic Investigations in the Ancient Near East and Caucasus
- Landscapes of Settlement in the Ancient Near East
- Maritime Archaeology
- Pop Culture and Near Eastern Archaeology
- Prehistoric Archaeology
- Reports on Current Excavations—ASOR Affiliated and Non-ASOR Affiliated
- Recent Work in the Archaeological Sciences
- Theoretical and Anthropological Approaches to the Near East
Member-Organized Sessions and Workshops Approved for the 2026 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.
- Africa in the Ancient World
- Ancient Languages and Linguistics
- Archaeologies of Memory
- Archaeology of Religion in the Levant during the Second and First Millennia BCE
- Art, Archaeology, and History of Central Asia
- Biblical Texts in Cultural Context
- The Future of Ancient West Asia Collections in Museums (Workshop)
- Jerusalem and the Archaeology of a Sacred City
- The LCP Handbook Series: Eastern Sigillata A (ESA)
- New Approaches to Ancient Animals
- Rural Communities: Social and Spiritual Rites
- Urbanism and Polities in the Bronze and Iron Age Levant
Descriptions of Sessions & Workshops
Sessions and workshops 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 Standing Sessions
Ancient Climate and Environmental Archaeology
Session Chairs: Brita Lorentzen, University of Georgia; Kathleen Forste, Brown University
Description: This session accepts papers that examine past human resource (flora and fauna) uses and human/environment interactions in the ancient Near East.
Session Chairs: TBD – Open Call for Session Chairs: December 22 – Application Deadline
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: TBD – Open Call for Session Chairs: December 22 – Application Deadline
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; Alison Acker Gruseke, Williams College
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: TBD – Open Call for Session Chairs: December 22 – Application Deadline
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.
Session Chairs: Nancy Amelia Highcock, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford; Oya Topçuoğlu, Northwestern University
Description: This session is open to research on the archaeology of Anatolia, which may include, but is not limited to: current fieldwork, material and visual culture, and new theoretical and methodological approaches in the wider field. Papers that address current cultural heritage initiatives and public engagement are especially welcome and we encourage contributions from colleagues in the early stages of their career.
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 Chairs: Michael Zimmerman, Bridgewater State University; Misha Elashvili, Bridgewater State University
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: TBD – Open Call for Session Chairs: December 22 – Application Deadline
Description: This session is open to papers that concern the Near East in the Byzantine period.
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.
Session Chairs: TBD – Open Call for Session Chairs: December 22 – Application Deadline
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.
Session Chair: Kyle Gregory Olson, Washington University in St. Louis
Description: This session explores the archaeology of Iran.
Archaeology of Islamic Society
Session Chairs: Ian W. N. Jones, New York University; Tasha Vorderstrasse, University of Chicago
Description: This session explores the archaeology of Islamic society.
Session Chair: TBD – Open Call for Session Chairs: December 22 – Application Deadline
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.
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 Chairs: Petra M. Creamer, Emory University; Elise J. Laugier, Utah State University
Description: This session highlights research on all aspects of history and archaeology focused on the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and adjacent areas.
Session Chairs: Hanan Charaf, Lebanese University; Nadine Panayot, American University of Beirut; Helen Dixon, East Carolina University
Description: This session is focused on current archaeological research in Lebanon, including the results of fieldwork and/or other research projects. It welcomes papers on any aspect of Lebanon’s archaeology and cultural heritage, regardless of the period. Additionally, the session invites contributions addressing the critical need for the conservation and protection of cultural heritage sites and museums in Lebanon, particularly in light of recent crises and emerging threats.
Session Chair: Lucas Proctor, J.W. Goethe University Frankfurt; Glynnis Maynard, Cambridge University
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.
Session Chair: 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: TBD – Open Call for Session Chairs: December 22 – Application Deadline
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: Sarah Schrader, Leiden University; Rose Campbell, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Luskin Center for History and Policy
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.
Cultural Heritage: Preservation, Presentation, and Management
Session Chair: TBD – Open Call for Session Chairs: December 22 – Application Deadline
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 Chairs: Leigh Anne Lieberman, Princeton University; Matthew Howland, Wichita State 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.
Gender in the Ancient Near East
Session Chairs: Avary Taylor, Yale University; Kelsie Ehalt, University of Michigan
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.
Session Chairs: Leticia R. Rodriguez, University of Houston; Caitlin Clerkin, Harvard Art Museums
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 Chair: Pınar Durgun, The Morgan Library and Museum
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: TBD – Open Call for Session Chairs: December 22 – Application Deadline
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
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.
Session Chairs: 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.
Pop Culture and Near Eastern Archaeology
Session Chairs: Michael Zimmerman, Bridgewater State University; Debra Trusty, University of Iowa
Description: The papers in this session represent a multidisciplinary discussion of approaches to the study of archaeology of the Near East with a focus on archaeological and historical education through storytelling – movies, television, digital and analog games (“archaeogaming”), immersive experiences, escape rooms, virtual reality, and in news media. This session aims to present a diverse array of topics about archaeology and pop culture, including stereotypes, misconceptions and pseudoarchaeology in media, as well as more positive interactions between Near Eastern archaeology and media, including the use of tools found in pop culture for research, education, community engagement, and heritage management.
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.n.
Recent Work in the Archaeological Sciences
Session Chairs: Alyssa V. Pietraszek, University of Haifa; Hannah M. Herrick; Simon Fraser University
Description: This session welcomes papers that apply one or more archaeological sciences, broadly defined, to investigate aspects of the ancient world.
Reports on Current Excavations—ASOR Affiliated & Non-ASOR Affiliated
Session Chair: TBD – Open Call for Session Chairs: December 22 – Application Deadline
Description: This session is for excavation reports from projects with or without ASOR/CAP affiliation
Theoretical and Anthropological Approaches to the Near East
Session Chair: 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 2026 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.
Session Chairs: Brenda J. Baker, Arizona State University; Michele R. Buzon, Purdue University
Description: This session, co-sponsored by the American-Sudanese Archaeological Research Center, builds on the successful Reintegrating Africa in the Ancient World workshop. This session allows paper contributions on the archaeology, bioarchaeology, and history of northeast Africa, engaging with a specific theme each year to highlight the rich prehistory and history of ancient Sudan and the greater northeast Africa region. The session welcomes work on a range of ancient northeast African cultures, including but not limited to Nubia (Kush), Aksum, Garamantes, and Egypt. Themes addressed are designed to have relevance in the modern world.
In the first year (2024), we consider conflict and its consequences in both the past and present. What evidence is there for conflict in the region through time? What impact did/does conflict have on the local populace? What is the variability in interactions? The second year (2025) focuses on mobility and migration into, within, and out of Africa. Different methods for reconstructing population movements, such as funerary behavior, artifact distributions, paleogenomics, and isotope analyses, are considered. How might various methods be integrated to investigate identity? What circumstances may result in different mobility patterns? The third year (2026) emphasizes identity and community through time. How does identity manifest through time? What factors affect identity and formation of communities? How does archaeology contribute to community and identity formation in the present?
Ancient Languages and Linguistics
Session Chairs: Victoria Almansa-Villatoro, Yale University; Brendan Hainline, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Description: This session invites papers engaging in a broad spectrum of topics related to ancient languages and linguistics. Submissions may focus on grammatical, lexicological, or phonological evidence, or draw from a range of textual and archaeological sources. We also encourage contributions that move beyond traditional linguistic analysis to explore the meaning and function of language in its ancient contexts. Regardless of the chosen approach, presentations should use language as a medium to better our understanding of the people who spoke it in ancient times.
Language and Place (2025) In this first of two thematically paired years, we especially invite submissions exploring the interaction between language and place. We welcome methodologies and approaches that account for the location of a language in space, such as dialect geography and wave models of language change. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, geographic dialects, dialect continuums, contact and borrowing between neighboring languages, areal features, etymologies of toponyms, and cross-cultural communication and the use of diplomatic languages.
Language and People (2026) In this second of two thematically paired years, we invite submissions from scholars exploring how the study of language can illuminate the lives, experiences, and relationships of people across the ancient world. We welcome methodological and theoretical approaches that integrate insights from linguistics, social theory, semiotics, and communication. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, power asymmetry in communication, the creation of prestige and identity dialects, the use of language to transmit emotions, reconstructing worldviews and discourses through semantic ranges and etymologies, persuasive rhetoric and narrative storytelling, speaking and the power of the word, the role of body language, and theoretical approaches to the materiality of language.
Session Chairs: Janling Fu, Harvard University; Tate Paulette, North Carolina State University
Description: This session seeks to continue building a robust, theoretically innovative, and empirically grounded conversation about the topic of memory across the sub-disciplines of ancient Near Eastern studies. During the previous three years, the session brought together specialists working all over the geographical and chronological spectrum to explore memory through three intertwined themes: space, place, and the built environment (2022); things, bodies, and assemblages (2023); and events, rituals, and routines (2024). Building on the momentum of these lively sessions and the connections that they fostered, the session will now approach memory through three new themes that, once again, seek to open up new perspectives and encourage dialogue among those working with archaeological, art historical, and/or written evidence. In the first year (2025), we consider memory as an instrument of inclusion and exclusion. For the second year (2026), we explore memory through the poles of stasis and change. In the third year (2027), we situate memory at the junction of trauma and healing. It is hoped that this continued, multi-disciplinary engagement with the topic of memory will encourage scholars of the ancient world to seek out and interrogate evidence for the complex intermingling of past and present and the many different modes of remembering and forgetting.
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 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 2025 session was dedicated to human–animal relations and their reflections in religious practices in the Levant during the second and first millennia BCE. We welcome papers dealing with this issue through various media and contexts, including texts, faunal remains, iconography and more.
Art, Archaeology, and History of Central Asia
Session Chairs: Harrison Morin, University of Chicago; Mitchell Allen, University of California, Berkeley
Description: This session is dedicated to the presentation of new and ongoing research concerning the art, archaeology, and history of Central Asia from prehistory to the present. Contributions may focus on a wide array of topics geographically tied to the region such as the presentation of findings from a recent season of fieldwork, intensive artifactual, textual, and art historical studies, or broader methodological or theoretical discussion relating to Central Asia’s history and archaeology. Papers concerning the cultural heritage of Central Asian countries are especially welcome.
Biblical Texts in Cultural Context
Session Chairs: 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 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 (2025) will be ethnicity and identity formation, inviting scholarship on conceptualizations of self and the other that intersect with the biblical text. The final year (2026) will be dedicated to biblical ritual in light of ritual spaces, personnel, and practices of the ancient Near East.
The Future of Ancient West Asia Collections in Museums (Workshop)
Session Chair: Pınar Durgun, The Morgan Library and Museum
Description: Many departments and museums with ancient Western Asian collections are or will be going through renovations and interpretive updates. This workshop aims to bring together museum professionals and scholars to exchange ideas and brainstorm on the presentation of AWA collections in museums today and in the future. Following the discussions in the Museum Professionals roundtable and the Museums and Social Justice session at ASOR, the need for a working group around best practices and blindspots has become apparent. The idea of this workshop is to discuss issues that museums with AWA collections are concerned with including (but not limited to) languages, diverse perspectives, multivocality, labels, citation practices, accessibility, provenance, restitution and repatriation, community curation and engagement, interactivity, digital approaches, ethics, and political issues.
The first year of the workshop aims to discuss ongoing renovation projects and their outcomes. In the second year the discussion will center around what is missing and what can be done to recognize and respond to the blind spots in the presentation of collections. As a result of these two year discussions, in the third year (2026), the workshop will center big picture ideas on the future directions of AWA collections. The overall goal is to prepare a “AWA collections-museum best practices” document for ASOR consideration.
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 (2024) focuses on studies aiming at identifying the personal experience expressions of worshipers and pilgrims who visited Jerusalem’s holy places throughout the ages. During the second year (2025) we will explore how the city was physically, economically and symbolically shaped by sacred sites. The focus of the third year (2026) will be the interface between heritage and worship.
The LCP Handbook Series: Eastern Sigillata A (ESA)
Session Chairs: Andrea Berlin, Boston University; Nicole Constantine, Stanford University
Description: The Levantine Ceramics Project launched in 2011, and with ongoing support from ASOR, has become a lively, digital, open-access resource for the pottery of the ancient and medieval Mediterranean and Near East. The website is ever-growing, with more than 20,000 ceramic vessels uploaded by hundreds of scholars working around the globe. In 2025, the LCP launched a handbook series, which will draw on this abundant data to produce a user-friendly set of resources for excavators and students. These will appear as joint open-access e-books and traditional print books published by Lockwood Press. The handbooks will serve as easy-to-use guides for pottery identification as well as provide updated discussions of classes of pottery that are fundamental to our understanding of the past. Both the handbooks and the ASOR sessions dedicated to their topics will further the LCP’s mission of providing a venue for collaborative, open-access ceramic research.
The 2025 session concerns the Late Roman Amphora 1 (LRA1), a ubiquitous, long-lived form whose distribution stretches from Scotland and Wales to Yemen and India, making it a powerful source of evidence for social and economic life in Late Antiquity. The LCP Handbook to the LRA1 brings together published scholarship, including all known production sites, petrographic data, and the most current information on distribution, all linked to the robust body of open-sourced data on the LCP. This session aims to continue the conversation that the Handbook begins, by inviting scholars to pose new questions and ideas to explore.
The 2026 session will be dedicated to Eastern Sigillata A (ESA), and the 2027 session will focus on ceramic wares of Jordan from the Early Bronze Age through the late Medieval era.
New Approaches to Ancient Animals
Session Chairs: Christine Mikeska, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Theo Kassebaum, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Description: Building on the momentum of the inaugural session at ASOR 2024, we invite papers that apply innovative theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of ancient animals in Southwest Asia, North Africa, and the Mediterranean. Recent theoretical approaches emphasizing multispecies relationships and non-anthropocentric perspectives have revealed that animals are central to shaping human social worlds. This session therefore invites presenters to take animals and their social relationships seriously, critically approaching archaeological assemblages, texts, and iconography as tools to reimagine the more-than-human past. While the study of ancient animals is traditionally approached through an economic or ecological lens, focusing on the utility of animals to their human counterpart, this session seeks to bring together new perspectives on the lives of animals in the ancient past to broaden our understanding of ancient multispecies worlds. This session also seeks to address the siloization of knowledge dissemination that results from long held disciplinary boundaries that divide ancient animal studies. Therefore, we invite papers that rethink approaches to ancient animals from a wide variety of perspectives, including (but not limited to) zooarchaeology, history and philology, and art history. We also encourage interdisciplinary papers that bring these perspectives together. In 2025, this session is organized around the theme of Rethinking Animal Bodies and Boundaries. In 2026, the theme will be rethinking animal agencies and autonomy.
Rural Communities: Social and Spiritual Rites
Session Chairs: Helena Roth, Tel Aviv University
Description: This multi-year session aims to center rural communities in archaeological discourse, moving beyond their traditional role as a backdrop to urban archaeology. Recognizing the historical dominance of rural populations, this initiative prioritizes in-depth investigations of rural life across diverse geographic and temporal contexts.
Following the 2024 Annual ASOR meeting, which focused on subsistence strategies and their impact on rural communities, the second year of this multi-year session, planned for 2025, will explore social and spiritual rites within rural settings. In particular, issues of public versus private rites, taboos, allowances, and investment will be addressed within the discussion of how ancient rural societies performed rituals and how, in turn, these rituals shaped rural societies. This constitutes another step towards investigating rural societies on their own terms, rather than as the opposite of “urban.”
The final year, planned for 2026, will investigate the social structure and complexity of rural communities, integrating insights from the preceding years. This framework emphasizes a multidisciplinary approach, combining archaeological analyses with anthropological, textual, and psychological perspectives to achieve a comprehensive understanding of rural societies.
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 (2024) 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 (2025) will be dedicated to discussing Levantine urbanism under the empires of the Late Bronze Age (Mittani, Hittites, Egypt), and the third year (2026) 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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