ASOR SPRING BOOK SALE
Spring is in the air, and ASOR is pleased to be holding a spring book sale for publications 2+ years old. Take advantage of ASOR’s spring cleaning and add some of these books to your reading list this season!
ASOR members (with a mailing address in the USA) can purchase copies of ASOR books at the discounted price of $15.00 (ca. 80% discount + $5.00 US media mail shipping) through April 30, 2025, while supplies last. All prices listed below include US media mail shipping. Due to ASOR’s licensing agreement with ISD, this offer is only available to ASOR members. We are unable to offer this discount to members without a US mailing address due to international shipping costs. Please contact membership@asor.org with any questions.
Not an ASOR member? Join as an Associate Member ($45) or Academic Member (starting at $84) first in order to take advantage of these great deals on books. More information on memberships and the benefits associated with each level can be found here.
AASOR 74: The Excavations of ‘Iraq al-Amir, Volume II. Edited by Nancy L. Lapp, with contributions by Michael S. Zimmerman, Daniel Ulvoczky, Nicholas Hudson, Adam Hartman, and Nancy L. Lapp. Original price $84.95. Sale price $15.00 (includes US media mail shipping).
AASOR 73: An Examination of the Stratigraphy and Neolithic-Iron Age Pottery from Tel Jezreel, Area A. Edited by Charlotte Whiting and Gloria London. Original price $84.95. Sale price $15.00 (includes US media mail shipping).
AASOR 72: Bayt Farhi and the Sephardic Palaces of Ottoman Damascus in the Late 18th and 19th Centuries. Edited by Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis, with contributions by Ezra Ashkenazie, Jeffery Burden, George H. Lewis, Judith S. McKenzie, and Jason Montgomery. Original price $84.95. Sale price $15.00 (includes US media mail shipping).
AASOR 69: The Archaeology of Agro-Pastoralist Economies in Jordan. Edited by Kevin M. McGeough, with contributions by Robin M. Brown, Alan Farahani, Hannah Huynh, Natalie Mueller, Benjamin W. Porter, Jennifer Ramsay, Kevin Rielly, and Bruce Routledge. Original price $84.95. Sale price $15.00 (includes US media mail shipping).
AASOR 63: Views from Phlamoudhi, Cyprus. By Joanna S. Smith. Original price $84.95. Sale price $15.00 (includes US media mail shipping).
ARS 30: Tel Kedesh I: The Hellenistic Archive. By Sharon C. Herbert. Original price $99.95. Sale price $15.00 (includes US media mail shipping).
ARS 29: Taanach II: The Iron Age Stratigraphy. By Mark W. Meehl. Original price $89.95. Sale price $15.00 (includes US media mail shipping).
Click here to purchase ARS 29 in ASOR’s Online Store.
ARS 27: Caesarea Maritima: Excavations in the Old City 1989-2003. Edited by Kenneth G. Holum. Original price $89.95. Sale price $15.00 (includes US media mail shipping).
ARS 20: Cyprus and the Balance of Empires: Art and Archaeology from Justinian I to the Coeur de Lion. Edited by Charles Anthony Stewart, Thomas W. Davis, and Annemarie Weyl Carr. Original price $84.95. Sale price $15.00 (includes US media mail shipping).
JCSSS 2: Texts from the Late Old Babylonian Period. Edited by Seth F. C. Richardson. Original price $75.00. Sale price $15.00 (includes US media mail shipping).
JCSSS 3: The Textual Criticism of Sumerian Literature. Edited by Paul Delnero. Original price $89.95. Sale price $15.00 (includes US media mail shipping).
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Upcoming anniversaries of American excavations offer an opportunity to reassess the importance of Carthage, famous for its contacts and conflicts with Greeks and Romans across the Mediterranean and infamous for its alleged ritual infanticide. Two American teams conducted excavations at the city’s liminal open-air votive precinct, where one finds cremated infant remains buried in urns beneath stone memorials bearing dedications to the Mistress, Tinnit Visage-of-Ba‘l, and to the Lord, Ba‘l Hammon.
The centennial and golden anniversaries of American excavations fast approach—one hundred years ago, F. W. Kelsey of the University of Michigan led a campaign under the auspices of the AIA (1925); fifty years ago, L. E. Stager of University of Chicago led another under the auspices of ASOR (1976-1979). Both teams excavated in the same propriété Regulus-Salammbô, with Stager’s Punic Project excavations picking up where Kelsey had left off. Even before the American campaigns, many stelae had already been extracted through clandestine or amateur excavation, including hasty extractions made just before Kelsey arrived on site, depriving us of their context. Nevertheless, our archival research at the University of Michigan has uncovered excavation records that, in combination with the Punic Project records, allow us to locate stela in plan and section. We have made practice scans of stelae, in the Netherlands and Denmark, in anticipation of scanning individual stela now held in Tunisian museum store rooms. This talk will demonstrate how 3D models of individual stelae can be replaced into their original positions by using archival site plans and annotated photographs and in reference to the positions of those stelae still in situ, and it will demonstrate how we can create a precise scale model of the Regulus-Salammbô sector.
Brien Garnand is a research associate of the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East (HMANE) and a visiting researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Near East (NINO), currently a member of a research group at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies (IIAS). He has contributed to the final excavation report from the ASOR Punic Project Carthage excavations since 1993, recently co-editing a preview of that report in a thematic volume of the Journal of Ancient History (Infants as Votive Offerings 2023). Besides cataloging artifacts in the basement of the HMANE and in the store rooms of the Musée national de Carthage, he has scoured the archives of the F. W. Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan and the J. B. Chabot archives at the Université catholique de Louvain in preparation for an exhibition timed to correspond with the issue of the Punic Project final report on the the 50th/100th anniversaries of American excavations. He once served as assistant director of the Stanford University Excavations at Mt. Polizzo in Sicily, and he has extensive experience in North Africa, both in field survey (Project Jerba—University of Pennsylvania/AAR/INP) and in excavation (Carthage Bir Messaouda—University of Amsterdam/INP). His current research focuses on votive stelae, both putting the formulaic-poetic language of Phoenician inscriptions into the context of Ancient Near Eastern literature and putting the sanctuary of Tinnit and Ba‘l in Carthage into the context of votive precincts across the Mediterranean. A mobility grant from NINO (2022) allowed him to test 3D scanning methods, and a recent ASOR Dar Ben Gacem fellowship (2023) supported a research visit to the Carthage precinct where he prepared a preliminary 3D site model.
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Medical treatments in the ancient Mediterranean world were rudimentary and often unsuccessful, and so individuals routinely looked for divine aid to cure their afflictions. This lecture considers one of the most common forms of ritual healing employed in Roman and late antique Palestine: amulets. A variety of amulets will be considered in this talk. For example, some amulets contained longer texts written on thin metal sheets or pieces of papyrus, which were then rolled and placed in a case that could be attached to a person’s body. Other amulets took the form of rings, bracelets, pendants, and gemstones, which typically had shorter texts, often accompanied by vivid illustrations.
With circumstances of close cultural contacts—such as prevailed in Palestine—the setting was ripe for Jews, Samaritans, and Christians to borrow forms of ritual healing that were perceived to be efficacious and to alter them to fit their own religious framework. This is particularly true for amulets, which employed similar techniques including the quotation of biblical passages and the use of magical symbols and names. As a result of these overlapping amulet traditions, it can be difficult in some cases even to be certain about the religious community to which the person who created the amulet or the person who wore the amulet belonged. The cultural and religious interactions revealed by amulets demonstrate the porousness of the boundaries that separated these communities, and made them the subject of polemical discourse among elite authors trying to police collective borders.
Megan Nutzman is Associate Professor of History at Old Dominion University. She received her PhD in Classics from the University of Chicago and holds an M.T.S. and a Th.M. from Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology. Her research focuses on the history and material culture of Greek and Roman cults, Jews, and Christians in the eastern Mediterranean, and especially on interactions among them. Her 2022 book, Contested Cures: Identity and Ritual Healing in Roman and Late Antique Palestine, received the Frank Moore Cross book award in 2023. It examines the various methods that people used to seek divine healing and the rhetoric of elite authors who used the acceptance or avoidance of certain healing rituals as markers of group identity. Some of her other publications have considered Jewish epitaphs from Rome, hot springs as sites of ritual healing, the relationship between amulets and tefillin, and the portrayal of Mary in the Protevangelium of James. She has received funding for her research from the Albright Institute for Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, from the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, from the American Council of Learned Societies, and from the National Endowment for the Humanities. At ODU, she teaches courses on ancient Greece and Rome and on early Christianity.
Jessica Nitschke is a Research Fellow and contract Lecturer in the Department of Ancient Studies at Stellenbosch University in South Africa; she is also the editor of ASOR’s outreach publication