Early Career Scholars Research in Action: Rennan Lemos
Archaeology Under Fire: The History of Sudan Between Water and War
Join ASOR’s Early Career Scholars on April 4, 2025 at 12:00pm ET via Zoom for a virtual Research in Action talk from Dr. Rennan Lemos about cultural heritage in Sudan.
Abstract: The history of archaeology in northern Sudan is, to a large extent, a history of salvage excavations. Successive dam projects in Lower Nubia have posed a tremendous threat to the region’s archaeology, resulting in significant losses but also producing one of the most comprehensive records of archaeological heritage in a single area. Drawing on archival materials and recent fieldwork, this talk will explore how Sudan’s archaeological heritage has been endangered—first by the flooding of Lower Nubia and now by war—and how a history of major threats has shaped the region’s heritage.
Presenter: Rennan Lemos teaches Egyptian and Sudanese archaeology at the University of Cambridge. He co-directs the Djehutyhotep Project and is assistant director of the Sanam Temple Project in Sudan. In 2024, he was a recipient of the Annual Prize “à la mémoire de Jean Leclant”, awarded by the Michela Schiff Giorgini Foundation.
The event, a part of our “Research in Action” series, is FREE for the ASOR community, but registration is required.
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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 
The texts of the ancient Near East and eastern Mediterranean Bronze and Iron Ages (including the Hebrew Bible) hint at the use of psychotropic substances (“hallucinogens”) in religious and shamanistic rituals. But the archaeological evidence for this is thin on the ground. This talk will look at the various available hallucinogenic substances and at recent research that indicates their consumption by human beings before examining artifacts that Dr. Ilan (and now others) believe are related to achieving altered states of consciousness. These include ring kernoi, seal impressions from the Aegean region, metal sceptres from the Chalcolithic period, ivory wands from the Late Bronze and Iron Ages, and the altars from the Iron Age temple at Tel Arad. The “high place” takes on a new meaning!
A native of Los Angeles, David llan was the director of the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology at the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem from 2003 to 2024. He has excavated at Tel Arad, Tel Malhata, Tel Yoqneam and Tel Megiddo and directed the excavations at Tel Dan from 2005 to 2022. He teaches at the Hebrew Union College and has taught at Tel Aviv University, Hebrew University, Johns Hopkins University and spent a sabbatical year in 2019-2020 at the Center for the Study of Origins of the University of Colorado, Boulder. Dr. Ilan specializes in mortuary archaeology, the archaeology of religion and ritual, ground stone artifacts, ceramic typology and technology, and the Chalcolithic period, the Middle Bronze Age and the early Iron Age of the southern Levant. He is the editor of the journal NGSBA Archaeology and the monograph series of the Nelson Glueck School. Dr. Ilan has published three final excavation reports and numerous articles in scholarly journals and in the popular press. His most recent articles deal with the praxis and paraphernalia of ritual action and religious belief in the ancient Near East, including the use of psychotropic substances.