2025 Shepard Urgent Action Grant: Emergency Stabilization of Cuneiform Tablets and Sealings at Kurd Qaburstan: a Conservation Partnership
Tiffany Earley-Spadoni (University of Central Florida)
Thanks to ASOR’s support, cultural heritage was preserved, conservation skills were shared, and the story of ancient Kurd Qaburstan became a little clearer. The excavators also thank the University of Central Florida College of Arts and Humanities for co-funding the conservation endeavor, and the National Science Foundation for supporting broader research at Kurd Qaburstan.
Since the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Ark of the Covenant has become one of, if not the most famous biblical “artifact,” despite the fact that scholars don’t agree on what might have happened to it or if it even really existed. Described in the Bible as a wooden chest plated with gold, adorned by cherubim, the Ark is said to have carried the tablets of the Ten Commandments and was one of the locations where God manifested His presence amongst the Israelites. The description may be straightforward and simple, but the Ark has proven to be the subject of a diverse variety of interpretations since biblical times, ranging from an imitation of an ancient Egyptian religious object to an advanced radioactive energy source capable of mass destruction. Ethiopian Christians believe the Ark resides in a church in Africa, while some have looked for it in the ancient Irish city of Tara. Early religious interpreters looked for coded messages in the biblical instructions on how to build the Ark, and modern faith communities build their own replica Arks for use in faith healing services and in Old Testament themed wax museums. All of these communities generally agree on what the Ark looked like, but what the Ark is or was, and why it matters is a different story. Join Kevin McGeough, in a lecture and conversation moderated by Jennie Ebeling and William Caraher, as he 
explores the interpretation of the Ark of the Covenant from the past two thousand years. Introducing his new book, Readers of the Lost Ark, Kevin will discuss how the Ark has been understood in different communities, from ancient Jewish and Christian commentators, through Medieval theologians, to modern ancient aliens theorists, misguided explorers, and Indiana Jones fan communities. There will be something for any “friend of ASOR” interest in this wide-ranging talk!
Kevin M. McGeough is Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Geography & Environment at the University of Lethbridge and holds a Board of Governor’s Research Chair in Archaeological Theory and Reception. McGeough is currently co-director of excavations at Busayra in Jordan and Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump UNESCO World Heritage Site in Canada. He is co-editor of the journal Alberta Archaeological Review, and author of The Ancient Near East in the Nineteenth Century, and Representations of Antiquity in Film: From Griffith to Grindhouse. His most recent book, Readers of the Lost Ark: Imagining the Ark of the Covenant from Ancient Times to the Present is available from Oxford University Press.
Jennie Ebeling is a Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Evansville. Ebeling co-directed the Jezreel Expedition in Israel and is a ground stone artifact specialist with a particular interest in women’s contributions to food and drink technologies in ancient southwest Asia. She edits ASOR’s Archaeological Reports Series and is an editor-at-large for Eisenbrauns, an imprint of Penn State University Press. The co-editor of five volumes, she is the author of Women’s Lives in Biblical Times (T&T Clark, Int’l) and is currently completing a monograph on ethnography, household archaeology, and representations of life in biblical Israel.
Bill Caraher teaches in the Department of History and American Indian Studies at the University of North Dakota. He is the editor of the Annual of ASOR and co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Archaeology (2019) and recently published The Archaeology of Contemporary America (2025). He is an archaeologist who has worked in Greece, Cyprus, and the United States.
Tasha Vorderstrasse is the Manager of the Continuing Education program at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, West Asia and North Africa (ISAC) at the University of Chicago. In her job, she coordinates the ISAC’s adult education program, in which she also teaches, in addition to giving ISAC Museum tours and providing other programming to University of Chicago students. She is also responsible for the ISAC social media pages. She received her PhD in Near Eastern Archaeology from the University of Chicago in 2004 and is interested in questions of how different forms of material culture can help us better understand how individuals constructed their identities over time. Her work on the reception of ancient and medieval West Asia and North Africa focuses on different ways in which various individuals understood and experienced the region, specifically looking at the collecting of antiquities, 19th-century photography, and how Black artists, historians, and intellectuals examined the ancient world.
