ASOR ANNOUNCES REGAN BAKER AS NEW MEMBERSHIP COORDINATOR
ASOR is pleased to announce Regan Baker as ASOR’s new Membership Coordinator! Regan Baker graduated from The George Washington University with a Bachelor’s of Art in Archaeology in May 2023. In February, Regan accepted the role of Office Coordinator and has excelled in her position working with ASOR members and staff at the James F. Strange Center.
This announcement comes with news of Katherine Schmitt’s departure from ASOR as Membership Coordinator. Katherine will be leaving to travel the United States and will be replaced by Regan Baker as the new contact for all ASOR Membership inquiries on May 24, 2024.
It has been a joy to work for ASOR and Katherine would like to thank the ASOR community. She will greatly miss all of the amazing members and staff she was able to meet and work with during her past 2 years at ASOR.
As Membership Coordinator, Regan will be responsible for the growth of both the membership and Friends of ASOR programs, handling membership processing and fulfillment, supporting the Annual Meeting, and website maintenance. Regan looks forward to continuing to work with ASOR’s members and donors!
Moni Islam joined ASOR on April 29 as the new Office Coordinator. He has a Master’s of Arts in Archaeology from Durham University in the United Kingdom, as well as a Bachelor’s of Arts in Anthropology and Global Affairs from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He has been familiar with ASOR for many years, including having won a 2021 ASOR Summer Stipend Award to work remotely on the Jezreel Expedition Publication Project where he helped organize the project’s open database, conduct research on a Palestinian village, and compile relevant photos and resources.
We are all sensing people, and the basic physical structure of our sensing organs has not changed for many thousands of years. But how did ancient humans perceive and experience sensory stimuli in their environment differently than we do today? Dr. Thomason sets out to explore this topic for the ancient Mesopotamians in particular. The history of the senses and explorations of sensory experiences in the ancient world have been increasingly the focus of scholarly research. Archaeologists, art historians and textual scholars have tried to recreate past sensory environments and experiences by using evidence from images, artifacts and ancient texts of all kinds.
In this lecture, Dr. Thomason, a specialist in ancient Mesopotamian material culture, explores how ancient Mesopotamian perceptions of sensory experiences can be compared to our own modern ones, by trying to understand the way that Mesopotamians sensed their environment and material culture and what perceptions they had of certain types of objects, such as metal bowls, wooden gates, and textiles.
Matthew J. Suriano is an Associate Professor in the Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland where he teaches Hebrew Bible, ancient religions, and archaeology. A former fellow at the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, Suriano has also participated in several archaeological excavations and surveys in Israel, most recently at Tel Burna. He has written extensively on death and burial in the ancient world, and his book A History of Death in the Hebrew Bible (Oxford University Press, 2018) won the American Society for Overseas Research’s Frank Moore Cross Award. His research interests also involve Jerusalem and he is currently studying the monolithic tombs in Silwan.
Dr. Darren P. Ashby joined ASOR as ASOR CHI’s Programs Manager on March 1. He previously worked at ASOR from 2017 to 2019 where he reported on threats and damage to cultural heritage and led a project to document the current condition of Jewish cultural heritage in Iraq and Syria. In his new role, Darren will work with CHI leadership to support ongoing projects, strengthen relationships between ASOR’s members and partners, and further develop ASOR’s abilities to protect, preserve, and promote the rich cultural heritage of Southwest Asia and North Africa in collaboration with local communities, heritage professionals, and civil society organizations.
Regan Baker graduated from The George Washington University with a Bachelor’s of Art in Archaeology in May 2023. As an archaeology student, Regan quickly became familiar with ASOR, and she is excited to be coming on as the Office Coordinator. Previously, she interned at the Colosseum while studying abroad in Rome, Italy during the Fall 2022 semester. There, she worked in collections storage under the guidance of a supervising archaeologist and assisted with a project on marble pieces from the Imperial Box.
For the people of Mesopotamia, the past was a source of knowledge and inspiration. Their reverence, both in terms of preserving early buildings and monuments and reviving images and ancient writing styles, is evident in archaeological and textual records. While Mesopotamian monuments and images were produced as historical works, inscribed with texts that marked them clearly and linked them to specific events and times, their efficacy was understood to be unlimited. Dated to the reign of king Nazi-Maruttash (ca. 1307–1282 BCE), the stele of the Goddess Lama, currently in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum, offers an excellent opportunity to explore Mesopotamian interaction with the past during the Kassite period (ca. 1574–1157 BCE). Through visual and textual analysis, this talk examines the survival of Lama imagery in this period. It reflects on the religious/political significance of the stele’s production within a broader context. The aim is to demonstrate that the crudely carved and seemingly unimaginative reuse of an earlier protective goddess figure was a deliberately archaizing image and an inspired citation of the past.
Helen Malko is the Associate Director of the Stanford Humanities Center, where she oversees various academic programs in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. Before joining Stanford, she worked at the American Center of Research (ACOR) and Columbia University Global Center in Amman, Jordan. Helen holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology and Archaeology from Stony Brook University and a BA from Baghdad University, and she is trained in cultural heritage and preservation studies. She has been awarded multiple fellowships at the Metropolitan Museum and Columbia University in New York and has conducted fieldwork and capacity-building projects in Iraq, Jordan, and Turkey.
Pp. 4–13: “Religion(s) in Seals: Old and New Challenges,” by Fabio Porzia
Pp. 14-19: “Mastering the Seven-Headed Serpent: A Stamp Seal from Hazor Provides a Missing Link between Cuneiform and Biblical Mythology,” by Christoph Uehlinger
Pp. 20-25: “Stamp Seals as Jewelry: Identifying Body Ornaments through Seal Impressions,” by Noa Ranzer
Pp. 26-31: “Making a Good Impression: A Typology of Mounted Seal Impressions in the Middle Bronze Age Southern Levant,” by Tatjana Beuthe
Pp. 32-40: “‘Male until Proven Otherwise?’: Searching for Women with the Help of Inscribed Stamp Seals from Jerusalem,” by Bruno Biermann
Pp. 42-52: “Scratching the Surface of Middle Bronze Age Scarabs: Investigating Enigmatic Marks on Stamp Seals from Lachish and Megiddo,” by Nadia Ben-Marzouk and Ben Greet
For the last two decades, the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project has explored the coastal region of Pyla village. Located 10 km east of Larnaka and immediately below the famous Late Bronze Age site atop the Kokkinokremos coastal ridge, Koutsopetria featured a now-infilled embayment which likely served as a harbor in antiquity. The location of the site near an ancient harbor and astride the major road running between the ancient cities of Kition and Salamis likely led to the fortification of the prominent coastal height of Vigla in the Hellenistic period. This site likely served as strategic outpost for mercenaries during the tumultuous period after Alexander the Great’s death when his successors battled for control over the island and the Mediterranean littoral. The forces occupying the fort appear to have abandoned it within a generation of its construction leaving behind a fascinating window into the tumultuous life of this strategic site.
During the Roman and Late Roman periods, a prosperous town developed in the coastal zone. Excavations in the 1990s by the Department of Antiquities revealed parts of an Early Christian basilica and the intensive survey carried out by our team showed that the site had trade connections across the Mediterranean. The rise and decline of the Roman period settlement at Koutsopetria was less abrupt than that of its Hellenistic predecessor on Vigla, but our work at Koutsopetria similarly offers a window into an era of significant change on the island. Our excavations and survey at Koutsopetria have revealed that the church and surrounding settlement likely experienced a gradual abandonment over the course of the 7th and 8th centuries. This suggests that the site did not succumb to a catastrophic end at the hands of Arab raiders, but declined gradually perhaps as a result of the changing economic and political landscape of the region.
R. Scott Moore is Distinguished University Professor of History at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
William Caraher is Associate Professor and teaches in the Department of History and American Indian Studies at the University of North Dakota.
Curating an exhibition of contemporary art comes with the incredible opportunity of collaborating with living artists to realize together how to give voice and vision to their work. Doing so in the space of an archaeological museum brings with it the added opportunity to revisit and reevaluate traditional object narratives and museological methods. For centuries Western cultural institutions and museum exhibitions have advanced historical narratives of ancient West Asia with a singular, authoritative voice, predominantly disconnected from the present. Contemporary installations have the power to forefront and celebrate the complexity and continuity of this rich cultural heritage, presenting postcolonial perspectives and thought-provoking artistic responses that draw on diverse lived experiences, memories, and imagination.
In this webinar, Kiersten Neumann will discuss powerful examples of the pairing of contemporary art and archaeological objects from her own experience as an art historian, archaeologist, and curator, demonstrating some of the ways in which such contemporary interventions, including those by local and diaspora artists and communities, can bring a uniquely humanizing perspective to this history.