FRIENDS OF ASOR WEBINARS
New Excavations at Nessana, Negev: Late Antique Pilgrimage Hub on the Desert Fringe
Friends of ASOR present the next webinar of the 2025-2026 season on April 29, 2026, at 12:30 pm EDT, presented by Yana Tchekhanovets. This webinar will be free and open to the public. Registration through Zoom (with a valid email address) is required. This webinar will be recorded and all registrants will be sent a recording link in the days following the webinar.
The ancient settlement of Nessana, located in the southwestern Negev, on the modern Israeli–Egyptian border, is a key site for the study of early Christian pilgrimage. Serving as the main caravan hub on the Christian pilgrimage road from the Holy Land to Sinai, Nessana enjoys all the economic benefits of the sacred route and develops into a flourishing urbanized village with caravanserais and numerous churches. This lecture will present the preliminary results of the first four seasons of renewed excavations at the site.
Yana Tchekhanovets is an archaeologist and professor at the Department of Archaeology at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She specializes in late antique archaeology, Caucasian Christian communities of Byzantine Palestine, and the archaeology of pilgrimage. After many years of fieldwork in Jerusalem, Yana is now a director of the new archaeological project at ancient Nessana, Negev.
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Neville McFerrin holds a PhD in Ancient Mediterranean Art and Archaeology from the Interdepartmental Program of Ancient Mediterranean Art and Archaeology at the University of Michigan. She now serves as an Assistant Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Art in the Department of Art History at the University of North Texas. Her research focuses upon intersections between dress, perception, materiality, and embodiment at the sites of Persepolis and Pompeii. Her published and forthcoming work explores a range of topics from reconsiderations of gender in the reliefs of the Apadana to the fashionability of pearls in late first century BCE Pompeii. It has appeared in multiple journals and edited volumes including Fashioned Selves: Dress and Identity in Antiquity, Fashion Studies, the Handbook of the Senses in the Ancient Near East, and most recently in The Routledge Companion to Seals and Seal Studies in Antiquity. She is currently working on a monograph that considers dress as a lens through which to reinterpret the site of Persepolis.
Since their beginnings, archaeologies of Anatolia have occupied a liminal position within the larger archaeological traditions of the “Old World.” Seen as a geography in contact with, but never fully belonging to, the archaeologies of Mesopotamia, the Mediterranean, the Aegean, or the Black Sea over the longue durée, certain combinations of time and space in the Anatolian past have been siloed into various sub-fields that either look outwards to neighboring geographies or stay exclusively Anatolian. For instance, the Middle Bronze Age of the central plateau is discussed within frameworks of Mesopotamian archaeology because of the trade routes that linked Assyria to Anatolia, while the period immediately succeeding it has been studied mostly in isolation as a distinctly Anatolian phenomenon, even though the Hittite Empire of the Late Bronze Age thrived on the trade networks of the Middle Bronze Age. Similarly, the classical cities of western Anatolia are staples of Greek and Roman archaeology and are seen as part of a larger Mediterranean world, while the Bronze Age in this same geography falls between the cracks of Anatolian and Aegean traditions, remaining an understudied topic even today. Befitting the common trope of Anatolia as a bridge, the archaeologies of this geography have been fragmented into numerous transitions, some claimed by the larger Mediterranean world, while others remain distinctly Anatolian and idiosyncratic within scholarship.
In this talk, Dr. Durusu-Tanrıöver traces the lineage of this fragmentation across times, places, and people as varied as nineteenth-century European travelers to Anatolia, early Republican Ankara, continual coloniality, and Orientalism. Posing the questions of how we can define Anatolia and what its archaeologies can look like in the later twenty-first century CE, she makes the case for a connected Anatolian archaeology that can both claim its multiple constituents and contribute to the larger debates in Mediterranean archaeology. To this end, she will identify several directions including, but not limited to, deliberate theoretical engagement, multi-disciplinarity, and regional fieldwork looking beyond single sites.
Dr. Müge Durusu-Tanrıöver is an archaeologist whose research explores the strategies and impacts of ancient imperialism on border regions in the eastern Mediterranean during the Bronze and Iron Ages. Her publications and fieldwork to date have mainly focused on the Hittite Empire, approaching this state from its edges through a myriad of lenses, including material culture and hybridity, artistic production, the rhetoric of kingship, and place-making. She holds a PhD in Archaeology and the Ancient World from Brown University and is currently an Assistant Professor in Temple University’s Department of Art History. Since 2019, Dr. Durusu-Tanrıöver has directed the Polatlı Landscape Archaeology and Survey Project (PLAS), a fieldwork initiative that seeks to understand the imperial strategies of the Hittite Empire along its western border, as well as the responses of local communities to the expansion of Hittite power in the region. Dr. Durusu-Tanrıöver has received numerous grants for her research, including a 
Dr. Carl Walsh holds a PhD in Archaeology from University College London and is an assistant exhibition curator at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. He is dedicated to crafting accessible and engaging stories about the ancient world and has curated multiple exhibitions at ISAW covering the ancient societies of Iraq, Etruria, Islamic Spain, and Egypt, as well as early modern art and photography. He has co-edited Teaching Ancient Egypt in Museums: Pedagogies in Practice, which delves into ethical best practices for engaging learners about ancient Egypt using museum objects and is currently working on a follow up volume that looks more broadly about teaching about ancient West Asia, North Africa, and the Mediterranean in museums. Carl’s research focuses on Bronze Age cross-cultural interactions and his current projects focus on the material culture—such as board games, cosmetics, furniture, and pottery—of the kingdom of Kerma (Kush) in modern Sudan, and considers how these objects reveal the complex interactions between societies across North Africa.
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Benyamin Storchan is a research excavation archaeologist for the Jerusalem Region of the Israel Antiquities Authority. He is currently a PhD candidate at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, writing a dissertation on Byzantine churches in the Holy Land during the transition to the early Islamic Period. Storchan has directed several large-scale excavations, including the Glorious Martyr excavations, the Pre- and Proto-historic settlements at Eshtaol, and landscape archaeology projects near Bet Shemesh. He has published multiple articles on Byzantine churches in the Holy Land, oil lamp production in the Roman period, and numerous final excavation reports.
Sarah Wenner, PhD, is the jointly appointed Provenance Researcher & Object Historian at the Cincinnati Art Museum and Assistant Professor at the American Center of Research (Amman, Jordan). A specialist in ancient ceramics and the Nabataeans, Wenner has worked in Jordan for over a decade, including at Petra, Humayma, Wadi Ramm, Aqaba, Khirbet al-Khalde, and Udhruh, as well as at Pompeii (Italy), Tharros (Sardinia), and Monticello (USA). Her research investigates the building of Roman cities through the recycling of ancient waste.
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