2023 SPEAKERS
Dr. Carolyn Kennedy, professor at Texas A&M University
The Gaspe Maritime Archaeology Project
Gaspe Bay is located in eastern Quebec and was visited by early European ships in order to fish for cod. The ships were large and technically advanced, yet some of their features are still unknown. The Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A & M has surveyed the area hoping to find wrecks of these ships. This lecture will present the results of the remote-sensing survey, the documentation efforts of the nautical materials, and the long-term goals of the project.
I am a nautical archaeologist with a focus on North American maritime history. I received my Master’s and PhD from Texas A&M University’s Nautical Archaeology Program where my thesis and dissertation examined the hulls of four 19th-century steamboats in Lake Champlain, Vermont, analyzing how their designs differed and developed over the course of the century as shipbuilders sought to create the ideal hull for the novel steam propulsion. After graduating, I spent a year as a research associate using cutting-edge laser-scanning technology to document the disarticulated timbers from three historic shipwrecks in Alexandria, Virginia, and reconstructing the ships digitally to better understand their original design and use.
Currently, I am co-directing the Gaspé Maritime Archaeology Project, launched in 2019, which seeks to study the maritime heritage and nautical archaeology of early European colonization and subsistence activities of eastern Québec and Canada. In addition to my interests in the historical and maritime archaeology of Canada and the United States, my research specialties and teaching interests also include public archaeology, analytical archaeology, and the conservation of archaeological materials.
Dr. Elizabeth Murphy, AP of Roman Archaeology in the Department of Classics at FSU
Potters in the Roman East: Daily life of an everyday profession in the Roman Empire
Dr. Murphy will discuss the everyday working lives of ancient potters. With many hundreds of kilns documented from the Mediterranean, with elaborate trade networks reconstructed from distributed pottery, and with workshops appearing in a range of settings (from cities to rural estates), potters and their ceramic products are the most archaeologically visible craft profession of the ancient world, yet we have no biographical accounts or personal narratives from the period on the lives of these workers. Using the rich archaeological record, she will investigate their workplaces and working lives—from the technologies of production to the rituals and magic of workshops.
Elizabeth A. Murphy (PhD, Joukowsky Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, Brown University) is an archaeologist specializing in the study of the Mediterranean during the Roman Imperial and Late Antique periods. Her research and teaching concerns the social and economic organization of the Roman world; more specifically, her work focuses on the history and archaeology of labor, production, and technology, with complementary interests in ancient urbanism and the Roman military. She is a specialist in material culture studies, with particular emphasis on the artifactual record of crafts production, and her fieldwork projects have spanned the ancient Mediterranean world from Asia Minor to Italy. She currently co-directs the Landscape Archaeology of Southwest Sardinia project (LASS), a diachronic landscape project in the modern region of Sulcis-Iglesias (Sardinia, Italy). With LASS, she is investigating the settlement organization, landscape exploitation, and daily life practices of this rural region during the period of the Roman Empire.
Dr. Emily Zavodny, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Central Florida
Building the Seasonal Round: faunal and isotopic evidence for agro-pastoral scheduling in prehistoric Croatia
Today the Lika region of central Croatia is considered an unpredictable and resource-poor environment. Though this characterization is assumed to have held true in prehistoric times as well, the Late Bronze Age (1200-800 BC) is characterized by the seemingly rapid emergence of economic and sociopolitical complexity throughout the area. These newly centralized populations and systems demanded increased economic specialization to sustain them, but were also more susceptible to risk caused by both normal environmental variation and inevitable but erratic crises. In Lika the precise scheduling of subsistence activities – planting, herding, harvesting- would have been critical given the area’s short summers, long winters, and unpredictable frosts.
Results from Summer 2019 excavations at one Late Bronze Age hillfort site, Piplica, provide an opportunity to identify and characterize this agricultural cycle. Here we integrate faunal analysis with light isotope ratios derived from bone and teeth (carbon, oxygen, nitrogen) to better understand how prehistoric farmers scheduled their activities in order to successfully balance the demands of a newly centralized population with local environmental constraints.
ABOUT EMILY: "I am an environmental archaeologist specializing in paleoecology, zooarchaeology, and isotope geochemistry. I am broadly interested in how past human and animal populations adapted to marginal landscapes, resource scarcity, and/or changing climate and environments. My current research focuses on the introduction and acclimatization of domesticated animals (cattle, sheep, goats, pigs) to different ecosystems in the Balkans and their enduring impact on human behavior and local landscapes. I have active field and lab projects based on my ongoing work in Croatia, and am currently developing a zooarchaeology and stable isotope prep lab here at UCF."Dr. Nancy Thomas, Professor Emerita of Art History Jacksonville University
Was Herodotus Right? Lions in Ancient Greece
Modern scholars scoff at Herodotus because he said real lions existed in ancient Greece. Was he right after all? Myths and art are not good enough proof. Even a few real lion bones could be the remains of imported pets, or pelts. Since the 1970s, however, this picture has totally changed as more and more Panthera leo bones have been unearthed all over Greece. Combining different kinds of evidence, Nancy R. Thomas, Professor Emerita of Art History at Jacksonville University, gives us a new, lion’s eye view of life in ancient Greece.
RECENT ARCHAEOLOGY NEWS
When Did Hominins Begin to Produce Tools?
LEIPZIG, GERMANY—According to a Science News report, Tomos Proffitt of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and his colleagues suggest that it may be necessary to develop new guidelines for evaluating whether or not stone flakes were produced by ancient hominins on purpose or by accident. Proffitt and his team members identified more than 200 complete and fragmented stone flakes at 40 locations in southern Thailand where long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis) use rocks to crack open oil palm nuts. Sharp-edged flakes sometimes break off the monkeys’ pounding stones inadvertently in the process. These flakes resemble those thought to have been produced on purpose by ancient hominins living in East Africa between 3.3 and 1.56 million years ago, Proffitt explained. The team members did observe some differences between the flakes left behind by macaques and those uncovered in East Africa, however. For example, many of the macaque flakes are damaged only on one side, while many of the hominin flakes are damaged on two sides. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Science Advances. To read about a 4,500-year-old burial of a rhesus macaque at Shahr-i-Sokhta, go to "World Roundup: Iran."
Sphinx Uncovered in Upper Egypt
QENA, EGYPT—Ahram Online reports that traces of a shrine, including a sphinx with the smiling face of an individual who is believed to be a Roman emperor, were uncovered at the site of the Horus Temple in the Dendera Temple complex by a team of researchers led by Mamdouh El-Damaty of Ain Shams University. El-Damaty said that the shrine had a two-level platform and a ramp, which had been carved from limestone. Inside the shrine, he and his team members found a mudbrick basin built during the Byzantine era and a ladder covered with plaster. The sphinx was found within this basin, El-Damaty said. A Roman stela carved with Demotic and hieroglyphic inscriptions was found beneath the statue. Its text could help to identify the face of the sphinx, he explained. To read about innovative research on Roman mummy portraits from the Fayum region of Lower Egypt, go to "At Face Value."
CURRENT ARCHAEOLOGY MAGAZINE
Click the cover image for more details
The Ancient Promise of Water
How people of the past harnessed the power of the world’s most precious resource
The Shaman's Secrets
9,000 years ago, two people were buried in Germany with hundreds of ritual objects—who were they?
An Enigmatic Empire Rises
A newly discovered 3,500-year-old palace in Iraqi Kurdistan provides a rare look at a regional superpower
End of an Era
Archaeologists discover that the ancient city of Ephesus met a fiery demise
A Caliph's Shining City
In southern Spain, Umayyad rulers built a sprawling complex to reflect their unique vision of the medieval Islamic world