Here are photos from our Member Appreciation Event on May 12, 2023. We enjoyed a tour of the Lighthouse Archaeological Maritime Program in St. Augustine, conducted by Chuck Meide, director of the organization.
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2023 MEETINGS & PRESENTATIONS
Join us again in September for more fascinating presentations.
Our speaker presentations take place at noon, in Building 51 at the University of North Florida, Jacksonville, (1 UNF Dr, Jacksonville, FL 32224) AND/OR on Zoom. The lectures are free and open to the public. After the lecture, complimentary refreshments may be served in the Physical Anthropology Lab. On Saturdays, parking is free and the staff/faculty/vendor spaces are open to everyone.
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
Risk of Flintknapping Injury Tabulated
CAIRO, EGYPT—Ahram Online reports that two embalming workshops and two tombs have been unearthed at the Saqqara necropolis. Mostafa Waziri of the Supreme Council of Activities said that the rectangular-shaped workshops have been dated to the 30th Dynasty (380–343 B.C.) and the Ptolemaic period (304–30 B.C.). The first workshop contains the remains of beds thought to have been used to hold the deceased during the mummification process. Made of stone covered with plaster, the beds were equipped with gutters. Pottery, tools, and ritual vessels were also recovered from this workshop. Stone beds, pottery, bronze tools, and animal remains were recovered from the second workshop, which was constructed with mud walls and stone floors. “According to initial studies, it is believed that this particular workshop was used for the mummification of sacred animals,” Waziri said. The first of the two tombs, dated to 2400 B.C., is a flat-roofed structure that belonged to an official named Ne Hesut Ba, who served as head scribe and priest of Horus and Maat during the Old Kingdom’s Fifth Dynasty. The second tomb, dated to about 1400 B.C. and the New Kingdom’s 18th Dynasty, had been cut from the rock and belonged to a priest named Men Kheber. To read about another mummy workshop at Saqqara, go to "Mummification Workshop," one of ARCHAEOLOGY's Top 10 Discoveries of the Decade.
Spanish Cave Was a Popular Destination in Prehistory
KENT, OHIO—According to a statement released by Kent State University, the process of breaking, flaking, and shaping stones to create tools may have been a life-threatening undertaking for early humans. Metin I. Eren of Kent State University and Stephen Lycett of the University of Buffalo and their colleagues, Nicholas Gala and Michelle Bebber, surveyed 173 modern flintknappers, and determined that knapping is more dangerous than they had realized from their own experiences. The reported injuries included running a stone flake across bone like a wood planer, deep cuts into the outer covering of bones, and one incident requiring a tourniquet after piercing an ankle with a stone flake. Thirty-five of the people surveyed had even experienced a small stone flake fly into one of their eyes. These sorts of wounds could have been fatal in an era before emergency hospitals and antibiotics, so that early people literally risked life and limb to make tools, Eren said. Passing on the knowledge of flintknapping may therefore have included ways to reduce risks, he added. “The injury risks involved in knapping are exactly the kind of activity that would have made learning from a skilled individual more likely since it would help reduce the risks associate with individual learning,” he concluded. Read the original scholarly article about this research in American Antiquity. To read more about flintknapping as experimental archaeology, go to "The Neolithic Toolkit."
CURRENT ARCHAEOLOGY MAGAZINE
Click the cover image for more details
Peru's Great Urban Experiment
A millennium ago, the Chimú built a new way of life in the vast city of Chan Chan
The Man in the Middle
How an ingenious royal official transformed Persian conquerors into proper Egyptian pharaohs
Lost Roman Resort
In the Bay of Naples, miles of ruins recall the splendor of ancient imperial holidays
Reusing the Past
Archaeologists discover how an embattled Assyrian king fortified Nineveh
Rituals of the Cattle Raiders
Rock art in the mountains of South Africa tells the story of how the Khoe and San peoples resisted enslavement