17吃瓜SEEKS NOMINATIONS FOR VICE PRESIDENT
The Officers Nominations Committee of 17吃瓜announces a general call for nominations and applications for individuals to be considered for the position of Vice President of the Corporation. This is a three-year term of office beginning on January 1, 2026 and ending on December 31, 2028. A general description of the Office of Vice President and its responsibilities is in the 17吃瓜Bylaws, 听(see Article IV, Section 4.7). Nominating an officer is an important way for members to participate in the governance of their organization, and we encourage you to self-nominate or nominate others. All 17吃瓜Members in good standing are eligible for nomination as Vice President.
The Vice President鈥檚 primary responsibilities are to chair the Chairs Coordinating Council and serve on ASOR鈥檚 Executive Committee. The Vice President will also perform additional duties as the Board of Trustees, the Executive Committee, the President, or the Board Chair may prescribe from time to time. In the event that both the President and Chair of the Board are unable to be present to discharge the duties of the President, the Vice President shall perform the duties of the President until a new President can be elected. The Vice President agrees to attend three meetings each year at his/her own expense: the 17吃瓜Board of Trustees meetings in November and May, and the Executive Committee retreat in January or February. General information on ASOR鈥檚 mission statement, bylaws, and strategic plan can be found .
to Bob Mullins (), Chair of the Officers Nominations Committee. Review of applications and nominations will begin on August 15, 2025 and continue until the position is filled. The Officers Nominations Committee expects to present a nominee for Vice President to the 17吃瓜Board of Trustees for a vote during the November 23, 2025 Board meeting in Boston, MA. Nominations should include the candidate鈥檚 name, a one-paragraph academic biography 鈥� including membership and activities in ASOR, a brief statement as to why the candidate would be appropriate for the position, and the candidate鈥檚 contact information. Self-nominations including the same information are encouraged. The Officers Nominations Committee will ask semi-finalists to submit a CV and vision statement.
17吃瓜is an Equal Opportunity Employer. 17吃瓜affirms its commitment to equality of opportunity and pledges that it will not practice or permit discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, gender, national origin, age, religion, creed, disability, veteran鈥檚 status, sexual orientation, or gender identity. The Board actively seeks candidates who represent the diversity within its membership for positions of leadership.
Nearly three thousand years ago, at the ancient site of Nimrud (near modern Mosul, Iraq), a succession of ten Neo-Assyrian kings reigned in collaboration with their queens from the magnificence of the Northwest Palace, the seat of the empire and center of their world. Too often overshadowed by the well documented legacy of Neo-Assyrian kings, this presentation illuminates the queens who reigned with them. Dr. Gansell focuses on the queens of Nimrud鈥檚 Northwest Palace (c. 865鈥�705 BCE) because it is here, in the late 1980s, that Iraqi archaeologists uncovered their partially intact royal tombs. The tombs contained heaps of precious jewelry and regalia, along with cuneiform inscriptions, and even some skeletal remains. Putting together these artifacts of death and connecting them to the art, architecture, and written record of the palace, we can learn about the names, lives, appearance, royal duties, and religious roles of the queens. Piece by piece, and layer by layer, across about 150 years of evidence, we discover the beauty, power, and presence of Nimrud鈥檚 Northwest Palace queens in life, death, and for eternity.
Dr. Amy Gansell is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art & Design at St. John鈥檚 University, where she serves as the Assistant Department Chair and Coordinator for the Women鈥檚, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Interdisciplinary Minor. She received her PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University in 2008. From 2008 to 2010, Dr. Gansell held a full-time position with the US Department of State as the Associate Coordinator for Afghan and Iraqi Cultural Heritage. In this capacity, she worked on diplomatic projects to restore and build professional capacity at the Afghan National Museum, the National Museum of Iraq, and the site of Babylon. Dr. Gansell returned to academic life in 2010 as a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University鈥檚 Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, after which she taught art history to art and design students at Pratt Institute and the State University of New York鈥檚 Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT).
Pp. 4鈥�14: 鈥淔rom Seasonal Hunting Base to Permanent Settlement: Insights from the High-altitude Hormangan Site,鈥� by Morteza Khanipour and Masashi Abe
Pp. 16-23: 鈥淭appeh Ziar: A Chalcolithic Site along the Zayandeh Rud River Basin (ZRB) in Isfahan, Iran,鈥� by Jaleh Kamalizad and Alireza Sardari
Pp. 24-34: 鈥淎rt as the Child of Nature: Investigating the Interplay between Human Society, Environment, and Artistic Production in Prehistoric Bronze Age Cyprus,鈥� by Zuzana Chovanec
Pp. 36-46: 鈥淎yios Iakovos-Dhima, Ideological Stake-Claiming, and Social Reproduction in Northeast Cyprus in the Late Bronze Age,鈥� by Thomas John William Humphrey
Pp. 48-56: 鈥淩itual Banqueting at a Hellenistic Sacred Area on the top of Fabrika Hill, Nea Paphos,鈥� by Jolanta M艂ynarczyk
Pp. 58-69: 鈥淢edieval Settlement Excavations at Arpa, Armenia: Regional Context and Chronology for a Silk Road Town,鈥� by Astghik Babajanyan and Kate Franklin
Pp. 70-77: 鈥淏yzantine Epitaphs: Unearthing New Sources of Christian Socioreligious Landscape from Southeastern Al-Karak Plateau (Southern Jordan),鈥� by Musallam R. Al-Rawahneh
The death of a child is perhaps the most painful, heartbreaking, and seemingly unnatural experience we have the displeasure of living with. Yet it is difficult to say with certainty whether this sentiment was shared by the inhabitants of ancient Isarel. Some anthropologists have found that in societies which experience a high rate of infant mortality and childhood death, parents remain emotionally detached from their children and do not mourn their deaths. We know that ancient Israel, like many pre-industrial societies, had a very high rate of infant mortality and childhood deaths. Did Israelites therefore care for their dying children? Did they give them a proper burial? Did they consider their children part of their families? The Hebrew Bible does not offer much information on the subject. Every time a child鈥檚 death is referenced, it is as a plot device in a narrative to prove an ethical, moral, or theological point. Abraham must sacrifice his child to show his commitment to God; Elijah shows off his wonder-working skills when he revives a dead child; David and Bathsheba鈥檚 first child dies because David committed murder and adultery; and Solomon demonstrates his wisdom when he commands a child to be cut in half. Yet, none of the biblical texts discuss how, or even if, Israelites cared for their dying children. Fortunately, there is another source to which we can turn to answer such questions: archaeology.
Kristine Henriksen Garroway is Professor of Bible at the HUC-JIR鈥檚 Skirball Campus in Los Angeles where she joined the faculty in 2011. She received her doctorate in Hebrew Bible and Cognate Studies at the HUC-JIR/Cincinnati in 2009. She has spent time studying and researching in Israel and has participated in excavations at Ashkelon, Tel Dor, and Tel Dan. Garroway鈥檚 scholarship focuses on children using archaeology and texts of ancient Israel and Mesopotamia. She has published in various scholarly journals and is a regular contributor to . Garroway鈥檚 books include: Children in the Ancient Near Eastern Household(Eisenbrauns 2014), Growing Up in Ancient Israel: Children in Material Culture and Biblical Texts (Society of Biblical Literature 2018), and The Dying Child: the Death and Personhood of Children in Ancient Israel (Oxford, 2025). She is the recipient of the Biblical Archaeological Society鈥檚 2019 Publication Award for Best Book Relating to Hebrew Bible.
To imagine the medieval Silk Road is to conjure up images of exotic commerce: camel caravans crossing wind-swept dunes, bustling city bazaars, silks and spices spilling from saddlebags. If these images loom large in modern imaginations of the Silk Road, how did people actually living in the Middle Ages think about long distance trade and travel? Drawing on textual, architectural and archaeological evidence, this talk explores the social lives of people living not in the city centers of medieval commerce, but in the places in-between, along the road. Specifically, the talk invites us to spend some time along the roadside with medieval people in the Armenian highlands, where special-built caravan inns housed travelers heading for the Mediterranean, to China, to the Middle East, and north into the steppe, and where people had their own imaginaries of the wider medieval world. Kate Franklin will share aspects of her work in the Republic of Armenia which show how global cultures emerge hand-in-hand with local worlds.
Kate Franklin is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at Birkbeck, University of London. Kate is a landscape archaeologist and historian focused on the intersections of local and large-scale social worlds in the medieval landscapes of what is now the Republic of Armenia, where she has been co-PI of the Vayots Dzor Silk Road Survey for nearly a decade. Kate鈥檚 most recent book, Landscapes and Environments of the Middle Ages(Routledge 2023, co-authored with Michael Bintley) explores the cultural history of nature in the medieval period.
Upcoming anniversaries of American excavations offer an opportunity to reassess the importance of Carthage, famous for its contacts and conflicts with Greeks and Romans across the Mediterranean and infamous for its alleged ritual infanticide. Two American teams conducted excavations at the city鈥檚 liminal open-air votive precinct, where one finds cremated infant remains buried in urns beneath stone memorials bearing dedications to the Mistress, Tinnit Visage-of-Ba鈥榣, and to the Lord, Ba鈥榣 Hammon.
The centennial and golden anniversaries of American excavations fast approach鈥攐ne hundred years ago, F. W. Kelsey of the University of Michigan led a campaign under the auspices of the AIA (1925); fifty years ago, L. E. Stager of University of Chicago led another under the auspices of 17吃瓜(1976-1979). Both teams excavated in the same propri茅t茅 Regulus-Salammb么, with Stager鈥檚 Punic Project excavations picking up where Kelsey had left off. Even before the American campaigns, many stelae had already been extracted through clandestine or amateur excavation, including hasty extractions made just before Kelsey arrived on site, depriving us of their context. Nevertheless, our archival research at the University of Michigan has uncovered excavation records that, in combination with the Punic Project records, allow us to locate stela in plan and section. We have made practice scans of stelae, in the Netherlands and Denmark, in anticipation of scanning individual stela now held in Tunisian museum store rooms. This talk will demonstrate how 3D models of individual stelae can be replaced into their original positions by using archival site plans and annotated photographs and in reference to the positions of those stelae still in situ, and it will demonstrate how we can create a precise scale model of the Regulus-Salammb么 sector.
Brien Garnand is a research associate of the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East (HMANE) and a visiting researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Near East (NINO), currently a member of a research group at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies (IIAS). He has contributed to the final excavation report from the 17吃瓜Punic Project Carthage excavations since 1993, recently co-editing a preview of that report in a thematic volume of the Journal of Ancient History (Infants as Votive Offerings 2023). Besides cataloging artifacts in the basement of the HMANE and in the store rooms of the Mus茅e national de Carthage, he has scoured the archives of the F. W. Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan and the J. B. Chabot archives at the Universit茅 catholique de Louvain in preparation for an exhibition timed to correspond with the issue of the Punic Project final report on the the 50th/100th anniversaries of American excavations. He once served as assistant director of the Stanford University Excavations at Mt. Polizzo in Sicily, and he has extensive experience in North Africa, both in field survey (Project Jerba鈥擴niversity of Pennsylvania/AAR/INP) and in excavation (Carthage Bir Messaouda鈥擴niversity of Amsterdam/INP). His current research focuses on votive stelae, both putting the formulaic-poetic language of Phoenician inscriptions into the context of Ancient Near Eastern literature and putting the sanctuary of Tinnit and Ba鈥榣 in Carthage into the context of votive precincts across the Mediterranean. A mobility grant from NINO (2022) allowed him to test 3D scanning methods, and a recent 17吃瓜Dar Ben Gacem fellowship (2023) supported a research visit to the Carthage precinct where he prepared a preliminary 3D site model.
Medical treatments in the ancient Mediterranean world were rudimentary and often unsuccessful, and so individuals routinely looked for divine aid to cure their afflictions. This lecture considers one of the most common forms of ritual healing employed in Roman and late antique Palestine: amulets. A variety of amulets will be considered in this talk. For example, some amulets contained longer texts written on thin metal sheets or pieces of papyrus, which were then rolled and placed in a case that could be attached to a person鈥檚 body. Other amulets took the form of rings, bracelets, pendants, and gemstones, which typically had shorter texts, often accompanied by vivid illustrations.
With circumstances of close cultural contacts鈥攕uch as prevailed in Palestine鈥攖he setting was ripe for Jews, Samaritans, and Christians to borrow forms of ritual healing that were perceived to be efficacious and to alter them to fit their own religious framework. This is particularly true for amulets, which employed similar techniques including the quotation of biblical passages and the use of magical symbols and names. As a result of these overlapping amulet traditions, it can be difficult in some cases even to be certain about the religious community to which the person who created the amulet or the person who wore the amulet belonged. The cultural and religious interactions revealed by amulets demonstrate the porousness of the boundaries that separated these communities, and made them the subject of polemical discourse among elite authors trying to police collective borders.
Megan Nutzman is Associate Professor of History at Old Dominion University. She received her PhD in Classics from the University of Chicago and holds an M.T.S. and a Th.M. from Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology. Her research focuses on the history and material culture of Greek and Roman cults, Jews, and Christians in the eastern Mediterranean, and especially on interactions among them. Her 2022 book, Contested Cures: Identity and Ritual Healing in Roman and Late Antique Palestine, received the Frank Moore Cross book award in 2023. It examines the various methods that people used to seek divine healing and the rhetoric of elite authors who used the acceptance or avoidance of certain healing rituals as markers of group identity. Some of her other publications have considered Jewish epitaphs from Rome, hot springs as sites of ritual healing, the relationship between amulets and tefillin, and the portrayal of Mary in the Protevangelium of James. She has received funding for her research from the Albright Institute for Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, from the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, from the American Council of Learned Societies, and from the National Endowment for the Humanities. At ODU, she teaches courses on ancient Greece and Rome and on early Christianity.
Jessica Nitschke is a Research Fellow and contract Lecturer in the Department of Ancient Studies at Stellenbosch University in South Africa; she is also the editor of ASOR鈥檚 outreach publication . Her research concerns the history and archaeology of the eastern Mediterranean in the first millennium BCE, especially interconnections between the Phoenicians, the Greek world, and Egypt. She co-edited Postcolonialism, Heritage, and the Built Environment: New Approaches to Architecture in Archaeology, published by Springer in 2020, and is currently working on a monograph on the Alexander Sarcophagus. She has carried out archaeological fieldwork at Tel Dor (Israel) and Tell Timai (Egypt), and currently excavates at el-Hibeh as part of the UC Berkeley project. She received her Ph.D. in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology from the University of California, Berkeley, and her BA in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago.