FRIENDS OF 17吃瓜WEBINARS
A Window on the Silk Road: Archaeology in Medieval Armenia
Friends of 17吃瓜present this upcoming webinar of the 2024-2025 season on April 30, 2025, at 2:00 pm EDT, presented by Dr. Kate Franklin. 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.
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.
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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.
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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.