FRIENDS OF 17吃瓜WEBINARS
鈥淚 am the border鈥�: Borders and Immigration in Ancient Egypt
Friends of 17吃瓜present the next webinar of the 2025-2026 season on May 6, 2026, at 7:00 pm EDT, presented by Danielle Candelora. 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.
From Tex-Mex cuisine to the use of Hinglish (mixed Hindi/English) in Bollywood movies, the influence of borderlands is ubiquitous in modern culture. Issues of borders, citizenship, and immigration are at the forefront of media headlines around the globe, and are examined across fields as diverse as Political Science and Sociology to Comparative Literature and the Visual Arts. Exploring these multiple approaches allows for new insights into the entangled concepts of borders, immigration, and identity in ancient Egypt. By treating borders not as fixed lines demarcating sovereignty and territorial control, but as processes that define differences and belonging, it is possible to focus more on lived experience and local expressions of identity. Common refrains in scholarship suggest that immigrants to Egypt would have quickly shed any indications of foreignness and tried to act, and therefore to be, as Egyptian as they could. Yet in these borderland zones, which could occur both along the boundaries of the Egyptian state and within it, there was social capital to be gained by preserving and advertising aspects of foreignness alongside Egyptian cultural adaptations. Some border communities, like those in the Eastern Delta or the oases of the Western Desert, had particular practices, traditions, and lifeways specific to their borderland homes. In other cases, personal examples can demonstrate how immigrant or borderland individuals developed and performed personal identities unique to the borderland.
Danielle Candelora is an Egyptian archaeologist and an Assistant Professor of Classics and Egyptology at the College of the Holy Cross. She earned her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from UCLA, and her research investigates the multivariate processes of identity negotiation in contexts of immigration in ancient Egypt, including the Second Intermediate Period, New Kingdom, and Late Period. She has published extensively on the concept of borders and foreigners in ancient Egypt, how immigrants integrated into and influenced Egyptian society, as well as the cultural blending which resulted. Danielle is the co-director of both the Osiris Ptah Nebankh Research Project at South Karnak and the Museology Field School at the Museo Egizio di Torino.
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Friends of 17吃瓜is pleased to announce that the first webinars of the 2025-2026 season will once again be free and open to the public with a goal to raise $10,000 so that the entire webinar season will be free. Will you support this outreach effort with a tax-deductible contribution? All donors/sponsors with gifts of $100 or more will be recognized in subsequent webinars. Make your gift today and select 鈥渨ebinars鈥� from the dropdown menu.
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The ancient settlement of Nessana, located in the southwestern Negev, on the modern Israeli鈥揈gyptian 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.
Spring is in the air, and 17吃瓜is pleased to be holding a spring book sale for publications 2+ years old. All proceeds from book sales will go to supporting membership scholarships!
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 鈥淥ld World.鈥� 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 dur茅e, 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-Tanr谋枚ver 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. M眉ge Durusu-Tanr谋枚ver 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鈥檚 Department of Art History. Since 2019, Dr. Durusu-Tanr谋枚ver has directed the Polatl谋 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-Tanr谋枚ver has received numerous grants for her research, including a 