This graduate seminar approaches the urban and rural landscapes of peninsular Italy from the Early Iron Age until the Gothic Wars, with the goal being to examine key points of intersection (and departure) between the spheres of ‘town’ and ‘country’. In adopting an holistic approach to these categories that are often juxtaposed, the seminar…[Read more]

Troy has long captured the human imagination. The story of its fall and the tales of both its inhabitants and besiegers have caught the attention of artists and their audiences from antiquity to post-modernity. It seems we are drawn to the struggle that is Troy and the Trojan War, to the paragons of virtue, and the archetypes of other, less noble…[Read more]

Troy has long captured the human imagination. The story of its fall and the tales of both its inhabitants and besiegers have caught the attention of artists and their audiences from antiquity to post-modernity. It seems we are drawn to the struggle that is Troy and the Trojan War, to the paragons of virtue, and the archetypes of other, less noble…[Read more]

This course considers the archaeology and settlement history of the Mediterranean basin from the later ninth century B.C. to the middle of the fifth century B.C. in order to study, in a contextualized way, the interconnectedness of cultures and economies in this region. The interchange and exchange that occurred in the archaic Mediterranean world…[Read more]

This course considers the archaeology and settlement history of the Mediterranean basin from the later ninth century B.C. to the middle of the fifth century B.C. in order to study, in a contextualized way, the interconnectedness of cultures and economies in this region. The interchange and exchange that occurred in the archaic Mediterranean world…[Read more]

The ancient city of Athens provides us with a wealth of archaeological and cultural information about the ancient world. Using Athens and its surroundings as our laboratory, this course will focus on the development and growth of the ancient city-state from the Bronze Age through to the third century A.D. The course will explore the archaeological…[Read more]

This course offers a survey of the archaeology of settled landscapes in the ancient Mediterranean world, including both the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean basin. In particular, the course will focus on city-country dichotomies in order to study the patterns of development, demography, and land use in selected case study areas. While the…[Read more]

This course offers a survey of the archaeology of settled landscapes in the ancient Mediterranean world, including both the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean basin. In particular, the course will focus on city-country dichotomies in order to study the patterns of development, demography, and land use in selected case study areas. While the…[Read more]

n this book the much-debated problem of political organization in Mycenaean Greece (ca. 1400-1200 BC) is analysed and contextualised through the prism of archaeology and contemporary textual (Linear B, Egyptian and Hittite) evidence.

From the early 14th century BC onwards, Hittite texts refer to a land Ahhiya(wa). The exact geographic position…[Read more]

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it argues that the Mycenaean Greek world served as a nexus for international trade between the Near East and Europe during the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1600 to 1100 BCE). Rather than a barbarian periphery, Europe – and in particular regions such as the Carpathian basin and the southern Baltic (Denmark and S…[Read more]

How else can we grow out of the complacency of the familiar but to seek the unfamiliar? We remember that it has been common practice for artists to be inspired by outside sources in their quests for maximum beauty and truth. My impulse is not to appropriate nor to commercialize that imagery, but through it, with reverence, to expand our capacity…[Read more]

The commercial level trading which emerged at the start of the Bronze Age was made possible by a common written language. That language was Akkadian in its syllabic (cuneiform) form, its phonetic form (Phaistos Disk and these Minoan Linear A tablets) and all the early alphabetic texts prior to the rise of Greek and Latin. These translated Minoan…[Read more]

This course provides a survey of sculptural forms in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds from the
time of Alexander the Great to Late Antiquity. Key sculptural media will be considered from
chronological and thematic perspectives. Attention will be given to contextual analysis, social
history, form, technique, commemoration, regionalism, the…[Read more]

This course is an introductory survey of the urban centers of the ancient Near Eastern, Egyptian,
and Mediterranean worlds. In this course students will explore the development of urbanism in
these areas by studying the archaeological remains from the cities of ancient Mesopotamia,
Egypt, Greece, and Rome, from the Neolithic period until the…[Read more]

This course provides a detailed examination of the life and administration of the Roman
emperor Augustus (reigned 31 B.C. to A.D.
14), a time of pivotal social and economic
change that forever altered the trajectory of
Roman history. Augustus and his
administration will be examined from a variety
of viewpoints, drawing on a rich dataset…[Read more]

Becker, J. A. (2021). Defining space, making the city: urbanism in Archaic Rome. In Gleba, Margarita. [Book Chapter]. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.76140

The Late Bronze Age is renowned for heightened interregional interaction in the entire Near East and Eastern Mediterranean as wealthy states like Egypt and Hatti jostled with each other in the pursuit of valuable commodities, technologies and materials. This increased political and economic interaction is credited in relatively recent scholarship…[Read more]

The structure of fifth-century Athenian society remains largely unknown, as is the distribution of its citizens into different socio-political categories. Ancient literary sources mostly describe a society divided into élite and poor. However, the model of a society alternately dominated by
the élite and the ‘lower-class’ is to be recon…[Read more]

This paper publishes a ceramic bowl in the Metropolitan Museum of Art depicting a Parthian shot. Although it lacks archaeological provenance, the bowl can be dated to the 4th to 2nd centuries BCE, and probably comes from northwestern Iran. It is, therefore, one of the few possible instances of a Parthian shot from the Arsacid Empire.

The Phaistos Disk is the missing link connecting Mesopotamian cuneiform Akkadian with its Mediterranean alphabetic forms. As such it is a hybrid phonetic and alphabetic text dating to about 1800 BCE. It is a philosophical/religious debate about the cause of a recent drought, the first written debate in history. The key to its translation was its…[Read more]