Blog: Antioch in Ruins: An Interview with Arie Amaya-Akkermans
By Joel Christensen | March 15, 2023
Blog: Ancient Worlds, Modern Communities: Supporting Projects in Archaeology, Philology, Pedagogy, and Film
By Nina Papathanasopoulou | August 26, 2022
Blog: Dissertation Spotlight: Signs of Writing? Writing and Trade in the Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean
By cassdonn | June 6, 2022
Today we take our saturation in a graphic world for granted. When we see baseball caps with logos or nonsense writing on graphic t-shirts, we don’t immediately recognize them as evidence for writing. But in the case of the Late Bronze Age script of Cyprus (ca. 1600–1000 BCE), the undeciphered Cypro-Minoan script, we have more baseball caps and t-shirts than longer texts. Multi-sign texts with two or more contiguous signs, likely to represent words, number around 250. Most of these multi-sign texts are quite short, consisting of only one or two words.
Blog: Dissertation Spotlight: The Shape of an Empire: Environments, Economies, and the Nature of the Seleucid State
By dmklokow | October 18, 2021
The Seleucid empire has long stood on the fringes of Classical scholarship. Following the conquest of the east by Alexander, the vast, multicultural construction lasted from 312–64 BCE, stretching from modern Turkey south to the Levantine coast and east into Afghanistan. Interdisciplinary by its very nature, Seleucid history straddles the boundaries of academic disciplines, languages, and methodologies, further fragmenting the study of an already fractured power. Recent holistic studies are rare, making the 2014 publication of Paul Kosmin’s comprehensive The Land of the Elephant Kings something of a groundbreaking study.
Blog: Contingent Faculty Series: A Conversation with Dr. Stephanie Kimmey
By skimmey | October 4, 2021
Our sixth interview in the Contingent Faculty Series is a virtual conversation between Dr. Theodora B. Kopestonsky and Dr. Stephanie Kimmey. Dr. Stephanie Kimmey recently joined the Department of Classics at Colorado College as a Visiting Assistant Professor. She received her PhD in Art History and Archaeology from the University of Missouri, Columbia in 2017. Stephanie’s research explores the intersection of Greek religion and daily life through everyday objects and ceramics to better understand the individual, personal experiences through the things people leave behind. She has been active in excavations throughout Greece since 2006, working at Nemea, Mycenae, and Aidonia. Before joining Colorado College, Stephanie worked as the Assistant Director of the MU Writing Center.
Blog: Dissertation Spotlight: Racialized Commodities: Thinking about Trade, Mobility, and Race in the Archaic Mediterranean
By Christopher Parmenter | September 27, 2021
One of the fascinations occupying Classical Studies in North America and Western Europe during the 1980s and 1990s was the way images refract the particularities of societies that produce them. One look at the imaginary of sixth- or fifth-century Athens would provide you a blistering array of human forms: doughty warriors, mourning women, drunken gods; the young and the old, Greek and barbarian. This last pair seemed especially interesting at the twilight of the Cold War.
Blog: Making Greek Vases Come to Life Through Animation
By Sonya Nevin | February 14, 2020
Greek vases, with their distinctive red and black, are one of the most recognizable faces of ancient Greece. Their decorative scenes of deities, myth, and everyday life offer a beautiful and informative window into classical culture. With the Panoply Vase Animation Project we’re encouraging people to enjoy and learn about ancient vases and society by placing the artifacts center-stage in short, lively animations made from the vase-scenes themselves. The animations keep as close as possible to the original artwork, using the existing figures and decoration and drawing on existing iconography. But the figures can now move, and the animations explore the possibilities within the vase scenes: runners can sprint past, dice are thrown, and those poised to strike can use their weapons. The tone of the animations varies.
Blog: Exploring the Newly Reopened Domus Transitoria, Nero’s First Palace on the Palatine Hill
By Agnes Crawford | October 11, 2019
Years of restoration work on the Palatine Hill and in the Roman Forum which—together with the Colosseum—now make up the Parco Archeologico del Colosseo has been coming to fruition over the last few years. After decades of sporadic work, rusting scaffolding, and locked gates, a fabulous flurry of activity has yielded an ever greater number of visitable sites.
Many of these are accessible as part of the SUPER ticket, which provides access to the Palatine Hill and the Roman Forum (but not the Colosseum), and includes access to eight excellent “bonus” sites: Santa Maria Antiqua, Temple of Romulus, Palatine Museum, the Neronian Cryptoporticus, the Aula Isiaca and Loggia Mattei, the Houses of Augustus and Livia, and—most recently—the Domus Transitoria.
Blog: Addressing the Divide Between Art History and Classics
By Kathryn Topper | August 1, 2019
'Addressing the Divide' is a new series of columns that looks at the ways in which the modern field of Classics was constructed and then explores ways to identify, modify, or simply abolish the lines between fields in order to embrace broader ideas of what Classics was, is, and could be. This month, Kathryn Topper addresses the divisions between Art History and Classics.
For specialists in Greek and Roman art, professional life is an endless navigation of disciplinary divides. Often it seems like we belong to a disciplinary no man’s land – too archaeological for other art historians, too art historical for field archaeologists, and too visual for text-oriented Classicists whose training has predisposed them to doubt the intellectual seriousness of scholars who study something as seemingly straightforward as pictures.
Blog: Addressing the Divide Between Archaeology and Classics
By Sarah Bond | June 21, 2019
'Addressing the Divide' is a new series of columns that looks at the ways in which the modern field of Classics was constructed and then explores ways to identify, modify, or simply abolish the lines between fields in order to embrace broader ideas of what Classics was, is, and could be. This month, we look at the divide between classical archaeology and philology by speaking with archaeologists Sheira Cohen, Eric Kansa, Kristina Killgrove, James Newhard, and Alison Rittershaus.