2008-2009 Public Lecture Program
for the
TOLEDO SOCIETY,
the
local chapter of the
ARCHAEOLOGICAL INSTITUTE OF AMERICA (AIA)
1. 7:30 pm, September 19 (Friday), 2008 ***********************************************
Chapurukha Kusimba, Ph.D., Curator of Anthropology, and Bruce Patterson, Ph.D., MacArthur Curator of Mammals, Department of Zoology, both at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago
Co-sponsored by the Toledo Museum of Art as part of the “It’s Friday”
series and in association with the TMA’s
exhibit “In Brightest Africa: Carl Akeley and African Art from the Toledo Zoo”.
Venue Toledo
Museum of Art, Little Theatre
[2445
Monroe St. in Toledo]
.
From
I-75, take exit 202B at Collingwood
Blvd (if southbound)
or exit 203A at Bancroft St (if northbound). Follow the signs to Monroe St. and
the Toledo Museum
of Art. Park behind the Museum in its Visitors' Lot.
Lecture Synopsis This lecture addresses Carl Akeley’s contributions to zoology and the museum sciences, including anthropology. It focuses on the land, animals and peoples of Kenya reflected in his work, collecting and famous sculptures, which document and comment on the animal-human conflicts of the past 100 years.
2. 7:30 pm, October 10 (Friday), 2008 ***********************************************
Mette Moltesen, Ph.D., Curator of Ancient Art, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, Denmark, and currently a Senior Fellow in residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY.
* * * Annual Kurt T. Luckner Lecturer * * *
Lecture
“Agrippina the Younger: Sister, Wife, and
Mother of Roman Emperors –
the Re-used Statue of
a Roman
Empress”
Venue Toledo Museum of Art, Little Theatre
[2445
Monroe St. in Toledo]
.
From
I-75, take exit 202B at Collingwood
Blvd (if southbound)
or exit 203A at Bancroft St (if northbound). Follow the signs to Monroe St. and
the Toledo Museum
of Art. Park behind the Museum in its Visitors' Lot.
Lecture Synopsis A
rare over life-size statue in dark green Egyptian stone (greywacke) represents
the Roman empress
Agrippina as a priestess
of her deified husband, the emperor Claudius. Found in fragments during
construction of a hospital
in 1884 in Rome, the head
was sold to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, while the body remained in
Rome at the
Capitoline Museum. Only
recently has it been possible to reconstruct the statue. Archaeological and
conservation studies
have shown that the
portrait head was re-cut and re-used at a later period, perhaps to represent a
late-antique empress who
wished to model herself
on one of the most influential woman of the Roman Empire.
3.
7:30 pm, November 14 (Friday), 2008
***********************************************
Venue
Toledo Museum of Art, Little Theatre
[2445
Monroe St. in Toledo]
.
From
I-75, take exit 202B at Collingwood
Blvd (if southbound)
or exit 203A at Bancroft St (if northbound). Follow the signs to Monroe St. and
the Toledo Museum
of Art. Park behind the Museum in its Visitors' Lot.
Lecture Synopsis
Did the ancients have ancient
ruins? Yes, ruins of older buildings (city walls, destroyed cities,
abandoned tombs)
were aleady part of the landscape that a Greek or Roman traveller could
experience. For a Greek of
the 5th century BC
it was not unusual to see ruins of a Mycenaen tombs, built 600 year earlier,
and to reminisce on the
names of famous
by-gone heros. A Roman could have heard of some destroyed city, and ventured to
see one, like
Carthage or
Corinth. What was the mental disposition of ancients toward their own ruins? How
did western man then
later look at ruins
after the collapse of the ancient world? What was the understanding of ancient
ruins in the Middle
Ages, in the
Renaissance and up to the present time? How do we deal now with ruins in a
modern city like Rome, in
attempt to make
them understandable to everyone? These are some of the pertinent questions this
lecture will address,
and in doing so it
will give a panoramic view of ruins and their meaning in the western culture.
4. 7:30 pm, December 12 (Friday), 2008 ***********************************************
Lecture “In Search of Ancient Egyptian Gemstones” Venue
Toledo Museum of Art, Little Theatre
[2445
Monroe St. in Toledo]
.
From
I-75, take exit 202B at Collingwood
Blvd (if southbound)
or exit 203A at Bancroft St (if northbound). Follow the signs to Monroe St. and
the Toledo Museum
of Art. Park behind the Museum in its Visitors' Lot.
5. 7:30 pm, January 9 (Friday), 2009 ***********************************************
Suzanne Hargrove, M.A., Chief Conservator, and Sandra Knudsen, Ph.D., Associate Curator of Ancient Art and Trustee of the AIA-Toledo Society, both at the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, OH
Lecture “How Did They Do That? Ancient Jewelry Techniques”
Venue
Toledo Museum of Art, Little Theatre
[2445
Monroe St. in Toledo].
From
I-75, take exit 202B at Collingwood
Blvd (if southbound)
or exit 203A at Bancroft St (if northbound). Follow the signs to Monroe St. and
the Toledo Museum
of Art. Park behind the Museum in its Visitors' Lot.
Lecture Synopsis
The Toledo Museum
of Art has a small but choice selection of ancient Greek jewelry. Greek
goldsmiths
achieved a level of
excellence rarely equally by artists of any other culture or time. How did they
create tiny metal sculptures?
How were they
constructed? How did they decorate the surfaces with granulation and intricate
wire filigree? Where did the
gold and colored stones
come from? Discover some of the secrets revealed by microscopic analysis and
archaeological
research in this
presentation.
6.
7:30 pm, February 6 (Friday), 2009
***********************************************
Venue
Toledo Museum of Art, Little Theatre
[2445
Monroe St. in Toledo].
From
I-75, take exit 202B at Collingwood
Blvd (if southbound)
or exit 203A at Bancroft St (if northbound). Follow the signs to Monroe St. and
the Toledo Museum
of Art. Park behind the Museum in its Visitors' Lot.
Lecture Synopsis
When the Assyrian King Sharrukin (Sargon
II) took the throne in 721 BC, he decided to build a new
capital city and proclaimed: "I built a city with the peoples of the lands which
my hands had conquered at the foot of
Mount Musri...the 'Palace Without a Rival' for my royal abode I built there."
Now known as Dur-Sharrukin ("Fortress of
Sargon") and in modern times more commonly as Khorsabad, the huge city was built
around a citadel containing the
palace of Sargon with its great relief sculptures, as well as templesand elite
residences. This lecture will present the power,
beauty, and cruelty of the Assyrian empire as illustrated at Khorsabad.
7. 7:30 pm, March 27 (Friday), 2009 ***********************************************
Margaret Cool Root, Ph.D., Professor of Near Eastern and Classical Art and Archaeology, Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI
Lecture “Ancient Seleucia on the Tigris”
Venue
Toledo Museum of Art, Little Theatre
[2445
Monroe St. in Toledo].
From
I-75, take exit 202B at Collingwood
Blvd (if southbound)
or exit 203A at Bancroft St (if northbound). Follow the signs to Monroe St. and
the Toledo Museum
of Art. Park behind the Museum in its Visitors' Lot.
Lecture Synopsis
Seleucia-on-the-Tigris (between modern Baghdad and ancient Babylon) became the
capital of a powerful
Hellenistic kingdom in
312 BC, following the death of Alexander the Great. It was a key player on the
world stage for 500
years, through much of
the Roman empire. American excavations in the 1920’s and ‘30s revealed marvelous
vestiges of the
site, from its glorious
heyday to its decline. This lecture highlights finds from those excavations,
which (outside Baghdad
itself) are held in
Toledo, Cleveland, and Ann Arbor. It offers fresh perspectives on life, cult,
commerce, and cultural
fusion along the Silk
Road of antiquity. Seleucia emerges as a city deeply resonant with age-old local
Mesopotamian
traditions, while also
fostering the Classical civilization of Western colonists and embracing contacts
with the Far East.
8. 7:30 pm, April 24 (Friday), 2009 ***********************************************
Lynne Lancaster, Ph.D., Professor of Classics, Ohio University in Athens, OH
Venue
Toledo Museum of Art, Little Theatre
[2445
Monroe St. in Toledo].
From
I-75, take exit 202B at Collingwood
Blvd (if southbound)
or exit 203A at Bancroft St (if northbound). Follow the signs to Monroe St. and
the Toledo Museum
of Art. Park behind the Museum in its Visitors' Lot.
Lecture Synopsis
This lecture examines a
building technique used in Roman North Africa for constructing vaults by
means of small
hollow terracotta tubes that are inserted one into another and “glued” together
with mortar. By examining
this unique
building technique, it became evident that the building industry in North Africa
was intimately connected with
the production of
olive oil destined for Rome and its use of these tubes ultimately resulted in
the creation of new forms of
vaulting not found
elsewhere in the Empire. Recent field surveys have produced a wealth of new
information regarding
ancient
agricultural technology for olive production, ceramic production for the
amphoras containing the olive oil, and also
fine ware
production. The proliferation of the vaulting tubes was also part of this period
of economic growth related to
increased
agricultural production. This unique construction technique eventually was
adopted elsewhere in the western
Mediterranean,
including Rome and Ravenna, where it was used to construct the dome of the
famous Byzantine church of
San Vitale. Through
a series of interconnected technologies, the necessity to provide food for Rome
ultimately resulted in
a vaulting
technique that created spectacular new architectural achievements.
9. 7:00 pm, May 21 (Thursday), 2009 ***********************************************
David Stothers, Ph.D. (Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toledo, Director of the Western Lake Erie Archaeological Research Program, and Archaeological Director of the Firelands Archaeological Research Center) and Glen Boatman (Research Assistant for the Western Lake Erie Archaeological Research Program and Trustee of the Firelands Archaeological Research Center, Amherst, OH)
Lecture “Seaman
Fort Defensive Earthworks: Archaeology of the Early Woodland in the Huron River
Valley of
Northcentral Ohio”
Venue
Maumee
Branch of the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library at 501 River Road in
Maumee. From Anthony
Wayne Trail (Routes US 24
& Ohio 25) exit toward the Maumee River on Key Street. At River Road turn right
(west) and
proceed a short
distance. The library will be on the right with parking behind it.
Lecture Synopsis This lecture
describes the Seaman Fort site, which is the largest example of an Early
Woodland
settlement in
northern Ohio. It was protected by a defensive earthwork, which indicates that
warfare was a way of life
at times during the
Early Woodland period (1000 BC - 1 AD) prior to the establishment of permanent
villages and
agriculture. A
display of artifacts recovered from excavations of the site will be available
for viewing.
************************************************************************************************
James A.
Harrell, AIA-Toledo Society President
(phone: 419-530-2193; e-mail: james.harrell@utoledo.edu)