The Classics Department is pleased to announce that two of our graduate students have recently received awards!

Published in the Journal of Field Archaeology.

Archaeologists study many phenomena that scale beyond even our most geographically expansive field methodologies. The promise of collecting archaeologically relevant data beyond the scale of regional surveys is among the most exciting prospects of the “data revolution.”

Published in the Journal of Field Archaeology.

We report the results of drone lidar survey at a high-elevation archaeological site in the Chachapoyas region of Peruvian Amazonia. Unlike traditional airborne remote sensing, drone lidar produces very high-density measurements at a wide range of scan angles by operating at low altitudes and slow flight speeds.

Published in the Journal of Field Archaeology.

Big data have arrived in archaeology, in the form of both large-scale datasets themselves and in the analytics and approaches of data science. Aerial data collected from satellite-, airborne- and UAV-mounted sensors have been particularly transformational, allowing us to capture more sites and features, over larger areas, at greater resolution, and in formerly inaccessible landscapes. However, these new means of collecting, processing, and visualizing datasets also present fresh challenges for archaeologists.

Published in the Asian Review of World Histories.

This paper examines five distinct events from seventeenth-century South Asia: a pirate raid, two battles and two more pirate raids, all of which represent varying acts of defiance committed against the great Mughal imperium.

During the first period of globalization medical ideas and practices originating in China became entangled in the medical activities of other places, sometimes at long distances. They produced effects through processes of alteration once known as translatio, meaning movements in place, status, and meaning.

Published in "Maritime Communities of the Ancient Andes," eds. G Prieto & D. H. Sandweiss.

These essays look beyond the subsistence strategies of maritime communities and their surroundings to discuss broader anthropological issues related to social adaptation, monumentality, urbanism, and political and religious change.

Published in "A Companion to World Literature," vol. 1, eds. K. Seigneurie & I. Ramelli.

Bucolic, a tradition of ancient Greek and Latin poetry deriving from certain works of Theocritus, emerges in a period of literary experimentation and reconsolidation of the Greek cultural past.

The ninth volume in the Joukowsky Institute Publication (JIP) series, Change and Resilience: The Occupation of Mediterranean Islands in Late Antiquity, edited by Miguel Ángel Cau Ontiveros and Catalina Mas Florit, is available from Oxbow Books.

In The Meaning of Color in Ancient Mesopotamia, Shiyanthi Thavapalan offers the first in-depth study of the words and expressions for colors in the Akkadian language (c. 2500-500 BCE).

Associate Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World and Egyptology & Assyriology Felipe Rojas is featured in the National Geographic series, Lost Cities With Albert Lin. In "Petra's Hidden Origins", Rojas and the Brown University Petra Terraces Archaeological Project (BUPTAP) team are interviewed about how Petra was part of a broad network of cities and cultures.

In this volume, Felipe Rojas examines how the inhabitants of Roman Anatolia interacted with the physical traces of earlier civilizations in their midst.

This volume, edited by Christine Proust and John Steele, explores how scholars wrote, preserved, circulated, and read knowledge in ancient Mesopotamia. It offers an exercise in micro-history that provides a case study for attempting to understand the relationship between scholars and scholarship during this time of great innovation.

Editors: Johannes Haubold, John Steele, and Kathryn Stevens

This volume of collected essays, the first of its kind in any language, investigates the Astronomical Diaries from ancient Babylon, a collection of almost 1000 clay tablets which, over a period of some five hundred years (6th century to 1st century BCE), record observations of selected astronomical phenomena as well as the economy and history of Mesopotamia and surrounding regions.

This collection is the first concerted attempt to explore the significance of classical legacies for Latin American history – from the uses of antiquarian learning in colonial institutions to the currents of Romantic Hellenism which inspired liberators and nation-builders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This book, by Professor Saul Olyan, the first to focus on ritual violence in the Hebrew Bible, investigates these and other violent rites, the ritual settings in which they occur, their various literary contexts, and the identity and aims of their agents in order to speak in an informed way about the contours and social aspects of ritual violence as it is represented in the Hebrew Bible.

Published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

This study presents the results of visual and portable X-ray fluorescence (PXRF) analyses of botijas/olive jars from the 16th Century sites of San Miguel de Piura and Carrizales, north coast Peru.

How to Think about War presents the most influential and compelling of these speeches in an elegant new translation by classicist Johanna Hanink, accompanied by an enlightening introduction, informative headnotes, and the original Greek on facing pages.

Archaeologist and Assistant Professor of Anthropology Parker VanValkenburgh is examining this question through the lens of the Spanish colonial reducción movement of the 1570s—a large-scale attempt to “modernize” over two million indigenous Peruvians by resettling them into planned towns. Although many written records of this movement remain, they often omit key details about the founding of the towns or the effects of the resettlement effort on inhabitants’ daily lives.

Published in Afghanistan.

The Sasanian rock-cut relief of Rag-i Bibi, located in northern Afghanistan, offers a unique opportunity to reconsider issues of audience, memory, and power in rupestral art. Found over 1,000 kilometers east of the nearest attested Sasanian rupestral relief, Rag-i Bibi is geographically and iconographically distinct, displaying elements of local subject matter, artistic style, and political symbolism.

This Fall, Professor Candace Rice joins Brown University as Assistant Professor of Archaeology and Classics.

Eight doctoral students were awarded Global Mobility Research Fellowships for the 2019-20 academic year.

Published in "World Archaeology 51.2."

Sometime in 2009, the make-up of the world population changed fundamentally, as the number of people living in cities surpassed that of rural residents for the first time. Today, already some 54% of the world’s inhabitants live in urban areas, and their numbers are set to reach 66% by 2050.