Events & News

Tuesday, April 28, 2006, 8:00 pm, Stern Center: Great Room, Dickinson College
Philip Betancourt, Laura H. Carnell Professor of Art History and Archaeology, Temple University

New evidence furnished by Chrysokamino, a final Neolithic and early Bronze Age copper-smelting workshop in northeast Crete, is beginning to provide answers on the earliest steps of Minoan trade and economy which was based on a trading system of exporting manufactured goods and importing raw materials.

Steven Soter, Ph.D., Research Associate, American Museum of Natural History, New York City

In 373 BC, an earthquake and tsunami destroyed and submerged Helike, the leading Greek city on the southwest shore of the Gulf of Corinth. The sunken ruins gradually silted over and disappeared. Ancient writers ascribed the disaster to the wrath of Poseidon, god of earthquakes and the sea. In 2001, excavators brought to light the first traces of Classical Helike, buried under deposits of a vanished lagoon. To their surprise, they also discovered nearby an entire Early Bronze Age town, dating from about 2400 BC. The Prehistoric town was evidently submerged in a lagoon some two thousand years before its Classical successor. The older site is undisturbed and remarkably well-preserved. It was also wealthy, as shown by a fine drinking vessel from Troy, and small gold and silver ornaments. The exploration of Prehistoric and Classical Helike will be the work of decades to come.

James Wright, Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology, Bryn Mawr College

"The Mycenaean Feast: Commensal Traditions and the Formation of Identity in Late Bronze Age Greece"

Feasting is a universal social practice and well understood in the ethnographic and historic record. The practice of feasting is instrumental in the forging of social relationships, in creating and maintaining communities, in marking out occasions of note, in building alliances, in amassing power and wealth, and in forging social identity. Reconstructing the evidence of feasting archaeologically requires figuring out what are the material correlates of feasting. Interpreting the archaeological evidence of feasting challenges archaeologists to think about the multiple uses of feasting and to consider feasting as a process the record of which may be found and interpreted across both temporal and spatial scales as well as social ones. Recent research on feasting in the Late Bronze Age society we call Mycenaean draws on a wide and detailed body of evidence that spans the entire Late Bronze Age and therefore is important as one way of understanding the formation of Mycenaean cultural identity. This lecture will survey the archaeological finds and their contexts of the Mycenaean feast, to include mortuary, residential, textual, and iconographic information. It will argue that the evolution of a "Mycenaean feast" can be described and that the characteristics of this practice are part of the construction of identity in the Mycenaean palace-centered societies of Mainland Greece.

Tuesday, November 19, 2002, 7:00 pm, Weiss 235, Dickinson College
Philip Betancourt, Laura H. Carnell Professor of Art History and Archaeology, Temple University

The Bronze Age culture of Crete, from 3000 to 1200 B.C., is called the Minoan civilization. In the summer of 2002, archaeological excavations were conducted in a Minoan burial cave near the village of Hagios Charalambos, in the mountains of central Crete, under the direction of Philip Betancourt. The "dig" discovered evidence for an unusual religious ceremony in which all the bones and grave goods from an entire community were moved and placed inside this cave, about 1800 B.C. Among the objects from over 1000 years of earlier burials were figurines, sealstones, pottery, and other objects.

Professor Betancourt has excavated in Greece for over 30 years, and he has written extensively on the Minoan civilization. This year he is receiving the Gold Medal for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement, the highest award given by the Archaeological Institute of America.

Prof. Betancourt's lecture marks the inauguration of an annual series of lectures by distinguished scholars sponsored by the new Interdisciplinary Archaeology Program at Dickinson.