2016 - 2017 Archives - Calgary SSEA

Lecture: How to Organise a Pyramid

Posted in 2016 - 2017, Event, Featured, Guest Speaker, Lecture

Special June Guest Lecture

Date: 7:30 – 9:00 pm, 16-June-2017

Cost: Meetings are Free to members, Guests $5 – Students with ID $2

Description:

This lecture will follow the activities involved in the construction of an ancient Egyptian pyramid, considering the practical logistics and technologies involved in the process of building the royal tomb from beginning to end. The king was the epitome around which the entire political, administrative and religious infrastructure of ancient Egypt revolved. Construction of his tomb, therefore, was the most important focus of his entire reign, and any and all resources in the country could be devoted to its creation. Surviving texts, geological surveys and field excavations in the cemetery and associated worker housing have together provided evidence for the royal funerary construction site, its scale, organisation and working conditions.

About the speaker:

Jacke Phillips, an SSEA member since 1984, graduated in Egyptian Archaeology at the University of Toronto. She now is affiliated with the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London) and the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research (University of Cambridge). She has long been interested in the social and organisational aspects of technological development.

Location:

Room EDC 287 in the Education Block at the University of Calgary.

Lecture: Blue like the Night Sky – Lapis Lazuli in Ancient Egypt

Posted in 2016 - 2017, Event, Featured, Guest Speaker

Please note the special date in May for this Lecture

Date: 7:30 – 9:00 pm, 26-May-2017

Cost: Meetings are Free to members, Guests $5 – Students with ID $2

Description:

Egyptians have shown great command in working with different varieties of stone since prehistoric times. Lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone dark-blue in colour with patches of white calcite or pyrite, was considered among the most prestigious. Its likeliest source in northeastern Afghanistan is more than 4,000 km away and the stone showed up in Egypt already hundreds of years before the building of the pyramids. How did lapis lazuli get to Egypt? Why was it so important that Egyptians engaged in this long-distance trade? In this presentation, we will unravel the evidence and gain an understanding of the importance of lapis lazuli within the Egyptian world. We will trace possible trade routes, investigate its aspects of symbolism, and consider the significance of its colour within Egyptian iconography.

About the speaker:

Thomas H. Greiner is currently pursuing his PhD in Ancient Near Eastern Studies in the department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilisations at the University of Toronto. Focusing his research on the cultural significance of lapis lazuli in dynastic Egypt, Thomas is also working on cataloguing the small Egyptian collection in the Museum of Vancouver. He completed a BA in Classical Archaeology from UBC and MA in Egyptology from the University of Liverpool. He has excavated at the Predynastic site of Hierakonpolis as well as in northern Minnesota, USA.

Location:

Room EDC 287 in the Education Block at the University of Calgary.

Lecture: X-Rays and CT scans of the University of Alberta’s Egyptian Mummy

Posted in 2016 - 2017, Event, Featured, Guest Speaker, Lecture

Date: 7:30 – 9:00 pm, 07-Apr-2017

Cost: Meetings are Free to members, Guests $5 – Students with ID $2

Description:

An ancient Egyptian mummy and its coffin, dating to the time of Cleopatra, were donated to the University of Alberta in 1979. Although of non-elite status, the mummy and coffin were of great cultural and scientific significance. In order to visualize the results of the mummification process, to determine the sex and age at death of the individual, and to identify any pathological conditions, x-rays and CT scans were first obtained in 1981. The studies were repeated in 1996 and 2016. As a result of the re-studies some early interpretations were confirmed, while others were refuted. In this talk I will present a brief history of the acquisition and repair of the mummy, will describe the improvements in the x-ray and CT images we obtained, and will illustrate aspects of the mummification process and the skeletal and soft tissue characteristics of the mummy.

About the speaker:

Nancy Lovell (BA Honours Simon Fraser; PhD Cornell) is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Alberta, and a trustee of the SSEA. After establishing her expertise in skeletal excavation and bioarchaeological research at sites of the Indus Valley Civilization, she made her first trip to Egypt in 1989 and shortly after began research on the skeletal remains of ancient Egyptians. She was the lead scientist in the imaging studies of the mummy that are the subject of this talk.

Location:

Room EDC 287 in the Education Block at the University of Calgary.

Lecture: Ancient Egypt and its Antiquities in Cinema

Posted in 2016 - 2017, Event, Featured, Guest Speaker, Lecture

Date: 7:30 – 9:00 pm, 03-Mar-2017

Cost: Meetings are Free to members, Guests $5 – Students with ID $2

The Scorpion King as a Scorpion and JFK as a Mummy Hunter: Ancient Egypt and its Antiquities in Cinema

Description:

Egypt has long been the setting for theatrical interpretation and with the emergence of silent film at the beginning of the 20^th century, the Nile Valley became a staple venue for exotic historical fiction. Much of our popular appreciation for Egypt is rooted in cinema; archaeologists have tended to evaluate films relating to archaeological context in reference to the accuracy of the ancient world that is depicted or the ways in which the discipline is portrayed. While audiences can and do question the historical accuracy of the stories that are presented, there are more subtle and more problematic interpretive issues that readily escape notice. These films offer typological arguments in which the normative constructs from the era of the viewer are reified by witnessing characters with recognizable values deal with the same kinds of issues that are struggled with outside of the cinema. Potentially subversive studies of the past are transformed into works that demonstrate the naturalness of neo-liberal politics. American Protestantism and democracy are given a teleological force that seems rooted in historical fact. These and other pre-critical readings of the past are given a seeming scientific accuracy for popular audiences through the veristic tropes used in this kind of film-making and the kinds of questioning that archaeology should encourage is undermined by these cinematic narrative techniques. This talk shall survey these and other issues in relation to a wide variety of cinematic genres, from silent film to recent flops.

About the speaker:

Kevin McGeough is a Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Geography at the University of Lethbridge. He has written numerous books including a three-volume series on archaeological reception called “The Ancient Near East in the Nineteenth Century.” Having excavated in Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, and Israel, Kevin is the editor of The Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research. He and Elizabeth Galway are currently working on an SSHRC funded project investigating the representation of Egypt and the Near East in children’s literature.

Location:

Room EDC 287 in the Education Block at the University of Calgary.

Lecture: Update on the Neolithic Sheikh Muftah Culture of Dakhleh Oasis

Posted in 2016 - 2017, Event, Featured, Guest Speaker, Lecture

Date: 7:30 – 9:00 pm, 03-Feb-2017

Cost: Meetings are Free to members, Guests $5 – Students with ID $2

Update on the Neolithic Sheikh Muftah Culture of Dakhleh Oasis and its Mysterious Clayton Rings, and New Insights into Desert Travel in Early Pharaonic Times

Description:

The Sheikh Muftah is a late Neolithic cultural group that occupied Dakhleh Oasis in the Egyptian Western Desert ca. 4000-2200 BC, overlapping in time with the Old Kingdomites from the Nile Valley who colonized the oasis starting about 2600 BC. We of the Dakhleh Oasis Project (DOP) describe the Sheikh Muftah as nomadic pastoralists (raising cattle and goats) confined to the wettest parts of the oasis at a time when the surrounding desert was becoming hyperarid. This picture of exclusively oasis-bound herders had to be modified however as a result of new fieldwork conducted by the ACACIA archaeological project from Germany. ACACIA archaeologists work in the desert beyond the oases, and are particularly interested in tracing the network of roads left by ancient travelers crossing the desert. ACACIA found caches of Clayton rings, strange artifacts made by Sheikh Muftah people, distributed far and wide across the Western Desert. They have also discovered well-marked paths left by Old Kingdom expeditions travelling southwestward from Dakhleh Oasis. ACACIA is able to show that Sheikh Muftah travelers and Old Kingdom travelers used very different methods of navigating their way across the empty desert.

About the speaker:

Mary McDonald (PhD Toronto) is an Associate Professor in the Anthropology and Archaeology Department at the University of Calgary. She conducts fieldwork in Dakhleh and Kharga, two large oases in the Egyptian Western Desert. She focuses on Early to Mid-Holocene material (ca. 10,000 to 2200 BC), at a time when wandering hunter-gatherer groups were gradually settling down and turning to agriculture (mostly herding cattle and goats). Other areas of interest include the beginnings of agriculture in the Near East, and the Prehistory of Africa.

Location:

Room EDC 287 in the Education Block at the University of Calgary.