The Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures welcomes Felipe Rojas Silva, Associate Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World and Egyptology and Assyriology, Brown University for a lecture that explores how people make sense of and manipulate material traces of the past in situations of colonial contact and religious conversion.

Rojas examines the deliberate re-use by early Armenian Christians of Iron-Age stelae bearing cuneiform inscriptions in the region around Lake Van (now eastern Turkey and Armenia). Scholars have noted such re-use in passing since the 19th century, but there has been no concerted effort to collect or interpret relevant evidence holistically. Combining archaeological and literary sources, Rojas contextualizes those cases of re-use as clashes of historical consciousness, expressed via material culture, and distinguish several distinct trends in Armenian engagements with cuneiform (and hieroglyphic) inscriptions in their native territories over the course of the first millennium AD.


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