 Hello everyone, thanks for joining us in today's penultimate talk in the women and gender performance lecture series. My name is Melissa Craddick and I'm curator at the Bodding Museum. Before I introduce today's speaker, I'd like to invite assistant curator Jess Johnson to read a statement on behalf of the museum. Thank you. We would like to begin by acknowledging that Berkeley, California is on the territory of the Hootune, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chotenoa Loni. We respect the land and the people who have stewarded it throughout many generations and we honor their elders both past and present. We are living in a moment that warrants deep reflection on our past and present. Across many global contexts, equal access to healthcare, education, fair wages, and human rights is contested on the basis of sex and gender identity. In an effort to bring light to these timely issues, to serve a broader public audience online, and to connect to the local community that it serves, the museum is taking action to become a more inclusive, welcoming, and equitable institution that practices the philosophy of radical inclusion, adopted by its parent institution, the Pacific School of Religion. One of these steps is the creation of public programming. Through this lecture series, we hope to highlight new and established scholars who are engaging with risky and often marginalized topics concerning women, gender performance, and sexuality in the past. We invite you to participate in these programs so that together we can listen, learn, and work toward creating a more inclusive community. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you, Jess. Now my pleasure to introduce today's speaker, Lauren McCormick, who will be graduating tomorrow with a PhD in Religious Studies from Syracuse University. And that's so exciting. Congratulations and thanks so much for taking the time this week especially to share your work with us. Lauren's dissertation is entitled My Eyes Are Up Here, Guardian Iconography of the Judean Pillar Figures. She holds a bachelor's degree in religion from Rivers University and master's degree is in religion from both New York University and Duke University. Lauren works with written and visual sources from the vocal world and explores paint as a fourth dimension on sculpture. She and Elizabeth Knot are co-editing a forthcoming volume with BravePulse publishers entitled Ambiguity in the Ancient Near East. And Lauren is currently also building a public-facing web exhibit for the Badae Museum that presents data collected via reflectance transformation imaging. The web exhibit is called a digital initiative recoloring ancient artifacts. So we look forward to hearing much more about all of your projects in today's talk, which is titled To See and Be Seen Looking as a Central Yet Under-Appreciated Attribute of the Judean Pillar Figuring. Lauren, the floor is yours. Thank you so much, Melissa, and everybody at the Badae Museum for thinking of me for this lecture series. I'm really very excited to be included. These are Judean pillar figurines. They're pteropodic clay figurines from the biblical heartland of Judah, understood as female figures who may be nude. These were mass-produced objects in the 8th to early 6th centuries BCE Judah. Over 1,000 examples have been found mostly in refusal contexts in and around Judean homes, a number that continues to rise as more archaeological excavations reach down into the Iron Age. Aside from zoomorphic animal figurines, which actually number the JPFs at a ratio of about three to one, JPFs are the most plentifully attested examples of figural art from ancient Judah. They appear in great numbers until the Babylonian destruction of Judah in the early 6th century BCE, and yet there is no clear mention of them in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. Neither was there any one of them which was inscribed. JPFs have bound in a time and place for a Judah-paid tribute to Assyrian and Babylonian overlords, but largely ruled itself. Other Iron Age 11 teen cultures have pillar figurines too, but Judah is noteworthy for its tight iconographic style, for example, lapping diversity in the hair, while a number of hairstyles can be found in pillar figurines of Judah's neighbors. The JPF's form is largely frozen without much diversity in design. JPFs abound in a time and place when the Second Commandment supposedly prohibited the production of images and the male god Yahweh supposedly reigned. Beyond the JPF, the only other anthropomorphic type of figurine found in volume in Judah is the horse rider. This is a horse rider figurine. I'm actually going to study next week in Freiburg, Switzerland, so I'm very excited about that. Horse rider figurines exist in negligible numbers in comparison to the JPF. Rosclutter estimates a ratio of about four to one, so JPFs are far more popular. And they're not usually found in archeological assemblages together with the JPF. Horse riders are crafted as well to be smaller than the JPF. See if the JPFs and horse riders were conceived as a pair, it would be unconventional for the male to be depicted on a smaller scale than the female. And in short, it seems like there's no male counterpart to the Judean pillar figurine. This is a tantalizing circumstance. It leads some to take JPFs as evidence for the historicity of the Second Commandment to argue that Judeans really did not make images of the God of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament, though they may have fudged the No Images rule for the JPF or just somehow did not think of it as a banned image. Interestingly, RNZ Darby shows that JPFs were found even in elite quarters of Jerusalem where officials lived, so even they had JPFs in and around their homes. JPFs connect back to a long history in the ancient Near East for female images in clay to be placed in the home. JPFs have traditional vibes and seem like stereotyped objects whose presence and value, no one really questioned. They evinced normal breakage patterns, for example, not bearing evidence of mutilation, even in periods of supposed religious reform. JPFs do not seem to have been found offensive in their primary use period from the 8th to early 6th centuries BCE. Not until the exile, the Babylonian catastrophe that the JPFs fall off the map. This leads some to conclude that after the exile, Judeans became more theologically strict and for the first time considered JPFs offensive. Another interpretive option is that JPF production ceased post 586 for the obvious reason that JPF production centers cease to exist as well. For this reason, JPFs have fascinated biblical scholars for generations, long before me and they'll continue to do so long after. JPFs entangle issues of monotheism, idolatry, female representation in the Godhead and or in everyday life, despite androcentric biblical texts that largely overlook them, as well as the presumed censorship of religion practiced on the ground versus religion as it is reported in the Bible. The JPF identity is notoriously ambiguous. It's unclear who or what these statuettes represent. People ask, is this female human? If divine, which goddess is represented and how does she intersect with or challenge the monotheistic worship of the God of Hebrew Bible or Old Testament? Or does the JPF perhaps represent a low divinity, like an angel? Though minor subtypes exist, the vast majority of JPFs feature the hands at breast pose. In one way or another, most scholars interpret JPFs by way of the breast. But I like to think of the JPFs at two registers, one in terms of design and the other in terms of decoration. The breasts are an integral part of JPF design. JPFs are not idol figures. Their arms are lifted and portrayed in the act of unwrapping the breasts. Their sculptures in motion. At the level of design, JPFs were crafted to direct viewer attention to the breasts. Traditionally, scholars have concluded that the JPF centerpieces the breasts because the JPF signifies fertility. They deny the timelessness of the appeal of fertility, but I do resist the interpretation of breast as a timeless signifier of fertility on the JPF. For whatever ties the hands at breast pose had to fertility in the ancient Near East, I have found that it's possible to be more precise about what this pose meant on these particular figurines in the specific time and place of 8th to early 6th century Judah. Spoiler alert is that I think the JPFs represent gatekeepers of the divine realm, often depicted holding their breasts. And I will detail that below. But for now, I will say that counterbalancing JPF breasts with eyes invites us to move beyond essentialist, unchanging notions that link breast to fertility, enabling us to see something culturally specific. JPFs do not represent every woman. They are culturally encoded figures from a specific time and place. They have a context. I have studied 109 JPFs and JPF fragments in person, about 80 of them stemming from Tel-Anazbe, which is biblical MISPA. I studied every JPF fragment from the Bade Museum, I'm sorry, that the Bade Museum holds from this site, and the rest are largely in Jerusalem at the Rockefeller Museum. I'm doing nothing less than starting my career on the proceedings. I am grateful to Aaron Darby for alerting me to the collection, to the staff of the Bade Museum with special shout out to Melissa Craddick for providing ongoing support, and especially to Aaron Brody for granting me the access that provided, sorry for granted me the access and then providing warm intellectual exchange since I visited Berkeley in 2018. Communication with Jeffrey Zorn who reworked the stratigraphy of Tel-Anazbe and knows so much about the site has also been invaluable. Thank you for letting me be part of your community. It's really made such a difference to me. Tel-Anazbe is a really important site for JPFs. It produced the second highest number of JPFs in all of Judah. Part of my work at the Bade Museum was to study each anthropomorphic figuring fragment and in some places to reclassify. I also poured over archival documents from the dig to uncover further JPF references. This work led to an update of the JPF count from Tel-Anazbe, which was originally estimated at 120, then Roz Clutter and Aaron Darby separately found about 140, and I found at least 186. Giving is the next most popular site for JPFs and is far behind with a count of just 54. The only site with more JPFs than Tel-Anazbe is the capital. Over 500 examples have been unearthed in Jerusalem and counting. I collaborated with David Ben Shlomo to have 15 JPFs from Tel-Anazbe tested for petrography. 14 out of 15 events evinced Jerusalem area clay, with only one showing a clay type local to Tel-Anazbe. Aaron Darby and I are currently developing an article about the special connection of JPFs from Tel-Anazbe and Jerusalem. Jerusalem was the administrative and religious center of Judah in the period when JPFs flourish. JPFs seem religious because they're sometimes found in assemblages with other cultically significant artifacts, like at a Tel-Anazbe home, where a molded JPF head was found with stones and an architectural model as doctors Jenny Ebling and Cynthia Shaper Elliott from this lecture series already discussed. The photography from Tel-Anazbe JPFs suggests that religious significance of the JPFs might be tied to religious practice in Jerusalem. Jerusalem is remembered in the Bible as Yahweh's patron city, though in some cases Yahweh's worship seems to have involved the worship of additional deities through time, and in other cases Yahweh was not preferred over other deities in Judah, like Ba'al or the Queen of Heaven. Tel-Anazbe's JPFs are pedographically tied to Jerusalem, which itself is associated with Yahweh worship. So for me, there seems to be an easy link between JPFs and Yahweh. As far as I know, I'm the first person to systematically study JPFs from Tel-Anazbe in person since the original excavation report of 1947. I realized at some point in my research that scholars have repeated for decades the descriptions of pigmentation provided about Tel-Anazbe's JPFs 75 years ago. A similar situation can be found for other sites. I remember writing Aaron like, can this really be true? And it was. Whitewash and paint are referenced with great consistency in discussions about JPFs, but without reevaluating the descriptions of that pigmentation and thinking of an update from the original excavation report. Without new analyses, there are simply nothing new to say, and color has become something of a stale topic for the JPF. Further sidelining the importance of color is the fact that JPF paint findings have not been able to affect the interpretation of JPF meaning in any significant way. For example, it's clear that many JPFs contain color bands at the neck, but scholars are not at a consensus about whether the bands represent necklaces, or similarly, if the rare color bands found on pillar bases indicate the pillar base was conceived as a garment, or if the JPF should be considered nude. Lastly, there is reason to believe that paint was not a highly valued attribute of the JPFs in early decades of JPF excavation. In the Tel-Bait-Mierzen report, J. L. Kelso and J. Palin Thorley report intentionally scraping paint off. Zion E. Zevitt correctly notes that paint has not been pursued as a pathway to theorizing JPF identity. To cover the basics, all JPF bodies are handmade and involve a pillar base that allows the figurine to stand independently. There are two head types. The first is based in anthropomorphic realism and was achieved through the use of a mold. The molded head type depicts a face framed at the top and sides by rows of tight curls. In general, its face has a prominent nose, full cheeks, often a slight smile with eyes that come in various sizes. The second JPF head type is a handmade, it's handmade and its manufacturer does not require the technology of a mold. Instead, the artisan made the face by pinching its clay, resulting in two depressions for the eyes and a nose between them. Aesthetically, the handmade type of JPF head is more schematic than the molded, for example, because the handmade type lacks a mouth. The eyes dominate on the handmade head type and can be so big that they engulf the cheeks and occupy almost the entire area of the face. All told, JPF design is pretty simple. It involves either a hand or mold made head on top of a torso with hands at breast, on top of a pillar base. Figuring decoration is harder to gauge. Pigmentation was placed on JPF surfaces as a matter of course. When I say pigmentation, I mean it as an umbrella term for whitewash and paint, where whitewash is a lime solution understood to prime a surface for paint. However, in most cases, JPF pigmentation has largely worn away through time. This is another reason why JPF breasts have been overemphasized in JPF discourse. Paint has faded, but design is still crystal clear. We do not get to see the painted finishing touches that gave final articulation to the JPF. And this is something that I wrote about last month actually in the University of Pennsylvania's expedition magazine, where I quote Brigitte Brugge on paint as a fourth dimension of sculpture. What we largely see when viewing JPFs today is the bare bones of design in a neutral clay color. A similar critique about sculpture has recently been leveled against marble statues from the classical world. Their display in museums worldwide without acknowledgement of prior paint has permeated modern mindsets and resulted in the illusion that these statues were, and I mean this as a double entendre pure white. My approach to the JPF privileges decoration. I use advanced imaging technology to retrieve JPF pigmentation and then place JPF decoration in conversation with JPF design. At other museums and institutions outside of the body museum, I collaborated with cultural heritage specialist museum conservators and other research scientists to investigate JPF paint. JPF composition via X-ray fluorescence, linear cross polarization and infrared imaging. I also use X-ray imaging to study JPF manufacture and to work in authenticated unprovenance molded JPFs. In terms of my work with the with the telenozbe figurines, I was once asked what changes because I studied the body's museum collection as I did. As I mentioned above, through crucial collaboration, I have been able to broaden the petrographic data through which JPFs are studied, both in and outside of telenozbe. When more than anything else, through my research on the body museum's collection, I've been able to move the needle on JPF paint and as a result, JPF eyes. A lot of time and attention went into depicting JPF eyes. I find that JPF eyes have been overlooked due to a preoccupation with JPF breasts. It's the classic my eyes are up here situation. One particular figurine fragment from telenozbe that I call Nasbet 255 has been my muse. I think all of the ancient Near Eastern gods I know that I ever met it. No one has ever restored color on a JPF and this one has such a clear paint pattern still adhering that it seemed ripe for that kind of work. With the help of a graphic designer, I was able to offer a full digital restoration of Nasbet 255's pigmentation. I analyzed this figurine fragment through imaging technologies called decorrelation stretch or D stretch and reflectance transformation imaging or RTI, which I will detail for you now. D stretch is an image enhancement technique that works in remote sensing to reveal chromatic data. Chromatic just means color. D stretch is layered upon a digital photograph to enhance or stretch its color contrast. The process is performed via computational algorithm running as a plugin to image J image processing software. Various color spaces are designed to target particular hues, revealing even faint traces of color. The results of D stretch are false color, for example, showing a neon color for a color that's actually subdued in reality. But the exaggerations make the targeted significant, the targeted colors significantly more apparent. So let's try it out. What colors do you see when you look at Nasbet 255? You might notice the red at the bridge of the nose, and then on top of that, that the headband is yellow. Further down at the neck area, you can also discern red and yellow, particularly on the proper left side of the figurine's neck. If you're really good, you might also notice that there's black outlining the eyes and white inside. Now let me show you what's D stretch. All of the colors just described that we may be strained to see before are now simply put apparent. D stretch also illuminates manufacturer clues like the superposition of paint layers. There is red under the white in the proper right eye. But on the whole, we can see that the headband is yellow, and that portion of the eye is red, I'm sorry, is otherwise white. It seems like when the face was painted red, it was done so in a sloppy way that accidentally reached onto the headband and into the eye, but would later be cleaned up by being painted over in those areas by those other colors. In collaboration with a graphic designer, we digitally restored Nazba 255's pigmentation. I physically colored, like with watercolor crayons, upon an 11 by 17 printout of Nazba 255. That printout had D stretch LBK colors placed applied, and the graphic designer reduced the overall opacity of the image to 50%. I colored the contours of paint right on top of where the chips exist. Last, the graphic designer digitally traced my markings onto the original photo of Nazba 255 without D stretch applied. And I chose rather arbitrarily which shade of each of those colors to go with in the final rendering. Above series of pictures, the first image is Nazba 255 as we've seen it in its current state of preservation. Then the second has the digital tracings of black included, the next adds red, then yellow, and the last white. The sixth is interpretive. I specified where colors should be filled in, though it no longer remains. Although the color schemes are so clear, this work felt straightforward to me, and in the end to be quite deductive, though the pupils did give me some trouble as I'll detail below. In general, I see a yellow headband cap, a red face, eyes with eyeliner sclera and pupils, and then red and yellow neck bands with a black grate over top in the neck. I consider that last illustration to be a digital restoration of Nazba 255's paint. However, this work is new and may after scrutiny proved to be best understood as a digital interpretation, or maybe even something else that I can't currently foresee. I use D stretch to study Nazba 255, but I would be remiss not to mention a drawback of that technology. D stretch enhances any color included in a photo based on hue. In the case of JPFs, not all surface colors stem from original figurine appearance. The developer of D stretch refers to the enhancement of non-target hues as noise. Examples of noise on Nazba 255 are spots where the clay level is exposed. JPFs are made from clay that is rich in iron, giving the clay a red hue. XRF testing performed at my request at the Metropolitan Museum of Art reveals that red JPF paint is likely made from iron oxide. So paint, as well as clay, are both detected as red by D stretch, where the red paint is something I need to target while the red of the clay is not. It's noise. Whenever D stretch suggests the presence of color, I always check back to original photos to be sure the color derives from paint and not something else. But ideally, other methodologies will always be used along with D stretch in order to corroborate the findings, like microscopic examination, or in my case reflectance transformation imaging, RTI. RTI is a method of computational photography where a series of pictures are taken of a stationary object with lights flashing at it from various known or knowable angles. Lightning information from the images is synthesized to generate a mathematical model of the surface, and I'm quoting Carla Shower from Chi here, cultural heritage imaging. This enables a user to relight the RTI image interactively and examine its surface using viewing software. RTI produces a digital surrogate of an object that can be relit by users from their own screens. Each RTI resembles a single two dimensional photographic image, but carries 3D shape information, which is why RTI images are often referred to as two and a half D. RTI was performed on NOSPA 255 in three different views from the front center from the left side and from the right side. D stretch has the ability to amplify chromatic data while RTI shows chromatic data as well as topographic data. Topographic data pertains to surface texture, and I'll give examples of that in a minute. But what I want to stress is that the chromatic data retrieved through D stretch was corroborated by RTI, and RTI then went on to contribute further details about NOSPA 255, including ones that are not visible to the naked eye. When colors are removed from NOSPA 255 and just the surface texture is shown, so the right picture in your screen here, a rim is perceptible around the left pupil. Specular enhancement also shows a distinct edging of that pupil. This is particularly significant when compared against the paint of the eyeliner in the same eye surrounding the eye basin. Despite also being depicted by black, the eyeliner does not cause a discernible relief. Also, the pupil and eyeliner paint are connected by the white wash that represents the white of the eye called sclera. Yet the eyeliner paint is on plane with the sclera while the pupil paint is thicker than the sclera. A differing wear pattern does not seem a likely explanation of the differing thicknesses because the eyeliner is located as close as 2.73 millimeters from the pupil. The best explanation for the thick rim around the left pupil is that it was created by multiple paint layers. In contrast, the nearby eyeliner presumably consists of the same black paint, but was applied with less layers. The artisan appears to have taken extra care to depict the pupil's rim via painting and repainting, and also possibly by edging. There seems to be a dip in the topography of the left side of the left pupil's rim. I will require further examples of pupil edging before I can make this claim for sure. Another figurine fragment I've seen at Penn Museum contains etching in the eye as well, but in an almond shape instead of a circle, which would be strange if pupils were intended. At the very least, I'm comfortable saying that Masba 255's eyes were a point of interest for the artisan because the pupils were painted over multiple times, and possibly also because the circular area was pre-etched or pre-impressed before being filled in with paint. Side note that I'm making a web exhibit to display Masba 255's intricacies, where users will be able to manipulate the RTI images for themselves. So please do keep an eye out for that in November. You can use this emergent technology for yourself, and researchers can explore new methodologies for object study through that exhibit. Back to the eyes. There's no greater contrast in color than black and white. The revealed inset black, white, black color scheme in Masba 255's eyes constructs them as a stark feature emphasized further by the oversized scale of the eye basins. These eyes were designed and decorated to draw attention. And while Masba 255 is exceptional for the amount of paint that still survives, it is not exceptional for having this particular pattern of paint in its eyes. I've been able to find additional instances of this paint scheme and also uncover likely new ones through the use of destretch. This led to the realization of an unpublished detail of molded head design. Molded eyes have pupils indicated prior to the application of paint via a circular bulge that was indicated on the mold itself. Elements of design and elements of decoration in this case converge. Also, interestingly, the trend in eye decoration that I have found to have black eyeliner, white scolera and pupils exist across JPF head types. This patterning in eye paint is on both the molded and handmade heads, along with other painted elements that I do not explore here, like color neck bands, a red face and black hair, which are all customary across the two morphologies. Paintwork glosses differences in JPF design and shows that pinched and molded heads were probably conceived together, probably having related meaning. Molded and hand-pinched eyes have a different aesthetic and manufacture technique, but paint underplays those differences and makes the disparate types match. Pose with arms at breast connects the types, and now we can say that paintwork does too. For this qualification, I would add to my suggestion that JPF eyes have customary paint scheme. Pupil size varies. Some look dilated, some look like pupils at rest, and others look constricted. Another example I have pictured for you here contains excellent paint and yet no evidence whatsoever of a pupil in the eye. I've looked at it via microscopic examination too. There really does not seem to be any black paint there, despite there being excellent paint preserved elsewhere. So it seems like it really did not have pupils. In terms of NASBA 255, I had such a hard time depicting the pupils in my digital restoration. It was only after hours of frustration that I realized the pupils look smaller from the front than they do from the sides. There is no still 2D image that will capture them because the pupils take part in an optical illusion. The concave shape of the eye basins swallow much of the pupil's diameter when viewed from the front, but display the fuller area when viewed from the side. In sum, the focus of this JPF's pupils varies depending on the angle from which the viewer views. The pupils look dilated from the side and constricted from the front. The pupils were crafted to be dynamic and interactive, alive even. I've argued that JPF brush should be counterbalanced with JPF eyes. The eyes are painted to be a standalone feature, while the figuring fragments containing breasts show that JPF breasts are not. There are not a ton of JPF's with body paint still evidence. But from what I've seen, paint does not articulate the breast in isolation, for example, through the depiction of nipples. Instead, when breasts have paint, they're just one constituent part of a larger hole involving the neck band motif. Some bands extend down the neck also to unwrap the shoulders, arms, and breasts. JPF design may single out the breasts, but paintwork does not. I do not advocate dislodging the breast essential to the JPF so that the eyes can take their place, but rather in acknowledging the interplay of multiple bodily features that contribute to JPF meaning. The dramatic and topographic views I've gleaned of Nazba 255 revealed that the eyes were an artfully crafted point of interest and time for the artisan. This work expands the iconographic repertoire through which JPFs can be analyzed in the future. And I thank the Religion Department and Jewish Studies program at Syracuse University so sincerely for the funding that made this research possible. I have to shift my focus now from presenting new primary evidence about JPFs to briefly interpreting that evidence by way of gender performance, the topic of this lecture series. I explored above that Nazba 255's eyes are self-contained, but they're not self-referential. Light is the dominant stimulus to affect pupil size, though emotion plays a role too. I interpret why JPF eyes as visual construction of fear. It is deeply tied to worship in the ancient Near East. Unlike the breast, JPF eyes are important enough to be to receive individualized depiction by pain. But that pain ultimately points outward and acts as a conduit to show that the JPF gaze is upon something bright. Nazba 255 has a narrative quality to it in that it is depicted as engaged with something outside of itself, a bright light. Modern deities including Galway were understood as radiant and bright. I interpret the red JPF face as evidence of divine illumination that results from close encounter with a high deity. For example, Moses' face shines in Exodus 3334 as he descends the mountain post theophany. Glowing bodies signal the holiness of figures able to encounter Galway's presence and live like the seraphim whose name literally translates to burning ones. In the Bible, Yahweh's court of angels have a special relationship to luminosity and fire and are able to directly attend upon Yahweh. They also have hybrid bodies like the cherubim and ophanim who comprise Yahweh's chariot throne, which is to say his furniture and transportation. Yet the cherubim and ophanim have eyes which inanimate objects in the earthly realm do not. The ophanim are particularly baffling as wheels that have eyes all over. Hybridity is a hallmark of a gatekeeper's station. Their bodies typify the principle that they're liminal characters, neither in one realm nor the other. I think that JPFs are also hybrid figures. They fuse the human body, not with furniture, but with another inanimate object, an architectural column. Anthropomorphic columns are called caryatids and we have evidence of them in ancient Near Eastern texts as well as actual built temples called the Syrian temple or the temple in Antis type. Solomon's temple plan described in the Bible includes columns that flank the front door or the threshold to the divine realm. Those two columns are given personal names Yakin and Boas and they're described as having bellies as human body parts. I argue that the JPFs were conceived as miniature temple caryatids kept in people's homes, thought to signal an entryway to the divine realm. The pose with hands at breast bolsters this argument. Flanking females with hands at breast sometimes also combined with architectural features can be found in architectural models from the Iron Age Levant. Many architectural models seem intended to house divinities at miniature scale, and I think JPFs participated in a similar tradition, where tiny pieces of divine architecture were used to signify the temple, which is to say, they mediated divine presence. So, when analyzing the JPFs, even granting the breast were a crucial feature, there is so much more to see than fertility. I do not think we have access to the origins of the meaning of the hands at breast pose, which reaches back to prehistory. However, as this posture occurs on the JPF in the Iron Age, it seems to connote gatekeeping. There are two references to a pair of women guarding the tentative meaning in the Hebrew Bible, which is to say at the entrance to Yahweh's presence, but more significantly, there are countless examples of female gatekeepers in ancient Near Eastern art. Gatekeeping was a female's role in the ancient Near East. However, even that claim needs qualification because the gatekeeping figures, though they may have breasts, do not always have genitalia and or maybe fused with another kind of body entirely. I argue that the bottom half of the JPF really is what it looks like, and indeed what it's always been referred to as a pillar. From this position, we fall out of touch with the data when we refer to the JPF as nude or female. What would it mean to call a column female or to call a column nude? These don't seem like the right questions to ask of the JPF. The fundamental query of my research has been, what did JPFs look like? After being able to account for decoration as well as design, I find that JPF composition stresses the eyes and the breasts, but also that gender has been ascribed in too hasty a way. JPFs managed to reveal shortcomings in our vocabulary and imaginations to discuss them. Even I use the term female to refer to the JPF in this paper, because I want to be understood and also because I'm still working through these ideas as well. I wanted to speak our language, but I also acknowledge that there's, there are facets, our language is not capturing. I really don't think gender was the primary category through which the JPF was understood in antiquity. JPFs are best appreciated as hybrid transhuman creatures who stand illuminated in a deity's presence in a gatekeeper stance, with eyes primed to watch the divine as well as early realms. In other words, as all seeing creatures. JPFs were whitewashed in antiquity to prepare their surfaces for pain. We ourselves whitewash the JPFs to when we reduce them to blanket fertility figures. Let's stop doing that. Lauren, thank you so much for this fascinating talk that of course intersects. So nicely with the Batte Museums collection and really highlights the value of this large and well documented and all contextualized JPF corpus that comes from Nasbe. So, I'd like to invite the live YouTube audience to submit questions for Q&A. And as those are coming in, I'm just going to start with a couple of my own and I'll start with a question about pervenience. I'm wondering how well documented the pervenience of the Judean pillar figurine corpus is in general. I mentioned, of course, the three main sites, Nasbe, Batemursim and Jerusalem, what proportion of the corpus is documented as coming from those settlements or some other secure find spot? Yeah, there's really not much by way of petrography. Am I understanding you correctly that you're interested to know more about the petrographic findings so far? I'm wondering more about the archeological context and find spot so where these figurines are distributed based on where they've been excavated and sort of where the gaps are in terms of the context. Okay. Yes, there are tons of problems in answering that question because the JPFs have been largely excavated by early excavations that were done prior to the 1970s, making their fine context very difficult to discern. For reasons that involve the way rooms were identified in prior archeological practice and a lack of detailed information about where in a room or at what level an object might have been found or even with what other objects it was associated within that potential room. So there's a lot of difficulties trying to work with early archeological reports and those are the ones where most JPFs were found. So, in a way, my project is able to sidestep that difficulty in JPF studies because my emphasis is on the aesthetics. So no matter where a figurine was found, no matter how problematically it was reported, the final aesthetics are what I used to analyze. So in general, I should offer the broad statements that JPFs are mostly found in refusal context in and around you day and home so they're not found usually in a room where you can reconstruct use value but instead as disregarded sort of garbage that is strewn about and also used for other purposes like in wall fill or underneath subfloor fill. So it's very rare to have a sealed tomb, for example, where a JPF is found with its in its sort of pristine context they're usually found as garbage and the garbage tends to have been accumulating around. So, I have another related question and there are a few questions coming in as well wondering about some of the differences between the more anthropomorphically realistic mold made JPF heads and the handmade pinched ones. So first question is, did the clay petrography study test differences in the clay sources or production locations between those two types. So the, the work that Aaron, Aaron Darby and David Benchelmo did in Jerusalem takes that kind of specificity into account. But in terms of the work that I did with the telenozbe corpus, the 15 anthropomorphic figurines that were tested were not. There was no difference to find between the molded or the pinched heads because they all came back Jerusalem area, except for one body fragment, which didn't include a head, and very interestingly that body fragment. So I, I specified it for testing because it was crumbly when I touched it like if you hold it the clay discolors your glove, and that may be speak improper firing technique, and the only JPF fragment that was tested and came back from telenozbe local clay was that one that seemed to events and inability to properly create. So that's something that's very interesting if most of them are from Jerusalem and the only one that we have comes from the, the local clay isn't made in as thorough and complete way, it really, it really points to Jerusalem as the epicenter, and maybe to telenozbe as a secondary production site that was trying to keep up, however, inadequately. That's pretty interesting so that it seemed like the quality of the production material and potentially the durability mattered quite a lot. So, how does that match on to the refuse context the domestic refuse context that you and and the fragmentation that you find in sort of the final dispositions or find spots of these objects. It's such an interesting question. I really do think that the JPS were not intended to last forever. That's a huge statement of course they weren't intended to last forever, but yes they were fired so that it's that be speaks a certain intention for them to be durable until last, but at the same time the necks are extremely long, in most cases of JPS which makes them fragile to breaking, and they continued to be crafted in that way for over 200 years with necks that were very fragile to breaking because they're just too awkwardly thin and long. So, you don't see any sort of morphology and the production technique through that through the time where we have the JPS. And so it really seems to me that they didn't mind that the JPS would eventually break. They intended for it to be somewhat durable in that they fired it and created so many of them. But actually they didn't take all that much care by my measure to make sure they didn't break after that the the tenant that I didn't discuss this in the paper but the molded heads are attached to the lower body by a clay tenant like a head on a spike that was then driven down into the shoulder and then the clay was smooth together before being fired and that tenant is not usually driven very deeply down into the neck. It usually is, I'm doing this as if you know what I mean. The tenant is usually only reaches the very top of the neck and so it suggests that it wasn't meant to be stabilized it was meant to elongate the neck where elongating the neck makes them easier to break. Interesting. So two related questions, again about the differences between the handmade and the mold made JPS heads. The first question is, are there more remains of paint traces on the handmade, the simpler figurines and on the molded faces. And the second question is, do you think that the painting on the handmade figurines may have been an alternative way of depicting facial features that lacked the same level of detail as the mold made heads. So to get to the first question about whether the pinched or the handmade seem to have different levels of paint remaining. So of course I'm limited to what I personally handled or what I've seen through limited photographs within usually excavation reports. But I find that the JPF paint accumulates in crevices. So molded faces have more crevices. But at the same time, it does seem true to my experience that the smooth face of the pinched variety is easier to detect. It's kind of tricky because on a molded face, I can almost always find traces of red from my from the experience with the ones I've held. Whereas that's not necessarily true because it gets wiped away more easily from the smoothed hand pinched face. So I guess it's a difficult question to know because the nature of the sort of physiognomy or that the shape of the face makes clay stick better to the samples because there are crevices to hide in where the pinched face doesn't really have that. But it is true I can't deny that some of the best paint I've ever seen our pinched faces I guess I don't want to generalize out yet. I would say it's a good question something to think more about, but even on just my experience I don't think I could really say that one was better preserved than the other I could just say that there's different preservation patterns. And then what was the second question. The second question was whether or not the paint on the handmade figurines on the head was perhaps made to draw out the details of the face that was otherwise not present compared to the mold made. I wish I think not because we never find examples of like a mouth painted on like it's not like paint was able to make up for the lack of whatever the mold would depict. I honestly think that paint does bridge them as I tried to draw out in this paper paint bridges the two types but at the same time I do think both types were meant to have different registers that they speak to. They each are able to emphasize something different that I think ends ends up true to the final figuring of like a gatekeeper so if I am being really interpretive based on my my own reading I think that the JPF in two types make sense for each side of the gate. So angelic beings on earth are usually depicted depicted anthropomorphically and mistaken for for people they're called on a sheen which is just a way to say men, whereas the JPF that are in the angels that are in the heavenly realm have more fantastical bodies that are not human. And so I have to admit I can't kind of fight back anymore that that's an appealing interpretation to me I think I think they met the figure to look into ways. And I have that answer for why but I admit that there could be many others it seems intentional that they with such consistency produced both types, although there are regional trends that are evident to like molded heads are more common on the coast. But in any case I digress, I would say I reserve the right to say I think that the types meant something in their separateness but we're also meant to be together so they're separate together. Thank you. The next question is, again, related to some of the differences in pain and also the methodological limitations of destruct that you discussed so I'm wondering sort of what the potential is and what also what the value might be. If you were able to let's say identify differences in in shade or hue or saturation of let's say reds and yellows between different figurines is that if you were to compare them and how destretch and RTI do or do not allow for that kind of analysis even that you emphasize that these are digital renderings or interpretations right that have their limits. So, are you asking about the ability to sort of parse hue to see which shade within a color family, they might have used. Yeah, so what are the methodological limitations and then what might the value be of being able to identify difference in in hue and color saturation between different figurines of course also taking into consideration weathering and Yeah, so destretch is able to work in snapshots. This isn't sophisticated enough. It's not scientific enough to be able to read to even approach original color. It just shows you what the color looks like today. Given all of the where all of the time buried all of the whatever it might have been exposed to in museums or anywhere else. And so the D stretch only works with the photograph that you take whenever whenever you take it so that would not support it's a good point it would not support trying to get back just a true color palette. And truthfully, you, you catch me on kind of the future of what my work should do which is learning more about how to do best practices with color reproduction. So, as I mentioned, I chose pretty arbitrarily just based on my experience what I thought the colors looked like. And that's a, that's not the strongest way to go about reconstructing colors so that is something that I want to get to in the future. Like I wonder chemical composition might help sort of anchor the method but yeah at present. I'm not able to really even know how to decide which shade within a given you to choose. Okay, thank you. A couple more questions coming in from the YouTube audience. Is there any relationship between the breast features on GPS and the divine name should die. Um, that's a good question. It's not something that I explore. Did they have more of a lead for me something. Okay, yeah I've been I'm sorry I will just go so far to say that it's not something I've explored and please do type more if you're still there about what what I should be thinking about. Okay, I'll let you know if anything else comes in. I can't see the chat coming in live the questions are being fed to me so if anything comes in I'll let you know. Another question from the YouTube audience. It's in my understanding there's no consensus on the figurines as being connected to the divine realm. Has the needle started to move on the scholarship and where does your study fit in. So the figurines had a long way to go from where they started so originally the earliest excavators discuss them in a, you know, in a way that just disregarded them as like Canaanite sex cult things like sex fertility whatever. So, from there, post the 1970s with the unearthing of the epigraphic evidence which discusses Yali in his Asherah there was something of an Asherah boom in Biblical scholars and the JPF started making a lot more sense, given that information was not interpreting Asherah so they began to be more evidence through which to have a conversation more, more data points to incorporate. And there's other reasons to like the pillar base of the JPF itself does look reminiscent of a tree trunk. I interpret it as a real pillar but tree trunk is another bona fide viable interpretation put forth by people like Liz Waxman. I think that the connection to the over 40 references to Asherah and the Hebrew Bible which do associate these cult objects Asherine with trees is another good reason to consider Asherah for an interpretation so in this case I guess what I'm trying to say is there's been a long way to go in terms of reconsidering the JPF's as other things than a high goddess. So I think it's our own sort of modern day familiarity with monotheism that also guides that interpretation where we're used to thinking of a god a goddess singularity instead of plurality within the Godhead. So that's something that my work along with others tries to do which is consider that these despite seeming to be religious in nature, despite that doesn't mean that they have to be a goddess. They could be many different shades of divinity that are lesser than which is why I use the word angel which is not the most sophisticated things to do but I think it's understandable. I don't know what I'm talking about but there's all different conceptions of divinity in the divine court around a high God that were really important. And the act to be honest even divorced from their association with the high God just within their own household practice of religion these lesser deities or whatever you want to call them served a major role in everyday lives but they're not what we gravitated toward because in sense the evidence took us toward the high God stuff and then our own modern biases did too. Can I add a little something to that. So I would also just add and thank you first of all amazing talk. So that pose of the supporting of the breasts as you showed in your slides first of all has an extremely long history, both before and after. But at certain times especially in the late Bronze Age, it's clearly a pose that's being done by divine beings. So that doesn't answer the question with our JPFs. It could still be a representative human worshipper who's doing that action in some sort of divine pose or it could be some sort of lesser divine being or it actually could be many different things. So after after the late Bronze Age where the pose you're referencing is most common there's a sort of dirt in this pose within the art historical record in iron age one which is generally difficult to to get material culture for anyway but interestingly that through the iron one there are also architectural models which is something I put on one of my slides. And that also is part of how I got there following Aaron Darby's trail that this figure, this nude female figure seems to drop out with the exception of the architectural models, and then the JPFs boom in the Levant. And so that continuity is one for me to that helps argue that they should be thought about as like almost accessory figures or attendant figures that are meant to signal something else. In my case, my interpretation is that they are guarding the entryway to the divine realm because they do that on architectural models. So yeah, I think that's why I was trying to make the point to about cultural specificity. So the hands at breast pose like I with the legions of people through time I agree it seems like they're really focusing on the breast and that fertility would be significant. But if it's possible to be more specific, like, wow, what a world we can uncover which is what I've just been trying to do is just to broaden out and not not be like structuralistic or something and not just be universal but really be as specific as we can be. And then that also helps us see why we think the way we do or what you know what what is it about us that makes us call them female, when they don't have a full female but it just there's there's so much that goes into it. Yeah, thank you so much. Oh, I was just gonna say we're just about a time but Aaron did you want to follow up. I mean, it's, it's a wonderful hat tip to of course the one of the themes of this whole lecture series. You know, and of course, we have to constantly all of us, you know question our own modern perceptions and then sort of foisting those back, you know, into into the past. You know, really just thank you for all your research and I, you know that the emphasis not only on the eyes but on the coloration, I think is so important and I'll just sort of add I mean I whatever I'm going to try not to go on forever because I can but you know this idea of a polychromy, which is taking off in in art history as well. You know that one of the important takeaways is that the way we see these, you know, sculptural figurines is not the way you know the ancient people who were handling them saw them, right. It's not the finishing touch, like what just means do if not give the final say to what a, you know, a surface can look like, especially figurines so yeah it's it really, it's, it's where we almost it feels like a curse such a corrective like that we thought we could theorize them without. And we can, as long as we qualify it as a study in design. So, so thank you for your work. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, thank you so much for the excellent contribution to the women and gender performance lecture series this is such a rich and fascinating talk that really move forward or understanding of these important materials. So we're just about at time. So Erin I know you have a few words to say to close out today's talk. Thank you, Melissa. And, and thank you Lauren again just want to wrap up by saying giving a word of thanks and of course to all of our other speakers who have made for such a rich series so far and we do have one final lecture in the series, coming up on the first also at 930am California time. Dr Stephanie Boudin will give a talk entitled women's eroticism in the ancient Near East. So we're all looking forward to that as a conclusion for this academic years series. I'm super pleased to say that we've been working on developing next year's series body museum staff and I, and Helen Dixon from in Carolina as well. And that will be on the topic of Phoenician women and gender performance, both in the homeland and in the Phoenician diasporas. So I hope if you found interest in the talks from this year's we're going to continue thematically into next year as well. Again broaching an extremely important topic and one that for the Phoenician world is understudied so I hope you will both join us on June 1 of this year. And then in October I believe of 2023, we will start on that next series continuing the theme but focusing on ancient Phoenicia all around the Mediterranean. And just as a as a final appeal again if you've enjoyed this series. And you feel like you'd like to support the kind of work that goes on to make this series possible. And other type of work at the body museum. You can go to our museum website, which is www.psr.edu backslash centers backslash body hyphen museum. And there's a giving tab there so we would appreciate your support which would allow us to continue lifting up the voices of early career scholars and marginalized scholars and lifting up the themes that we find so important for social justice work related to the ancient world. So thank you all for tuning in and we look forward to seeing you virtually on June 1 and then again when our series begins our new