 Yeah, good morning, 6 p.m. in Catania, Sicily, and Rita, you go with 9 a.m. in Berkeley, and we're starting the webinar. I'm sorry, we're late. There were like some technical problems, and we're still waiting for the other department. I think she was not able to get connected. I just got a message from her, and I'm very happy and pleased to be part of this beginning of exchange between the two departments, Department of Human Science and the Department of Near Eastern Studies and Classical Studies. They will be part of the agreement between UC Berkeley and the University of Catania. We hope that showing to the students and researchers interested in funeral, ancient funeral rituals, this will bring about possible exchange programs between our ecological research at the University of Catania, and projects run by scholars at UC Berkeley. And I will leave the words to Rita, that will probably read some words from the head of department at the Near Eastern Studies. Yes, good morning everyone, or good afternoon, good evening for those who are watching on YouTube. And yes, so our chair of the Near Eastern Studies department, Francesca Rockberg, could not be with us due to another compelling meeting, but I will read the text that she wrote for this event. Dear colleagues, I regret that due to another Zoom meeting, I cannot make my welcoming virtual person for the webinar, The Archaeology of Death, that Professor Rita Luccarelli and Nicola Laneri have organized today. On behalf of the Department of Near Eastern Studies, UC Berkeley, I want to extend my welcome to everyone and to thank Rita and Professor Laneri for putting this webinar together to launch the exciting new international cooperation between UC Berkeley and the University of the University of Catania. I also want to thank Sara Kansa and Nicol Tripecevich from the Archaeological Research Facility of UC Berkeley for generously live streaming the webinar on their YouTube channel. I hope this will be just the first of many collaborations on Near Eastern and Mediterranean antiquity between colleagues at our two universities. And I hope too that when travel is possible, again, we will meet and share our work in person. And indeed, I also wish to join our chair to thank the Archaeological Research Facility of UC Berkeley for hosting this meeting on their very active and inspiring YouTube channel full of other videos and live streamed events on archaeological research, not only at UC Berkeley, but in the whole world. And I also want to say that I think that the speakers here today not only sharing common interest in the study of the ancient world, but we are also very lucky scholars for working and teaching in two beautiful and historical universities, but also in two scenic regions such as Sicily, Catania, and the Bay Area of California and Berkeley in particular. Our campuses and regions really deserve to be visited and experienced in full and in person by us, by scholars and by our students. And this is why with this agreement, we really hope that we can create a new study, exchange programs, conferences, and other corporations between scholars of the universities. And so that said, I think I'll give the word to the first speaker. Sorry, Rita. I just got a message from the head of the department. She has internet connection problems. She wants just to thank you, to thank all your colleagues in the head of the department. And she's happy and she wants to acknowledge the fact that everything started because we invited Rita Luccarelli to teach Egyptology in our department and was a great success. The students are very happy and she hopes to see all the other colleagues, all your other colleagues in Catania and hopefully more American students, students from Berkeley to come to Catania and join our archaeological projects and hopefully Sicilian students, students from the University of Catania to join your projects and also come to Berkeley. So I'll give you, thank you again. Thank you. Thank you indeed. We really hope that in a new world without pandemics, of course. And yes, I'm going to give the word to the first speaker of today, Pietro Militello, Professor of Aegean Archaeology at the Department of Humanities of the University of Catania, who has published extensively on the writing systems as well on the material culture in the Aegean world, interconnections between the Aegean world and Sicily during the Bronze and Iron Ages, but I'm sure he can even better than me present himself. And Pietro, let me know when start the slides for your presentation. On, I think he's still mute. Okay, can you hear now? Yes. Perfect. So first of all, thank you for inviting me here to share my experience in the field of archaeology of that. I will introduce myself. I'm an Aegean archaeologist, as you said, and I'm currently working in Crete as director of the excavations and cestus in the Iatriada. But my main interest is in Crete, about the realm of the living palatial administration and architecture. Therefore, for the topic of this meeting, archaeology of death, I decided to present to researchers I'm currently carrying on in Italy. Being also interested in the wider aspects of a Mediterranean history, since 2012, I have started the excavations in two Sicilian sites, characterized by the presence of necropolis, California and Calicantonia. Now, if we can go on with the slide. So yes, one minute, I will share it soon. Okay. The presentation slide, next one. Okay, perfect. Both sites are set in the area of the Iblian mountains in Southeast Mississippi, characterized by calcareous rock and small canyons, locally called caverns, suitable to host large villages of rock cut dwellings and large necropolis of rock cut tombs. But beyond these shared features, the two sites differ in the morphology of tombs and in the preservation of the archaeological evidence, leading therefore to different approaches and different projects because archaeology of death has many nuances. And for each of these sites, we have to make a choice between these different approaches. Calicanton lays on the western edge of the Cavadistica gorge. The project started in 2012 in collaboration with the Supreme Tendenza di Ragusa. The archaeological area is made up by the village, the necropolis, and a biopsidal dwelling between the two. The village has been destroyed by modern building activity in the 70s, and a few evidence survive. The hub resulted to be a building 12 meters long, full of pottery, mainly storage containers and pouring vessels, with some shapes represented by more than 30 temples. It's served therefore to host communal activity. Here we found the skeletons of 312 individuals. The majority of them died of a violence death for the collapse of the building, perhaps due to human or to natural events. But at least one corpse was preserved in an extended position. And so it looked at how it could be used for the preparation of the corpse. Starting from the necropolis, the country is made up by 93 tombs, rock-cut tombs scattered along the gorge, which were, however, looted in antiquity. So only very few preserved layers remained. Therefore, we had to concentrate not so much on the analysis of the remains of pottery, but we concentrated on spatial analysis and visual analysis. In order also to fill a gap in the scientific knowledge of Sicilian history, until now, interest of archaeology for Sicilian prehistoric tombs was mainly devoted to the morphological and chronological study, with the less attention paid to landscape sections. We wanted on the country to construct the inner organization of the necropolis, not only from a social point of view, but also from a physical point of view. It turned out that the tombs are grouped on 14 rocky ridges containing from 2 to 11 funerary units per cluster. The clusters were linked by footpaths and steps cut in the rock. A restricted area left in front of the entrance of each tomb left space only for a few people, suggesting a ritual with respected access. But in each cluster, it is possible to detect the existence of some facilities, like niches, probably to be used by all the tombs of the same cluster. Clustering of tombs, morphological differentiation from a more elaborate to more simple facades, and also different accessibility, seemed to stress the existence of internal differentiation and competition within the social group, notwithstanding the substantially egalitarian structure of early Bronze Age Sicilian society. Next slide please. Visual analysis stressed how tombs were conceived to be seen especially by people from the opposite side of the gorge, representing therefore a territorial mark. On the contrary, the necropolis and the village were not visible to each other, while the hut formed a clear reference point within the settlement system, as it was visible from both the village and from the tombs. Starting from this data, an analysis of the ritual landscape of Calicanton has been attempted. A ritual space can be identified divided at least into two different areas. The first one consists of the necropolis. The second ritual area relates to the hut, which laid directly between the village and the tombs of the necropolis. Sorry? No, not next slide. I'll go back. Okay. So the hut must have been perceived as a border of demarcation zone between life and death. Now next slide. The next slide please. Okay. The second side is the Hypogeum of California, situated in the so-called Contra da Mana inside the California Forest Park in a wonderful landscape of a protected pound and flora. The Hypogeum is one of the most important finality structures in prehistoric Sicily, but no systematic research was carried out until our investigation in 2013 in collaboration always with the superintendent, Sadira Gupta. The Hypogeum consists of a wide entrance and 35 rooms, creating an impressive underground complex of a type until now unknown in Sicily. The main problem of the Hypogeum is its long history. It started as a funerary area. The first chambers were excavated into the final corporate age around 2500 BC, the last ones in the early Bronze Age, towards 1700 BC. From the middle Bronze Age to the early Iron Age, some of the chambers were used for Celtic activities, probably libations in honor of the death. At some time in the first millennium, the main entrance was blocked and cult activity concentrated on the outside. From the 4th century AD, some of the chambers were used as a Christian Hypogeum and later on in the early medieval age as the storerooms of working areas. Area of layers were disturbed or even erased up to the rock. It was therefore not possible to recover all the information we could expect in such a case. So in the case of the California, our interest focused on a different approach and three different goals. The first one was a digital survey of the whole Hypogeum to provide an updated tool for a deeper analysis of the architecture and techniques of construction. The second was the study of energetic constructional Hypogeum in order to calculate possible amount of man labor employed and the number of people belonging to the original community. Next slide, please. Next slide. The third goal is to reproduce what is called corporeality. It has to reconstruct the physical experience within the Hypogeum at the time of its use, from temperature and humidity to sound and visual perception in the darkness. Finally, next slide. Another opportunity of research has been given by a systematic study of human remains undertaken by Francesco Giavazzi and Elena Varotto of the FAFAB Research Center and the Flindler University. Results look very interesting, providing unexpected insights. Cut marks on some bones made after death seem to hint at the practice of deflation of the body, in some cases after some period of death, suggesting secondary practices of burial. In another case, cut marks were made just before death, suggesting a violent death and posing as a problem of conflicts in a period traditionally considered of a physical coexistence. Finally, next slide. Part of pathological analysis brought to light the existence of congenital diseases, various diseases and tumors such as this osteocondroma, which you can see at the center of the slide, providing new data on the health conditions in the later Copper Age of early Bronze Age, Sicily. So this is my contribution to the seminar. Obviously, I'm ready to answer any questions. There will be anyone and I will pass to the other speaker. Thank you. Yes, thank you Professor Militello. And indeed, we will have time for questions at the end for now. I'll give the word to the second speaker, Professor Kim Shelton, Associate Professor of Classics, Director of the Nehmea Center for Classical Archaeology and Kim directs three excavations, actually, programs in Greece, and is a specialist in ceramics, material culture and mortuary landscapes. Please, Kim. Thank you, Rita. And thank you very much for the invitation to join this group. I don't see myself, so that's probably fine. But hopefully everyone can hear me. So of the three projects that I run in Greece, they actually all appear on this map, which is one reason why I'm able to work on all three projects. But what is particularly relevant to the subject of this group is, of course, mortuary archaeology is the site of Aedonia, which as you see here is located in the northeastern part of the Peloponnes, the area of the southwest Corinthia. It is an area that in a certain part of its history, in what we call the Mycenaeum palatial period, so approximately between 1400 and 1200 BCE, this region seems to have been part of the larger kingdom of Mycenae, which you can see here is just to the southeast of it. And these areas were also, as I've marked here, significant through the Iron Age and into the Archaic period and in varying degrees. So they all sort of interact with one another through these periods in a kind of continuous way, some of them through settlements, but also through the mortuary landscape. Next slide, please. The site of Aedonia became known, unfortunately, through extensive looting that started in the late 1970s and went on through the first part of the 1980s with the Greek archaeological service able to conduct salvage excavations throughout that period. It became particularly well known in the early 1990s when a group of material from this cemetery, what was been called the Aedonia Treasure, was put up for sale, came out for sale at a gallery in New York and that sale was eventually blocked in the material repatriated back to Greece. Combined with the material from the salvage excavations, there's been a pretty strong understanding of the importance of this site. Mostly though, through the objects themselves, many of which you can see on this image, including gold signet rings, precious semi precious seal stones, works in in cloison A and other inlay, and also an early plan of these tombs, the original ones that were either looted or discovered through salvage excavation include 20 mortuary features. About 16 of them are the traditional Mycenaean chamber tomb that you see one of the entrances to here on the image and one also that shows the quite overgrown state in which they have become because the site has not, although is an archaeological site, it has not been expropriated as of yet, so is still privately owned and not as had not been as consistently maintained over the years, which led to the fact that looting did continue over the years and intensified significantly during the economic crisis in the late 2000s. Read the next slide please. So this led to a request by the Greek Archaeological Service to the Nemea Center of UC Berkeley to collaborate with them and try to do more for the site, save the site on the one hand and help stop the looting, continue the excavations in a systematic way, and then also prepare the site for eventual expropriation and presentation to the two visitors, including we've designed there, I've illustrated here, an old abandoned schoolhouse nearby the site that we're going to convert into a visitor center, interpretive center that will really be centered on the history of the site, which is so enmeshed with illegal activity and looting and the loss of you know, material, cultural material, but also intellectual material. So we started our work with the survey in 2014 and you see a plan that resulted from that, including all types of interesting archaeological features beyond the cemetery itself. In fact, we identified in addition to the cemetery that's been known since the 1970s, two additional cemeteries or clusters of chamber tombs that we're now calling the upper cemetery, the middle cemetery, which is the original one from known from the 1970s and the lower cemetery. And we began systematic excavations in 2015 and I didn't change my slide, we were supposed to have our last season this summer, obviously that's been postponed. Yeah, go ahead, next slide, that's good. So we found a very interesting range of chamber tombs. One of the things that developed from the salvage excavations was that we have a good understanding of the variety of chamber tomb architecture and burial architecture that were available to the residents of Aedonia, including some pretty monumental sized chamber tombs, some of them very well cut out of the bedrock. And there were also alternate features that could be produced, including long trenches, which resemble the entrance to one of these chamber tombs and yet there was no doorway, there was no chamber, they just used that long trench for burial. And there was one instance of a type of tomb that is much more known on Crete, which is often referred to as a pit cave. It's at the bottom of a deep shaft and then you have a chamber off opening off the bottom. That's very unusual for this part of the Mycenaean world. So maybe showing some interaction with Crete in this period. So we've been able to go on and expand because of our systematic excavations and not only find additional tombs, but a number of tombs that were not disturbed in any way. And that includes modern looting but also ancient intervention. We have uncovered a few tombs that show significant interaction in especially the archaic period. And it looks like some of these tombs were accidentally discovered and identified likely during this period of interest in the Homeric heroic past that they believe these were tombs of the heroes and they become areas of worship and veneration and little hero shrines. And so we find the material that reflects that both installations and figurines, for instance. We also unfortunately have found tombs that have been very disturbed. The one that you see here on the bottom right of the screen, beautifully carved tomb, actually very well preserved, was totally looted. And we didn't have either human remains or artifacts that came from that tomb at all, unfortunately. The opposite of that is the one you see in the center, which is one of our earliest tombs from the site and is a really massive monumental tomb. And although used much later in time, the collapse of the tomb, since that's why we're looking at it from above because the ceiling had collapsed, is protected the original late Bronze Age material and that was found entirely intact. Next slide, please. And I'm using here Tomb 100 to illustrate the situation that we had. You have a plan here of Tomb 100, a very typical Mycenaean chamber tomb cut into the bedrock. This one was cut into a very soft area of bedrock that we have on the site and so had partially collapsed. You can see at the bottom right what it looked like when we found it. It had absolutely been partially looted, had been entered into earlier in time, and then had been used as a dump for garbage for quite a long period of time. So I illustrate here first two pieces of garbage that were found in part of the artifacts that we collected and the overall life history of this tomb, which went right up to the point where we started excavating it. And I also am illustrating what is, yes, a Coca-Cola bottle. This was found at the burial level of the tomb, only about 70 centimeters from one of our burial features and is able to be dated to the early 1990s, so dates when the tomb was entered and robbed. And we don't know, in fact, if they got anything at all because of the heavy collapse. Go ahead, next slide, Rita, because in fact what we we ended up finding, I think this is the last one. No, this should go away. Yeah, there you go. So instead, because of the collapse, again, most we think almost all, if not all, of the original burials were in fact underneath and were not robbed. And they included, as you can see, a quite long span of burial activity from about 1500 to 1375 BCE. And what that showed to us, and it's sort of a good example of what we've been finding in all the tombs that we excavate, is a very interesting selection of burial choices, some that are primary burials, some that remain primary burials throughout the history of the tomb, others that become secondary burial activities and are treated in different ways. In the West Burial Platform, for instance, we had the the bones very carefully curated with all of the skulls lined up together at the bottom of a pit, and then all of the long bones laid on top of it. And other areas in the pit were much more haphazard and commingled. You can't really identify individual features of individual burials. And we also found in this is our first example of what we call a warrior's kit, a selection of weapons and tools that accompany some of what have seemed to be perhaps the more elite or more important burials on the site. So again, I just wanted to illustrate one example that is typical of the kinds of things that we're finding. A wealth of material, material culture, absolutely able to identify that with individual burials and mortuary habits is particularly important as that is totally missing from the earlier site. But even and maybe most importantly, as we now have at least 50 individuals that were able to study osteologically and bioarcheologically, and we'll be able to say something about the population of this area, which which has not been possible up to this point. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Kim, for this very interesting presentation. So as I said, we will have time for questions at the end. Now I would like to give the world to our third speaker, Simona Todaro, researcher of prehistory and proto-history of the Mediterranean and funerary culture in the Asian world and in Sicily in the Bronze Age. Please, Simona. You're on mute. Thank you. I'm not very awake despite the fact that in Patania 630 at the moment. So hello everybody. Thank you for inviting me and just in addition to your presentation, I can say that I'm a researcher of Mediterranean prehistory, but the focus of my research has been mainly the Aegean and Crete. I am an active member of the mission working in Crete ever since in 1996. I started as a student of Patania University and it's been a long way ever since. And as part of the mission, my role has been trying to reconstruct the earliest phases of occupation of two sites, Festos and Aguiatriada. And the first one starts at the end of the 6th beginning of the 5th millennium and the second one instead is at the end of the 4th millennium. And it hasn't been easy, especially in the case of Festos, it's been particularly difficult because Festos is known in the Aegean for being the place of two Minoan palaces that has been built, one on top of the other. So it's a tell site. And so the investigation of the earliest level has been extremely difficult and has been carried out in a three major excavation season. Now there is the fourth one, which is directed by the Professor Militadlo. And so piecing together all these little pieces as entailed working with more than 180 stratigraphies underneath the palaces. But apart from that, it has been rewarding and because the figures after these 20 years of research has changed dramatically in comparison when I started. So if you can advance the PowerPoint, I will try and explain which type of site is Festos. Well, it's very deceiving because when I arrived at Festos, I saw this wonderful tell site which was already an elevated site to start with. So dominating this Louisville plain, wonderful. And it was presented by earlier scholars as a Newland site, as a typical Neolithic site, which, however, was built on the top of the hill as a consequence of some sort of threat, which was supposed to be driven by the arrival of newcomers. And with time and researching and searching also other work done by geologists working in Greece, it turned out that Festos, when it was established at the end of the sixth millennium, was a coastal site. And it was a coastal site set on a hill overlooking a wetland. And it was very different from these Neolithic sites, which we were entailing, especially because the earlier traces of activity were intermittent. It was not a settlement. It was very difficult to understand what it was because the stratigraphy showed pattern of activity and then abandonment and then activity. And the deposits were not domestic by any means. And so then if you advance the PowerPoint, you can see that with time it became clear that rather than being these sort of refugee sites, expression of the cretins that has decided to left to leave the plain because of the arrival of newcomers, it was instead a sort of open air site, which it was frequented periodically by people arriving from the sea, earliest metal and mineral prospectors, who periodically were going here, finding particularly perficus because of the presence of the wetland. And then after these going on activity, at some point that some of these decided to settle in. And so we have within 400 or 500 years of these periodic and intermittent activity, we have the earliest appearance of structure, which is a circular structure, which I'm trying to point with my pointer. I don't know if it's in display, but it's B in the PowerPoint. And another structure, which instead is on A, there are just, as you can understand, just small traces of walls. But the rest, it was just open air with strange assemblages where what was clear, it was this activity of pouring and pouring liquid and using a red ochre. And then there was this adult human remains. To say that although I participated actively at the latest excavation, these burial remains, these human remains had been excavated in the 60s. So for me, it was like dealing with legacy excavation. And in all honesty, when I was putting together the site, I limited myself to state the presence of this. And because the site at this point appeared to be a settlement, I thought that it could be regarded as an intramural burial. And it was only afterwards, when I was exposed to the work of Sefi Triandafilo, who is a professor, associate professor at the University of Salonico, who published these articles, Living with the Dead, and in which all the practices regarding the burial in the Neolithic sites of Greece had been put together, that I start thinking that probably I could do something with this. I could do more than just stating the presence of intramural burial. First of all, because what was strange about this one, it was the fact that it was laid on a bed of red ochre. And now this is common, but not in this period. The use of red ochre and burial in the Western Mediterranean disappear after the fourth millennium. And in Greece, we only have a case that tested in the Mesolithic period, but it was not very common. So if you can advance the slide after, yes, double click. Thank you. I was starting to understand how it could work together with the material assemblages that he was surrounding. And I noticed that there was not only the red ochre used to decorate the vessel, but the red ochre was profusely found. And also the skull was completely found full of red ochre. And at that point, I decided to contact Erika Fjandra, who passed away, unfortunately, a couple of months ago. But in 2010, I contacted her and I asked her because she excavated the skeleton. And I asked her if she had more information that could provide me that. Also because near the skeleton, I don't know if it's visible in this slide, unfortunately, it's not a good image. There was this triton shell which has been cut at one hand, so probably used as an instrument. And it was also decorated with red ochre. And thanks to Erika Fjandra, who advanced the slide, I obtained a series of further photos and indication of what was actually found. And so she told me that she was the one discovering the skeleton, that the skeleton was not a primary burial. It was a secondary burial because only long bones and the skull was found. She also told me that this skull locked the lower mandible, that is which has been replaced by a stone. And then it was all covered with these blocks on the stone that are visible in the second image from the top, on top of the legs. And so I started researching and understanding what it could be. It was clearly a secondary burial, but she told me that it was not found within a pit. And actually she sent for analysis the red ochre that he was found underneath. And she discovered that it was part of limestone, so it was lying on a floor. And so what seems probable is that there was something going on. So all the ochre containers that have been found around this area and the ochre that he was lying on the skull, it seems to have stopped a moment in time in which they were doing something with the skeleton. But what they were doing with the skeleton, it was really unique in the sense like one part of the skeleton, as you can be seen, it's fragmented. And I thought that it could be like due to the excavation or to manipulation like during later activity at the site. Instead she confirmed that it was clearly like broken. At the time it didn't make sense, but then as the studies on the Neolithic burial practice proceeds and as the publication of the Necropolis at Tepi was brought forward, it became really more interesting because in the Necropolis at Tepi, which is a site in Attica, it is interesting to find that some of the skeleton had a stone inside the mouth. And this skeleton had always the skull completely damaged by some sort of, you know, with the hammer or something, it's voluntary, deliberately broken. And these appear as to be deviant burial. So I started researching to see why and if this could be a deviant burial, the fact that it is a unique skeleton within a site that had just become a settlement at the time in which other burial were done in caves, it was already opening up a perspective. It could have been just a case relocation of some of the bones within the settlement is something that is tested also later on. So when I started putting together all the information, I decided to start and focusing on specific treatment to see what was that continued in Crete and what was instead unique. Now for the lack of the mandible and the presence of a stone, the mandible is always lacking, but this is something that is related to the very act of disarticulation because normally it remains attached to the neck. But the placing of a stone in the mouth is not common at all. And red okra is something that disappears in the Mesolithic. And it was also this Mesolithic connection that opened up a sort of a better understanding because after all, this could be the burial of the people, of one of the people who first settled the site. So in terms of future perspective, I started trying to see if it could help me tracing the origin of the first setter of the site. And in this, the connection with Marula has been very interesting because it's on the Cyclades, on an island of Kipnos, and it's a Mesolithic site. So it's 2,000 years earlier than the skeleton. It had provided red okra, it had provided the use of stone. But what is even more interesting is that some of the skeleton at Marulas, according to the analysis that has been done, revealed a distinctive pathology in the skull, which proves that those people were exposed to talismia. They had this disease. So that kind of lit the light, because if you show the last light, can you advance? Yeah. What has become clear in the environmental reconstruction of the site is that the wetland that was around Festus at some point, it kind of was alternating period of fresh water and period of bird water. So it was a wetland that alternately becomes warm, and therefore it was not very good for a living condition. And the fact that we found these skeleton with these distinctive burial practices that connect to Marulas, and the fact that some of the individuals at Marulas appear to have suffered of talismia, and the fact that just building up very recently, it has been proved that alpha talismia is something that is not badly and prevents malaria for attacking people. And so it could allow living in a wetland where the condition were not open. It just given me the idea of starting the project, hopefully with the collaboration of Savitri and the Philu, to try and see if there are traces on this skull that could open up the possibility of seeing if the first settler of the site were somehow really related to these people, these Mesolithic people from Marula, that were carrying the gene that allowed them to settle for the first time in this environment. Thank you. Thank you, Simona, for your fascinating presentation. I think it's time for me to introduce the co-host. It was like a very, Simona, it's a very interesting, and I read some comments with Inas also. It's like very fascinating because you were able to reconstruct the palaeophatological aspects of this funerary, secondary funerary, boreal system, but also like the reconstructing engine environments. It seems like a very fascinating project that combined landscape analysis with funerary analysis and the analysis of those. So now let me introduce the co-host of this webinar, Rita Luccarelli, who is an associate professor of Egyptology and has been also loaned to Lento Catania for this semester. And so she's been the perfect link between UC Berkeley and the University of Catania, and she's going to talk about two projects that she's been interested during the last years. Thank you, Rita, for organizing this. Thank you, Nicola, for your kind presentation. And indeed, I am bringing everyone now from Greece to Egypt. And for those of you who know me, they knew that I've been working a lot actually, not really on a site, but on text, mostly on text of the ancient Egyptian so-called Book of the Dead. And indeed, my main project at UC Berkeley is the sketchy title of the Book of the Dead in 3D. Why? Because, well, this corpus of spells, the Book of the Dead, mostly known for its version on papyri, is also tested on other media, 3D medias. And I choose coffins to work on how the text and the iconography of those magical spells, as well as spells of similar type, are used to decorate ancient Egyptian coffins. And so since 2015, actually, the Book of the Dead in 3D project is based at UC Berkeley and aims at implementing the 3D visualizations of ancient Egyptian coffins kept primarily at the Museum, for which I'm also faculty curator for the Egyptian collection, the Fiber Herz Museum of Anthropology, which has actually the biggest Egyptian collection in North America. And we are working at the digitization of the old collection. I'm focusing on the coffins, creating 3D models, but annotating those models with metadata that can tell us about the origin of the coffins, the history, the name of the owners, and in particular the translation of the magical text on the coffins. And techniques of digital capture and 3D visualization, in particular photogrammetry, are currently widely used in Egyptology in order to create replicas of all kind of objects, as well as for reconstructing also archaeological sites, tombs and temples. Museums are using 3D viewers, such as Sketchfab, in order to disseminate their collection and ancient Egyptian artifacts, constitutes a good part of these 3D online replicas. Now with my project, indeed, I'm focusing on creating annotations in the coffins, especially the anthropoid coffins produced in the first millennium BC, really are decorated with very interesting variants of funerary text, of those spells that should protect the disease that during the journey in the Netherlands, according to the ancient Egyptian beliefs. So having annotated 3D models is also a very good educational tool to have students working also maybe on the Egyptian language, if they want to follow Egyptian language courses that we offer at UC Berkeley, but they are also useful for the museum visitors. And those coffins of the Hearst Museum, as well as of the other small museums, small collections in California, where we've been working, they are not on exhibitions, they are in storage rooms, so disseminating them through digital viewers where one can indeed enjoy the full object, flip it around, as well as read about the text and the translation is an optimal way to supply to the lack of space in museums to exhibit those beautiful artifacts. And so this is an example of the annotations in the previous slides. There was a link to the website of the project 3D coffins Berkeley, which I don't have time to show to you today, but I invite everybody to check the website. In many cases, you can even download the PDF versions of those 3D models of coffins, or you can look at those online with all annotations. So I'm working on this with a team of students and colleagues that are helping with that. And today in particular, I want to present to you my first case study, the first sarcophagus on which I've been working, which is a beautiful, actually sarcophagus lead of an official lead during the 26th dynasty in the north of Egypt. And this tomb is known, it's found in Saqqara. So we are here around 600, 500 BC. We call him the doctor because one of his titles is indeed Sunnu, an Egyptian doctor. But those Sunnu at this time, they were also high officials, military men. And indeed the tomb has never been filled. We think that some tech probably died during a military expedition maybe, but the tomb was ready was one of these beautiful tomb shafts of the period. So this is here, you can see some photo of me and a student starting to photograph this beautiful and heavy two tons heavy sarcophagus lead when at the time when it was still in the storage, in one of the storage rooms of the museum off sites in Richmond, thanks to crowdfunding campaign. And under the other time, the director of the museum was Benjamin Porter, who is one of the next speakers today, who has been doing an amazing job in supporting such a campaign and bring back the sarcophagus lead in our gallery space where it's still today. In the meantime, I've been working to create a 3D model of the sarcophagus lead and I've been working of course to the translation of the text of this sarcophagus, which is similar, it's made of spells similar to the Book of the Dead, mostly of the pyramid text type. And this sarcophagus has been then the basis of a second phase of the Book of the Dead in 3D project, which is still ongoing, that is called Return to the Tomb, contextualizing the Egyptian sarcophagus of some tech in a 4D visualization of the tomb and its environment at Sakhar and Dynasty 26. And this is a collaborative project with a colleague from UC Santa Cruz, Elaine Sulevan, Chris Hoffman, who has been managing the project, UC Berkeley, I saw on YouTube, it's online, so hi Chris. And the project has been generously funded by the Center of Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society, C3 and the Banatau Institute. So Elaine Sulevan is a digital Egyptologist specialized in digitally reconstructing funerary sites and she's been recently publishing a book, Constructing the Sacred, which is available online if you want to check as well, where you can see this interactive reconstruction, the Necropolis of Sakkara. We have been using the visualization that Elaine made of the 26th Dynasty Sakkara, that was the period when the tomb of some tech was built, that you can see here in the reconstruction we've been made. Thanks to an amazing team, also students that help using these softwares for both for photogrammetry like MetaShape and VR for the reconstructions, for VR we've been using Unity. And so we reconstruct basically the landscape, the tomb and brought back the sarcophagus in the tomb. In this way, this is a way to have apps like this in VR to make sure that the objects that nowadays are decontextualized in museums can virtually be brought back in their own environment. And I think this is one of the most amazing functions that digital technologies have in archaeology. And so I wanted to show you quickly two minutes' demo of what we've been doing for this VR app that we hope to launch by the end of this year. And of course for the full experience, you will need a headset and really travel into the tomb, but I hope this will give you an idea and I hope also the audio will be on its shoulder. To the ancient Sakkara Necropolis. Sakkara was an important cemetery site that stood in the high desert west of the city of Memphis, a religious, economic and political center. It is the 26th dynasty, otherwise known as the Seyite period, 664 to 525 BCE. When high officials and families of the elite from the now state capital Seis wanted to be buried near the pyramids of the powerful pharaohs of the past. For example, the famous steppe pyramid of Jozer, or the pyramid of King Unas, both built more than 1500 years before the Seyite period. You are now standing before a series of 26 dynasties shaft tombs marked at the surface by square enclosure walls. 26 dynasty shaft tombs were often designed with a long narrow shaft dug into the ground, ending in a burial chamber. Sontek's tomb shaft extended more than 25 meters deep into the rock of the Sakkara Plateau. After the burial chamber was built and in place, the shaft was filled with sand to make the tomb inaccessible. Click on the hieroglyphs to view their translation. Thank you for visiting the Tomb of Sontek at Sakkara. We hope you enjoyed your journey. Okay, so this was a very short demo. We are really working to make it possible for the user of this app to study the sarcophagus in its own tomb, and later on to have also the texture of the old tomb walls. The tomb is, by the way, an object of an epigraphic survey and an archaeological mission by a colleague, Ramadan Hussein, from Tubingen. So we are really looking forward to cooperate with them and have a full immersive experience for this beautiful object and for the old tomb. The scope of this project is to explore the variegated dimensions of the ancient Egyptian funerary religion, magic, and secret spaces through immersive experience and visualizations. We hope that with this project we are showing how immersive visualization technologies also provide access in new ways to cultures and experiences that are inaccessible or lost, giving us both the means of preserving the diversity of human cultural experience and the way to understand cultural diversity and the role of empathy in a global context. And key here is the dissemination of Egyptology content to the public, creating new ways for students and museum visitors to engage in meaningful ways with scholarly content, content that harnesses real scholarship and current research, but packages it in a way that is approachable and understandable by the public. And so after this short presentation I also want to take, oh well, I forgot to say that we have at UC Berkeley a few installations, one of them is actually at the Archaeological Research Facilities of what we call the Cape Kiosk and those are 3D environments that I'm using also for teaching and where we can show those 3D models, the reconstructions in a better view so the students can get more engaged in studying archaeology in general, not only Egyptian archaeology. And as I said, if you were still to mention other two archaeological projects that we have at UC Berkeley, one is directed by my colleague Cairo Redmont, is an archaeological mission at Eliebe in Venezuela, almost 300 kilometers south of Cairo, and Eliebe site is key to understanding ancient Egyptian history since it was a capital during the third intermediate period of the Egyptian history, so around the beginning of the first millennium BC and the site is especially popular for a lot of findings already in the past of papyri, but archaeologically speaking it has some very massive walls built by the high priest of Amunatibs to separate them from the kings of Egypt at Tannis, so in the north this was a period indeed of divide between the priest and the kings that were formally together, but through the archaeological missions like those we understand more about historical periods which are very dense and hard to understand for Egyptologists. So the mission is still ongoing, of course right now it's freezed as well as all archaeological missions, but my colleague hoped to resume it soon. And the last project I wanted to mention is the Abydos Temple Paper archive project which is an international mission under the auspices of the University of California Berkeley in collaboration with the Ministry of Antiquities, Egypt, with members from several countries including many Egyptian team members and others from our department, the Eastern Studies. Carol Redmont again is directing this project, our really PhD postdoc, we could say Jessica Kaiser is one of the directors, we have many other students graduate and undergraduate involved in this project and this project is about discovering and studying those historical archives that were abandoned in the site as you can see in this photo and that instead contain documents from the Egyptian Antiquities Service related to the heritage management of the site of Abydos and surrounding areas. So they found documents approximately from the 1850 to the 1960s, so the focus is to preserve and categorize this historical archive detailing the modern history of the area and its archaeological sites from also the Egyptian point of view and so it's very very useful for reconstructing the history of Egyptology. And we decide I'm done with Egypt so we can move again with the next speaker that I may introduce Benjamin Porter, associate professor of Middle Eastern archaeology at our department in Eastern Studies and he's an archaeologist but also an anthropologist studying studies the bronze and iron age societies of the Middle East and Mediterranean and directs various field projects but maybe Ben himself wants to say more about those projects and focusing on one in particular. Please Ben. Hi, thank you Rita. I hope everyone can see me. This is a very exciting collaboration and I'm very happy to be a part of it. The thing I'd like to talk about today is a new project. Before I do that let me put a little bit more into context. But the last 10 years I've become very interested in the ways that archaeologists around the world can use collections that have collections, mortuary collections that have been excavated over the past century that are now kept in museum collections and antiquity collections and perhaps these collections have not been particularly well published or they've been underpublished or perhaps they've been overpublished but the new kinds of questions that we're asking about mortuary practices in the past have not yet been asked and so I think this is an important complementary strategy to active field research. So one project that I kicked off about a decade ago that involves a very interesting collection at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley where I'm also a faculty curator of Middle Eastern archaeology and a past director of the museum. I kicked off a project with my colleague at Sonoma State University Dr. Alexis Bhutan where we were looking at a collection that was excavated in the 1940s by an archaeologist named Peter B. Cornwall on the island of Bahrain which is located in the Persian Gulf. In the lower right hand screen you can see one of our early publications that was an overview of the of the collection and we've gone on to publish several articles that are looking at how we can use 21st century both bioarchaeological techniques as well as mortuary archaeological techniques to study this museum collection and it's borne a lot of fruit. We've been able to make I think important contributions to the ways that we think about the Bronze Age civilizations of one kingdom in particular named Dill Moon. Our project inspired us to develop another project that brought our colleagues into conversation with us and these conversations were published in a book published by the University of Colorado Press called Remembering the Dead in the Ancient Near East and you can see that located in the lower left hand corner. But today I want to talk about a new project that I've started that but it's along a similar theme of looking for undervalued mortuary evidence and trying to ask new questions with them and that's at the archaeological site of Tal Al Mazar which is located today in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Could I have the next slide Rita? Good. So here you can see a map of the southern Levant where between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan Rift Valley you have the state of Israel you have the Palestinian West Bank and then the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. This is located the site Tal Al Mazar is located not far from the northern shore of the Dead Sea not far from the very famous Neolithic site of Jericho and in the lower right hand part of the screen you can see a satellite imagery of Tal Al Mazar. It was located in the Iron Age and we'll be talking about mainly the fifth and fourth centuries BCE in a moment but Tal Al Mazar was located in the Jordan Valley which in antiquity was a rather marshy area perhaps good for agriculture. It was also located on a major commercial furrow fair that linked the southern Levant and the northern Levant as well as Mediterranean coastal ports. So this is very much on the edge of the if you might say the traditional Mediterranean basin and the ancient Middle Eastern world. The next slide please. So the time period I'm interested in asking this question is during the period in which the Achaemenid Persian Empire ruled a good portion of the Middle East you can see a map on the upper right hand corner. This empire extended from western Turkey all the way to the Indus River Valley and what is today Pakistan and at times there was even control over parts of Egypt. So the base of the Achaemenid Empire was in southwest Iran at some of the famous capitals like Persepolis and Suza. So the Tal Al Mazar was quite far from the imperial core but the Jordan Valley and the Levant in particular were key for two particular reasons. One was the Levant was an agricultural bread basket that supplied food not just for Egypt but also the northern Levant and of course local populations. The second reason it was an important location is that it was a coastal gateway for Mesopotamia into the Mediterranean and so the coastal ports along the Mediterranean coast like the ancient cities of Tyre and Dor were key and so the peoples of Tal Al Mazar and the peoples of the Jordan Valley lived a stone's throw if you will from these more active and perhaps more cosmopolitan Mediterranean ports and so the site of Al Mazar and its counterparts in the Jordan Valley served as a very important agricultural node between Mesopotamia and between the Mediterranean ports and I think this is important too is what in a moment we're going to see just what their cemetery looked like. The next slide please so of course I did not excavate Tal Al Mazar it was excavated by an excellent team from the University of Jordan between 1977 and 1981 this was an important teaching a project for the University of Jordan and many Jordanian archaeologists of that generation trained here when they were young scholars. What's really useful about this project is that they went on to publish the biological data and the mortuary evidence from the cemetery that was located just off the site of the tel and they published it in a way that even though it was published in 1984 and you can find this book if you're interested there was a very good information about biological data of the different individuals that were buried here there was age data sex biological sex and then images about how bodies were interred what position they were laid in as well as grave goods and so the entire cemetery was not excavated and today unfortunately it's not available for excavation it's now part of the agricultural environment of the Jordan Valley but the team was able to excavate 85 largely single occupant interments that reign that persons raged to the age from infants to senior adults so you have a very nice population spread there to understand both children and young adults to the very elderly and then among so many of the observations that have already been made is that biological males and females received a different burial treatments if we had more time we could take a look at how males and females of bodies were positioned differently biological male and biological female bodies were positioned differently as well as the objects with which they were interred so it raises a lot of interesting questions to be asking about identity and how that intersects with issues of gender and how those are memorialized in the mortuary in the mortuary context then also what's interesting and into the credit of the original excavators is they published a wide range of objects that were found in each of the of the interments that gives us a very interesting insight into the mortuary assemblages that appeared in each cyst and many of these objects were not just utilitarian ceramic vessels that one would expect but there were also many luxury items here on the screen you can see there's a very standard accumulated seal and stamp seal and both and cylinder seal that were placed with these individuals there was also bronze and iron objects that were used say for feasting and then some individuals received slightly more treatment in their interment and were placed in these bathtub coffins this is the object you this you see here in in a profile where these are bathtub coffins that are found throughout Mesopotamia in the middle part of the first millennium as well as in the Levant and so certain individuals were receiving slightly more treatment in death than others and so this raises another question about how about status and rank in these in these situations and so the University of Jordan has given us a really great assemblage to ask new questions that were not asked in the past and some of those questions I'll review on the next slide Rita the kinds of things I'm asking in this project is what can the documented biological profiles tell us about El Mazar's overall health and what was it like the Jordan Valley again was often marshy these were likely individuals were participating in agriculture and also at the mercy of diseases like malaria and so how is that how are those conditions being expressed in the human skeleton I'm also interested as I hinted a moment ago about the ideologies of death burial in the afterlife and how that's encoded in the evidence what do these assemblages tell us about the community's access to prestige good markets I don't have time to show you all of the wonderful objects luxury objects that are found here but many of these objects have traveled from long distances and so even though we might be exploring a community that was mainly based in labor they seem to have access to prestige good markets that's likely because of their community's location on an important commercial thoroughfare that ran the length of the Jordan Valley and then finally this is not the only cemetery in this style that dates to this period we have two others that have been well published one you can see their publications here one is located near the bronze and iron age city of Karkamesh on the Euphrates that was re-re-examined by Mori a few decades ago and then there's also a publication from Kameda Lotes which is in southern Lebanon that also has a cemetery that dates to this time period so what can we learn then about this about these different communities by comparing these three cemetery assemblages so that's that's what I'm interested in exploring for this new collaboration that we have with our Sicilian colleagues and hopefully if you check back with me in a in a few more months I'll have a lot more to say about this investigation so thank you for listening and I'll turn it back over to Rita now thank you Ben for this really great presentation so I think now we are at the last speaker of the day professor Nicola Laneri who teaches archaeology and art history of the ancient Near East at the University of Catania and since 2003 has been the director of the Hirb-Merdon Tepe Archaeological Project in Turkey and is currently also the co-director of the Ganja region kurgan archaeological project in Azerbaijan and I also want to add that I'm very happy to have been to have been working with Nicola for this visiting professorship been holding at University of Catania so we've been we've been co-teaching a course for Egyptology and it's great now to continue this cooperation also with the other colleagues of Catania but well I'll leave the word to Nicola for now thank you so much Rita and I start I know it's going to be a tiny little book it's possible to see anyway I remember when I was a student of European for history reading this book by Maria Gimbutesh on the Kourgans I think a lot of my friends and colleagues here probably read this book in Italian it was based on an article from 1956 if I remember wrong and it was a a diffusionist approach towards the idea of the spread of Kourgans together with Prada in European culture from the Pontic era all the way into Anatolia so I kind of travel this this idea of of the Kourgans of these funerary mountains and a word that it's coming from Turkish language and has never been translated is a translation should be a burial mound has been lingering in my mind for a long while until 2018 when I kind of moved from Anatolia all the way to the Caucasus and I started a project in a collaboration with colleagues Azeri colleagues from the Academy of Science at the Institute of Ethnography and Archaeology the Academy of Science of Baku co-directing with Bakhtiar Jalilov this this project in collaboration with the School of Religion Studies of Kamines in Florence University of Catania and the idea was to try to bring into the arena a clear investigation of these funerary mountains so we decided to tackle two areas two areas related to two creeks the Ganja creek and the Kuruq Chai creek affluent of the Kura river as you can see in the plan going from Anatolia into the Caspian Sea one of the two rivers together with the Arax river they gave the name to one of the most famous culture of the southern Caucasus that is the Kurorax culture that dated between the four millennium BC and the second millennium BC so the idea was to tackle these these funerary mountains there are marking the landscape of numerous southern Caucasus and Caucasus nations Western Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Eastern Anatolia the tradition of the Kyrgyz comes from the Pontic area where during the fifth millennium the large collective burials were constructed slowly this tradition came down into the southern Caucasus between the northern and the lesser Caucasus and this is where we are exactly located the idea was thus to excavate on one side a Kuruq axis the Kurga and that was part of the Uzurama plateau in the Goranboi province as I said before along the Kuruq Chai affluent to the Kura river and the other one was to tackle on the late Bronze it means late second millennium beginning of the first millennium BC the Kurgans along near the modern city of Ganja what we have done this was like starting from 2018 next slide Rita please was to clean and and investigate the Kurgan through a biographical approach that means like see and understand the different layers of construction use and memorialization of these funeral amounts the raises about two meters from from the ground the the the the Kura axis Kurgans are varied in terms of size but generally between 15 and 20 meters of diameters in particular we focus on Kurgan aid after the Michael Lake bacteria Jalilov excavated the seven Kurgans data to this period in particular as you can see from this slide what we noticed immediately was that these funeral mounds it was constructed using two different circles of stones one that was the inner circle and it was the top of the mound that covering the funeral chamber and the second one was a circle of stones around a kind of path that was probably used for ritual purposes as a sort of circular emulation around the Kurgan so interestingly last week we got five calibrated dates on on seeds human bones and charcoals and they're all steady in that range of three thousand six hundred and sixty two three thousand five hundred BC making this the most ancient Kurgan of all the southern Caucasus and also Eastern Anatolia next slide please Rita as you can see from this photos for this picture put together by Lorenzo Caccioli with a photo scan you can see the circles but you can see that there are two different Kurgans one that is linked to the funeral the main funeral chamber and the dromus linked to the corners of the cardinal points and you can see those stones in black circling this funeral chamber that was five by seven meters in size the dromus was about one meter and fifty in length and one meter width and next the tangent to this circle of stones whereas there were another circle of stones as you can see were not centered on the funeral chamber why because this the funeral chamber dated to the core axis was then reused during a later period we think in terms of pottery chronology the calibrated dates were not very helpful but in terms of pottery chronology these two intrusive pit burials that you can see along the northern edge of the funeral chamber were dated to the early Kurgan period that means middle bronze age end of the early bronze age middle bronze age that is roughly between two thousand and six hundred two two thousand and three hundred so it's almost like a seven hundred it's almost a thousand years later and on top of this two graves where a bill was built a larger a larger Kurgans that was used to include also the previous Kuroraksis Kurgan we don't know this if this is an active memorialization but considering the widespread area of the Uzun Ramapoto where there are more than 280 Kurgans we don't understand why they had to reuse exactly the same area it is also interesting that this Kurgan is probably the largest Kurgan of the Kuroraksis period and the two graves that are located on the northern side of the funeral chamber didn't destroy the funeral chamber but just touch along the edges of the funeral chamber a third intrusive pit was in state used as a funeral favissa related to the use of the Kuroraksis Kurgan next slide please as you can see from this reconstruction the dromos was used to enter the dromos sloping down was used to enter the funeral chamber and at least in three different three or four different phases the bodies of the individuals where the pause are using wooden sledges and as you will see in the next slide we saw these archaeological traces the pattern of these wooden beams along the floor as you can see in one corner was located a sordid of wooden coffin that was probably used as a chimney to make circulate air within the funeral chamber why because at the end use of the funeral chambers after all the bodies were deposited the funeral chambers and the dromos were burned from within and at the end of the first phase of firing was also the beams were also burned from outside allowing the whole structure to collapse within what we also notice as you can see is that probably the funeral chamber during the use encountered a collapse of one of the wall because as you can see the the cyst the grave there was the pit that was cut was then bonded with with madrid walls circling around and creating a sordid of house for these communities what we know is that during this period the communities we're moving a lot we're either transhumant or nomadic communities moving from georgia towards northwestern iran and armenium crossing during the seasonally the the lesser calcas the borders azerbaijan with armenia so during this period of occupation this seasonal period of occupation of the area the bodies the dead bodies of the members of the communities were buried inside and at the end of the use of the of the other funeral chamber the chamber the the chamber was burned down and the funeral chamber was was filled in with the virgin soil the gypsum plaster virgin soil around located around the curgat next slide please so as you can see here from the from these three slides the all the beams were found almost intact burn inside so they collapse inside the funeral chambers at the end use of the of the of the of the curgat of the funeral chamber and as you can see even the whole architrave on top of the thromos were found and as you can see in the corner there was this sord of coffin chimney that was used probably to bury people but also to allow air and fire to burn this this chamber as you can see most of the human beings were burned inside were all in primary depositions and together with each phase of the position of these human beings usually were found only one or two usually a set of vessels composed of a bowl and a drinking vessel as you can see in this case that is clearly evident from this from this picture in the center the human being was placed on you can see the pattern was placed on on a sledge that was used probably to carry inside the funeral chamber the body of this individual in in concluding my presentation what we want to do next year and we hope some people from Berkeley will join us together with our students from the University of Catania is to publish all the materials excavated by the my colleague Bakhtiarja Lilov in a final volume in a final report they will include the couraraxes couragans together with the iron age couragans of the ganja region and then we'll start excavating a settlement in the Astafa region farther north along the coura in order to understand the relationship between the between these couragans and the settlements so thank you to everybody I think I am the concluding speaker of today I hope we were able to put together an interesting webinar I've seen almost 170 people probably even more students from Berkeley from the University of Catania is at the end of COVID allowed us to connect with no expenses and that's like probably the best way of connecting Berkeley and Catania I don't even know how much will cost the flight from Berkeley to Catania and thank you Rita thank you all thank you also the the provost and the president of the University of Catania the provost of UC Berkeley for having signed this agreement and hopefully there are questions yes indeed we open now a short time for questions if there are questions from the audience or even if the speakers have questions for other speakers of course so I'll check also the the chat space okay any questions raise your hands so yeah Rita yes yeah there was a question there was a question an interesting question that came on the youtube chat I'll think I'll take that one about the source of the the bronze and iron in the Mazar cemetery I don't think there's been any specific sourcing that's been done on those specific objects it's a good question I think however I could speculate there were a number of iron ores available in the foothills to the east and to the south of the settlement where iron ores were mined probably during the iron age and certainly in later in the classical and Islamic era we have actually documented so iron ores would be readily available to producers in the southern Levant bronze is a little bit more complicated of course because you need copper and tin there there was a major copper mining area in southwestern Jordan but we're it really we don't have much evidence that it was being used at this time is being used both the fore and after this time another potential location for copper would have been Cyprus of course which was a major producer throughout the second the late second into the first millennium albeit not consistently so it's a great question but we don't have the specific answer right now great and there are I see other questions one was for Professor Militello can you please repeat the date of the bones with the cut marks suggesting the flashing okay I had already answered them in the chat C14 date gives a calibrated date of around 1850-1750 BC so we are just in what is called early bronze age early Sicilian early bronze age in European terminologies the transition between early and middle bronze age okay then there were other questions one was imaging the IM pay or frangere of the ancient Mediterranean how would be how would he be hired how would he find working stuff who would finance his projects who wants to answer that okay I have to say that this is not a question for Caligantano-Californo but it's perhaps a question for Festus it's not a funerary monument but I am just trying to find the answer for the same problem especially because we are just in a cooler moment of transition for less complex to more complex societies Simona has an idea about how people who was hired before at the end of the early non-repellational period I think that in the case of Festus where we are just in more communal and corporative society so my idea is that main labor source was provided by the community whereas the specialist came from outside and and probably I could not find evidence for the way how they were hired in metal or other kinds of goods but I think that in this case in the case of Festus we can have a kind of mix between a communal work as suggested by Simona Todorov perhaps give a better description of how she thinks people was hired in the preparation period and in the preparation period I think in this case we are a communal participation for the not specialized man labor whereas only specialists were hired from outside I don't know if this can fit your answer for your period and your okay I might have just a few remark on that and he's just he has to do mainly with the type of site Festus is because starting from around the mid of of the third millennium stop being a settlement and it was more like a ritual site and so what we could see it was that at some point they start mobilizing a huge amount of labor to cut the hill there is a lot of terracing and in in conjunction with these big work we found the introduction of what I interpreted as Russian bowls they are little plain like the near eastern one but in Crete they appear much later in this case we have these big construction fields with hundreds and hundreds of these plain bowls that are mainly mold made so they they are mold made that means that you can produce it a huge amount you can put also a known specialist to produce them and mainly the mold can assure about the volume the standardization of volume and so in that case it was clear that because nobody was inhabiting the place whenever there was the need of conducting major collaborative work there was this sort of meal distribution I wouldn't even say redistribution because we don't have much evidence about the fact that at that early stage they are starting gathering together but there was some sort of emerging authorities that was organizing and coordinating all these workmen and so in this stage we can see that there is this distribution of meal in this in the shape of meat and whatever kind of substance that was provided with these little Russian bowls and because that is the moment in which we have some sign that they start draining the marshy area and so it's possible that and it's also that we have some pollen date but they are not very well dated that show that cereal starting appearing so it's possible that there was a conjunction of new engineering capacity draining the marshy area and so that's allowed some sort of cultivation intensive cultivation of grain and therefore the redistribution model applied only for this type of communal work and as Pietro explained before for later period instead it's more complicated and it seems that I totally agree with them for this because what I wanted to stress is just that whereas until the end of the preflatial period we have this huge amount of Russian bowls this disappear in middle minimum 1b and this think marks a change in the way in people was hired as far as the question of how specialists were paid what I can say in the linear eight tablets we can find evidence for example wine barley grain but also boohoo so I cannot I can also think of this kind of raw material as a form of payment thank you there are a scene in the chat there are questions for Kim and Ben maybe they want to answer Ben answered on the directly in the in the chat right Ben yeah but they can't they can't read the chat so I guess the official child on YouTube all right yes maybe there is a question Kim wants to answer there's actually actually two questions one was about the warrior kit that I mentioned is something that we see that it's included with the number of our burials and the question was about whether there's any evidence for other professions I would say though that the warriors kid I wouldn't call the warrior profession in the same way that I would say that this is a mark of identity and in many cases we don't yet have any evidence on the burial itself on the skeletal material that would suggest that they were anything more than just a cushy elite that sat around and did nothing but by including all of this material you at least give off the picture of being a warrior in your life and who's going to fight you after you're dead anyway the exception though is we do in fact have one burial that was very well dug out with two swords and a dagger and but also a mirror and some other interesting bronzes who died from let's call it sharp force trauma through the center of his his forehead so possibly a sword a sword blow so there's some that may actually have been doing that we don't really have other yet evidence of professions within the artifact material we do have one burial with the things that were found with them including 24 bows and arrows and a leather quiver and a seal stone that showed different prey that a person was identifying themselves as a hunter rather than a than a warrior but and we may find some other indicators of course on the osteological material when it's more closely examined that that indicates other kinds of professions through repeated activity but but that's still in the very early stages of study there was just one very other one about whether there's archaeological evidence linking the archaic periods interaction with Homer there's nothing particularly direct about that starting in the in the Iron Age and going into the archaic period as we know that the Homeric epics were circulating very widely we do see an intensification of people visiting sites that are linked to the Homeric epics I've I've witnessed this many times at Mycenae for instance where there are certain places on the site that would have been visible and people interacted with and there were often gifts left that are like the types of gifts we know from the funeral of Patroclus which are not actually a terribly good reflection of what people give in late Bronze Age tombs but then during the later Iron Age and the archaic period they start to leave these at Bronze Age tombs that they identify they believe are these these heroes that are being described we think in the epic and we see that and I thought you know too so I guess I guess Rita was almost 8 p.m. here I think it's dinner time yeah and I think I see reducing we had a peak of 175 was a great success I guess we got like amazing comments a lot of students it was great thank you all I mean thank you for taking your time off and be part of this I hope we're going to be able to organize like more specific webinar in the future I mean we have a summer you know we don't know if we're going to go in the field and on the field itself it might be an occasion to just like exchange more ideas on other subjects so thank you all thank you Rita thank you Sarah and thank you Nico thank you everyone thank you and I hope to see you in person soon all of you I hope bye bye bye bye bye