2024

20th November

The ERC Project ‘Roman Empire of the 2000 Cities’

Time and Venue: 17.30 Bilkent A-130

21st-22nd November

The 3rd Pisidia Symposium: The Interaction of Pisidia with the ‘Outside World’

More info about the event can be found here

Venue: Bilkent University Library, Art Room

6th November

Chronicles of a Connected Frontier: the southern Anatolian Plateau between Phrygia and the Mediterranean in the first millennium BCE

More info about the event can be found here

Time and Venue: 17.30 H-232

23rd October

Contested Cultural Heritage: ethics morality and the law in the context of museums & the Islamic art market

More info about the event can be found here

Time and Venue: 17.30 Bilkent University C Blok Amphitheatre

17th – 18th October

Public Archaeology: Dialogues, Communities and Social Challenges

More info about the conference can be found here

Venue: Bilkent University, Archaeology Department Room A130

16th – 18th May

Connecting Stucco in the Mediterranean. (c. 300 BCE – c. 1200 CE) Methodological approaches and the State of Research

More infor about the conference can be found here

Venue: Bilkent University, C- Block Amphi

8th May

Evening Lecture by Prof. Jorge López Quiroga (Autonomous University of Madrid) and Dr. Natalia Figueiras Pimentel (Complutense University of Madrid): “Ancient and Early Medieval Rupestrian Architecture in the Iberian Peninsula. A Western Construction of Eastern Typology”

Time and location: 17:30, Room H-232 (Faculty of Humanities and Letters)

abstract

For the area corresponding to the Iberian Peninsula, architecture excavated in the rock has been present since Roman times, essentially in works of civil architecture, mining and its network of canals (well known, for example, in the northwest of the peninsula) that show a knowledge and technology in the process of excavating and working the rock. Later, throughout the Late Antiquity, rock architecture was also used for residential and cultural functions, particularly in the south of the Iberian Peninsula, with the arrival of monks and hermits from North Africa. During the Early Middle Ages, with the Islamic presence, this type of architecture was maintained and reused by small communities, for utilitarian and residential purposes, maintaining its use practically to the present day in the south and the Mediterranean area, where the presence of caves excavated in the rock is relatively abundant. With the development and consolidation of the Islamic presence, communities of hermit monks emigrated to the north, taking with them the technology and use of rupestrian architecture for funerary, cultural and residential uses. It is at this time when numerous churches, hermitages and monasteries were excavated in the rock with a notable oriental influence. From the 12th century onwards other types of constructions, expanding and changing the physiognomy of these cultural complexes, replace this rupestrian architecture. We can affirm that there exists in the Iberian Peninsula an important tradition of stonework and technology excavated in the rock, but with clear differences between the rupestrian architecture of the Roman period with respect to the late antique and early medieval ones. We therefore observe significant evidence in the Iberian Peninsula of an architecture that presents an apparently Western construction but at the same time with a precise Eastern typology, in which, maintaining local/Western tradition and influence, Eastern languages and architectural solutions are simultaneously introduced, first Byzantines and later Islamic.

short biography

Prof. Dr. Jorge López Quiroga is Full Professor of Medieval Archaeology at the Autonomous University of Madrid since 2022, having previously been Allocataire de Recherche (University of Paris IV), A.T.E.R. in Medieval History (University of La Rochelle), Research Assistant (University of Alcalá de Henares), Doctor in Medieval History (University of Paris-Sorbonne, Paris IV), Geography and History (University of Santiago de Compostela, USC) and European Doctor (USC). He is former Member of the Casa de Velázquez and former Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, among other various post-doctoral research grants. He has been a visiting professor at various European and American universities. He was Director of the Spanish Archaeological Mission in Conimbriga (Portugal) and Explorer Research Grant of the National Geographic Society. He is also Member of the National Society of Antiquaries of France, based at the Louvre Museum (Paris) and Associate Member of the Michel de Boüard Center (Centre for Ancient and Medieval Historical and Archaeological Research, CRAHAM-University of Caen-CNRS). He has directed, as principal investigator, twenty national and international scientific projects. He is the author of about twenty monographs, as author, editor and/or coordinator, as well as one hundred and fifty articles, book chapters and publications in Proceedings of National and International Scientific Congresses. He was also curator of the exhibition “In Tempore Sueborum. El tiempo de los Suevos en la Gallaecia (411-585)”, held between December 2017 and May 2018. For more than thirty years his research has focused on Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages in the Iberian Peninsula.

Natalia Figueiras Pimentel is Graduate in Art History, specialty History of Medieval Art (Santiago de Compostela University, 1995-1999). Teaching Certificate (University of Valencia, 1999-2000). Specialist in “Conservation and Restoration of Historical-Artistic Heritage” (Polytechnic University of Valencia, UPV, 2001-2003). She completed a doctoral program in Fine Arts, “Conservation and Restoration of Artistic Historical Heritage” (2001-2003). She has also a transdisciplinary training in relation to the documentation, study, and enhancement of cultural heritage: “Characterization of architectural materials and Stone Conservation-Restoration” (University of Zaragoza, 2004). Superior Technique in “Plastic Arts and Design in Artistic Photography” (EASD ‘Antonio Faílde’, 2008-2011), postgraduate training in Archaeometry and Applied Techniques (Polytechnic University of Valencia, 2001-2007; University of Murcia, 2020-2021 and University of Burgos, 2021-2023). She is currently doing her doctoral thesis in History of Medieval Art at the Complutense University of Madrid, International PhD Mention, with a thesis entitled: “Hermitism in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages from the St Pedro de Rocas rupestrian complex (Ribeira Sacra, Galicia, Spain) as a paradigm: a transdisciplinary scientific study applied to the History of Art”.

26th April

The representation of the face with its features and its expressions has always reflected the choice of the artists, or those who commission the piece, and/or its subject, according tointention and function of the artwork, and the beliefs and the context of the time and the culture when it was fashioned.
Some such portraits were destined for the darkness of the tomb, as were the plastered and painted skulls of the Neolithic, the golden masks of Mycenaean nobles, and the portrayals of the deceased on Fayum mummy portraits. Others were for the bright light of public and private spaces, such as the smiling kouroi and kore portraits of Archaic period in Greece, or infused with ideal beauty for Greek temples, or the sober grandeur and dignity of the Roman emperors.
Yet all were intended to immortalise the essence of the person they portrayed, the focus of the 6th annual Bilkent Archaeology Day. In this celebration of portraiture, we shall explore this prominent aspect of the distant and near, past, the impulse to capture the soul and character of a person through portraiture, whether idealised or realistic, whether inspired by ritual or political factors. To do so we will examine and the motives and intentions of the artists, and the role of social, religious, and political factors in the society behind the creation of the artwork, and so better define the role of portraiture in its original context.

The detailed program of the Bilkent Archaeology Day 2024 can be found here.

27th March

Evening Lecture by Dr. Julia Koch (Institute of Classical Studies, University of Giessen): “Phrygians at the Black Sea? Exploring Ritual Landscapes in Northern Anatolia”

Time and Location: 17:30, Room H-232 (Faculty of Humanities and Letters)

GE points will be given

Abstract

The Kingdom of Phrygia is traditionally located in the western Anatolian Plateau centering on the capital at Gordion on the Upper Sangarios River. Recent scholarship, however, has reconstructed the territorial expansion of the Phrygian Kingdom on a large scale both to the east and to the northeast of Gordion for political control over the region of the Halys River bend during the later 8^th/7^th century B.C. The Devrez Valley north of Çankırı at the foot of the Ilgaz Mountains is seen to have marked the northern limits of the Phrygian state. In this lecture we cross the Ilgaz Mountains towards the southern Black Sea to survey the religious landscape inventories of Iron Age northern Anatolia influenced by Phrygian culture: rock-cut facades and idols, stepped altars carved from the living rock, cult statues and niches, and so-called house shrines sculptured in miniature. At the sanctuary of Phrygian Zeus at Tios two sherds incised with Paleo-Phrygian graffiti were found next to East Greek and Attic pottery near an Archaic temple, while in Tios’ hinterland Phrygian grave goods were deposited in a tumulus. Votive offerings of Attic drinking vessels dedicated to Kybebos and terracotta figurines of the goddess ritually deposited in a sacrificial pit at the Greek seaport of Amisos shed further light on the significance of sanctuaries as stage for the maintenance of local cult tradition and intercultural exchange. By presenting new and less recent finds of sacr(aliz)ed places this talk offers fresh insights into Iron Age northern Anatolia abundant with astonishing ritual landscapes and it is hoped to encourage further discussion on colonial encounters of diverse migrant communities – both Greek and Phrygian – settling along the southern Black Sea coast.