SAMR 2024 Newsletter
President’s Page:
Hello from Boston to all of our old and new members!
As President of SAMR I want to start by saying that I hope your semesters are off to a good start. I am excited to report on a few new developments. First of all, we are happy to welcome on board our new Secretary, Chance Bonar (https://humanities.tufts.edu/people/chance-bonar), whose arrival will allow our Treasurer and former Secretary-Treasurer, Jacob Latham, to do one person’s job, instead of two!
All three of us are very much looking forward to our SAMR annual meeting, for the first time ever on Zoom. More details will be announced soon.
Even though we will be meeting online to allow more of us to participate at the annual meeting, we very much hope to see you at the big annual meetings of the year.
At the SBL/AAR, we will be holding a joint session with Greco-Roman religions on 11/23, 4pm, entitled “Reaching Far and Wide: Elite Values and Wider Social Interactions in Religious Settings across the Ancient Mediterranean” chaired by Barbette Spaeth and with presentations by Philip Harland, Junqi Kou, and our own Jacob Latham and with a response by John Bodel.
At the SCS/AIA, we will be holding a session on 1/3, 2pm, entitled “The Gods are Watching: The Ocular and the Oracular in Ancient Mediterranean Religions,” chaired by myself, and with presentations by Cianna Z. Jackson, Mark F. McClay, Federica Scicolone, Dane Scott, Rabun Taylor and Torie Burmeister.
Two additional announcements:
1, our collection of ancient religion syllabi is still open. Please submit them here: https://forms.gle/gbm4PBfpvSCUJVxHA
2, if you wanted to attend the Connected Past: Religious Networks in Antiquity conference, organized by our own Megan Daniel at UBC, but were not able to do so due to the Jewish holidays, please reach out to us as soon as possible, so that we can arrange access for you to see a recording of select presentations.
Until we can meet in person or on Zoom again, please do not hesitate to reach out to me, or to Jacob or Chance, with any questions.
The Year (or so) in Review
Godscapes: Ritual, Belief and the Natural World in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond was a great success!
Hosted by the University of St. Andrews and its School of Classics (June 2023), Jason König of St. Andrews kicked things off with an inspiring keynote: “Representing Mountain Religion in the Roman Empire: Bodies and Landscapes in Pausanias and Beyond.” Sessions on Topographies; Mobility and the Divine; and Displacement followed on the first day. Rivers and Watery Landscapes flooded two sessions (in the best way) on Day 2, with Treescapes topping off the day. Day 3 brought diverse ways of “Thinking the Natural World,” as well as two sessions addressing the Destructive and Scary.
We were grateful to those who persevered through illnesses and Canadian forest fires to make it (whether in person or online), and especially to our hosts in St. Andrews, who in addition to housing and conference venues secured a lovely venue for our conference banquet—the Tom Morris Bar & Grill in the clubhouse of the St. Andrews golf club. Before the conference, a group of brave expeditionaries assembled at the Twice Brewed Inn near Haltwhistle in Northumberland, England, near the most scenic stretch of Hadrian’s Wall—one day, they visited Housesteads Roman Fort then walked a few miles along Hadrian’s Wall; and the next day, Beth Greene kindly toured them around Vindolanda and its museum, providing expert insights into the famous tablets and leather shoes. Cheers and warmest thanks to Beth!
Other SAMR Events
Flash Conference April 2023: Religion and Material Culture in Late Antiquity
In April 2023, our current president Zsuzsa Várhelyi organized a three paper flash conference with:
Dina Boero, “The Space of a Stylite: Columns and their Topographical Contexts”
Sarah Porter, “Desire in the Archive: A 1934 Excavation in Antioch’s Southeastern Nekropolis
Camille Angelo, “Animating Attachments: An Affective Archaeology of Late Antique Monastic Refectories”
SBL November 2023 SAMR-GRR: Secrecy and Sociogenesis
At the SBL, co-sponsored by Greco-Roman Religions, “Secrecy and Sociogenesis” featured six papers: Gerhard van den Heever, “Taking Leave of Secrecy”; Paul Robertson, “Magic Apples, Secret Rituals, and Constructing Social Groupness”; Christopher S. Atkins, “Unearthing the Ritual Underground: Curses, Incantations, and Plato’s Dialogues”; Bartlomiej (“Bartek”) Bednarek, “The Secrecy of Maenadic Rites Reconsidered”; Christian Bull, “Secret Books of the Egyptian Hermes: Hidden in Temples, for Priests and Kings”; and Dan Mills, “The Persistence of Physiognomy in the Middle Ages: The Zohar’s Version of the Secretum Secretorum.”
SCS 2024: Secrecy and Sociogenesis:
In “Secrecy and Sociogenesis,” Netanel Anor explored the esoteric semiotic system of oracles in ancient Babylonian politics; Bartek Bednarek addressed the allegedly exclusively feminine forms of Dionysos’ cult, whose iconography, however, suggest that females were only gradually introduced into Dionysiac scenes; Isobel Köster, compared Cicero’s Catilinarians with secret missions, a deviant bricolage of ritual practices, and the rhetoric of half-revealed secrets provide meaningful intersections to contemporary conspiracies; and Vivan Laughlin proposed that the Egyptian iconography in Augustus’ living quarters should be contextualized in an aesthetic of concealment.
AIA 2024: Gods on the Rocks
“Gods on the Rocks” featured six thought-provoking papers by James Hua, Federica Scicolone, Samantha Meyer, Zehavi Husser, Nikolaos Lazaridis, and Rebecca Van Hove, who covered the spatiality of epigraphy in cave cults at Marathon, Paros, and Thessaly; divine identity in Greek inscribed epigrams; divine prescriptions in Asclepian iamata from Lebena; epithets of Jupiter in Roman Italian inscriptions; and religious graffiti in Egypt's Western Desert. The panel demonstrated ways that epigraphic evidence can reveal ancient religious dynamics on the ground through various methods and approaches, including cognitive studies, text-world theory, and medical anthropology.
Publication News
Some of the presentations from the December 2022 Flash Conference: Religion and Epigraphy, organized by former SAMR secretary-treasurer Eric Orlin, have been submitted to the journal Religion in the Roman Empire to be part of a special issue on the lived experience of individuals, a place where inscriptions are naturally of prime importance.
SAMR Series with Lockwood Press: The next three SAMR volumes are in various stages: Bronwen Wickkiser and Wendy Closterman are co-editing a volume from the Godscapes conference at St. Andrews and Sandy Blakely is lining up outside reviewers for the other two volumes. Publication details from Lockwood Press to come.
Member News
Amelia Robertson Brown be spending time in Greece and Italy with an Australian Research Council Discovery Project three-year grant. Along with co-investigators Bronwen Neil, Estelle Strazdins and Ryan Strickler, Amelia be researching imperial portraits as religious mass media for "Images of Power: Roman Mass Media and Imperial Cult, 69-450 CE."
And, finally, upcoming events
Our friends at ARRoW (Archaeology of Religion in the Roman World) have put together an amazing slate at the SBL in San Diego coming up in November. Be sure to check the app to confirm.
Saturday, 23 November, 4:00 pm to 6:30 pm 33C (Upper Level East) - Convention Center: “Archaeology of the Ephemeral: Re-imagining Christian Meeting Places”
Sunday, 24 November, 1:00 pm to 3:30 pm Cobalt 501B (Fifth Level) - Hilton Bayfront, Joint session with Senses, Cultures, and Biblical Worlds program unit: “Senses and Material Culture”
Monday, 25 November, 9:00 am to 11:30 am Aqua Salon F (Third Level) - Hilton Bayfront, ARROW open session, papers on “Remember Jesus Must Die,” Caesaria Maritima, and flax pools at Magdala
Monday, 25 November, 4:00 pm and 6:30 pm 23B (Upper Level East) - Convention Center: “Archaeology of the Ephemeral: Gender and Death”
Tuesday, 26 November, 9:00 am to 11:15 am 33C (Upper Level East) - Convention Center, Joint session with Ancient Fiction and Early Christian and Jewish Narrative: “Travel and Location in Ancient Fiction”