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                            Holly Pittman on "Cultures in Contact"

Holly Pittman (University of Pennsylvania) will speak on "Cultures in Contact: Seeing Interaction through Imagery on the Iranian Plateau during the Bronze Age of Exchange." Coffee and cookies will be available from noon to 12:30 p.m., and the lecture will be from 12:30 to 2 p.m. Join us in person or!

Lecture Abstract:

Among the minor arts in the ancient Near East, engraved seal stones are closely associated with personal or corporate identity expressed through iconography and style.  In settings where administrators from different communities interact, such small portable objects can be particularly sensitive markers of cultural identity when other evidence, textual or ceramic, is absent.  This feature of personal seals makes them an especially useful window into cultural interaction during the third millennium Early Bronze Age when the ancient world from the Euphrates to the Indus was linked together through a vast network of exchange and interaction along which merchants, craftsmen, emissaries and later soldiers and diplomats passed.  While the Mesopotamian cuneiform texts provide us with hints of this interaction, we can evaluate it directly through the material traces left of the minor arts, especially the administrative residue of glyptic art.  This talk will illustrate through the rich and varied finds from the recent excavations at Konar Sandal South in the Halil River valley of Kerman province in southeastern Iran the evidence for this cultural contact.  Among them are impressions of imported seals, local seals, and hybrid seals that merge traits of various cultural styles reflecting the cultural identities of the merchants and officials who interacted at the heart of the mercantile interaction sphere.  Through this residue, we can imagine who the players were and how they were affected by their interlocutors.