Upcoming Events

"Guardians at the Threshold: Doorscapes, Demons, and the Making of the Underworld in Ancient Egypt and Etruria"

Friday, October 9, 2026 at 7:00pm

Professor Rita Lucarelli
University of California, Berkeley

The ancient underworld was anything but empty. In both ancient Egypt and Etruria, tomb paintings and funerary monuments depict a richly inhabited Beyond, where gates, doors, and liminal passages are guarded by powerful supernatural beings. Far from being merely terrifying figures, these guardians regulated movement between worlds, protected sacred boundaries, and enforced the cosmic order of the afterlife.
This lecture offers a comparative visual exploration of these "doorscapes", the architectural and symbolic landscapes of thresholds, and the demonic beings that inhabit them. By bringing Egyptian and Etruscan evidence into dialogue, I examine how each culture imagined the geography of the Beyond, the role of its guardians, and the symbolic significance of doors and gates as places of judgment, transition, and protection. Through this comparison, the lecture highlights broader questions of worldmaking, visual imagination, and the ways ancient societies conceived and represented liminal spaces between life and death.

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This lecture is offered as a hybrid.

To attend in person:
Location: Archaeology Center, Stanford Campus

To watch on Zoom: Register Here »

AIA Book Club: The Battle That Stopped Rome

In AD 9, a Roman traitor led an army of barbarians who trapped and then slaughtered three entire Roman legions: 20,000 men, half the Roman army in Europe. If not for this battle, the Roman Empire would surely have expanded to the Elbe River, and probably eastward into present-day Russia. But after this defeat, the shocked Romans ended all efforts to expand beyond the Rhine, which became the fixed border between Rome and Germania for the next 400 years, and which remains the cultural border between Latin western Europe and Germanic central and eastern Europe today. This fascinating narrative introduces us to the key protagonists: the emperor Augustus, the most powerful of the Caesars; his general Varus, who was the wrong man in the wrong place; and the barbarian leader Arminius, later celebrated as the first German hero. In graphic detail, based on recent archaeological finds, the author leads the reader through the mud, blood, and decimation that was the Battle of Teutoburg Forest.

Anyone in our society (or anyone interested in our society) is welcome to join. You just need to register for our Zoom discussion.

Friday, October 16, 2026 at 7:00pm

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