Upcoming Events

AIA Stanford Book Club: "The Red Sea Scrolls: How Ancient Papyri Reveal the Secrets of the Pyramids"
by Pierre Tallet and Mark Lehner

The inside story, told by excavators of the extraordinary discovery of the world’s oldest papyri, revealing how Egyptian King Khufu’s men built the Great Pyramid at Giza. Pierre Tallet’s discovery of the Red Sea Scrolls, the world’s oldest surviving written documents in 2013, was one of the most remarkable moments in the history of Egyptology. These papyri, written some 4,600 years ago, and combined with Mark Lehner’s research, changed what we thought we knew about the building of the Great Pyramid at Giza.

Here, for the first time, the world-renowned Egyptologists Tallet and Lehner give us the definitive account of this astounding discovery. The story begins with Tallet’s hunt for hieroglyphic rock inscriptions in the Sinai Peninsula and leads up to the discovery of the papyri, the diary of Inspector Merer, who oversaw workers in the reign of Pharaoh Khufu in Wadi el-Jarf, the site of an ancient harbor on the Red Sea. The translation of the papyri reveals how the stones of the Great Pyramid ended up in Giza. Combined with Lehner’s excavations of the harbor at the pyramid construction site the Red Sea Papyri have greatly advanced our understanding of how the ancient Egyptians were able to build monuments that survive to this day.

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

Friday, September 12, 2025 at 7:00pm

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Heirlooms, Amulets, Tools or Trash?: Life Cycles of Objects Curated in the Ancient Mediterranean"
by Professor Amanda Reiterman, University of California, Santa Cruz

Agamemnon’s scepter, Pelops’s spear, Eriphyle’s necklace, Medea’s robes—ancient Greek literature is full of references to objects kept as heirlooms by the ruling class. But what about ordinary people? In fact, archaeologists do encounter artifacts that predate their assemblages substantially or exhibit ancient repairs, and thus, might be described as “curated” in the past. These chronological anomalies have the potential to inform us about the intimate relationships between people and things in antiquity and ancient attitudes toward the past within different Mediterranean communities. Through a series of case studies focusing on individual artifacts, this talk will explore how archaeologists might disentangle the motives for ancient curation and recognize the nuanced roles of objects from the past in the ancient present. As we will see, people in the past kept things over time for many of the same reasons as we do today.

Anyone in our society (or anyone interested in our society) is welcome to join.

Friday, October 10, 2025 at 7:00pm

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Water and the City of Rome, Part 1: The Tiber"
by Laura Linkletter Rich, Vice President, AIA Stanford Society

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Anyone in our society (or anyone interested in our society) is welcome to join.

Friday, November 7, 2025 at 7:00pm

Cuprous Cookery: The Consumption, Maintenance, and Use of Bronze Vessels in the Pompeian Kitchen
by Dr. Aaron Brown, Stanford University

How did the ancient Romans feed themselves? Any satisfactory response to this question must take into account the full range of implements available to ancient cooks and how they were manipulated in the course of meal-making. While a diverse assortment of vessels, utensils, and portable cooking apparatus is known to have been employed in Roman kitchens, certain material classes have benefitted from more intensive study as a result of their relative abundance in the archaeological record. In contrast to pottery, which is prone to fragmentation but quite durable, bronze kitchenwares rarely survive in a good state of preservation archaeologically due to the corrosive, highly recyclable nature of copper alloys. The underrepresentation of bronzewares in the archaeological record raises a number of important questions concerning the role of bronze in the Roman kitchen, its relationship to ceramic, and the demand for and valuation of such wares. In this talk, I explore these issues by focusing on the material record of a single site: Pompeii. Here, in the terminal phase of the town, we find one of the largest, most diverse collections of well-preserved bronze kitchenwares found anywhere in the Roman world. Drawing on the results of recent fieldwork in Pompeii involving archival research and the analysis of use alterations and repairs exhibited by such implements, I chart patterns in the ownership and use of the town’s bronze kitchenwares. These patterns, in turn, allow us to consider the motives of ancient consumers and the degree to which a socially differentiated cuisine may have exited in Pompeii in the first-century CE.

Anyone in our society (or anyone interested in our society) is welcome to join.

Friday, December 5, 2025 at 7:00pm

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The Frederick R. and Margaret B. Matson Lectureship for Near Eastern Archaeology and Archaeological Technology: "Making the Ice Age Virtual and Accessible: Using VR and Underwater Robotics to Teach Archaeology"
by Professor Ashley Lemke, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

How can we engage the next generation with archaeology? How can we bring ancient time periods and societies to life? As an underwater archaeologist researching submerged ancient sites, Dr. Lemke is familiar with the latest technology to explore deeper and further back in time - but how can you involve students and the public in these discoveries? Work with computer scientist has developed a virtual world of the ancient Great Lakes, where past environments, animals and archaeological sites can be investigated. You can enter this ancient world via virtual reality and better understand the past lifeways of people who lived there and hypothesize about where additional archaeological sites may be located. In addition, middle and high school students are often involved in building robots for competitions - but what if we took the robots out of the pool and used them for underwater archaeology? This talk will present case studies in bring VR and robotics to classrooms, museums, and beyond to introduce archaeology to a broader audience.

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

Friday, February 6, 2026 at 7:00pm

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