Society for the Study of the Past

I am thrilled to announce the digital launch of our new book, Redefining Monuments! 📘 🎉 The @memstudiesassoc.bsky.social will host the event online on 11 December. José and I will be in conversation with Britt Baillie, @profdanhicks.bsky.social and Gal Kirn to discuss how we can redefine monuments!

Refaat’a family is facing eviction. Please donate if you’ve been impacted by his life: chuffed.org/project/1093...

How to See the Past Seeing the Past — Sonja Drimmer When I ask the question, "why can't computer vision see the past?" the narrow answer is because computer vision is linear algebra, and as an art historian I reject the premise that math is sight. ...

The narrow answer to "why can't computer vision see the past?" is bc CV is linear algebra & I reject the premise that math is sight. But the big answer is that the data extraction industry is leveraging computer vision to engineer an anti-human future.
sonja-drimmer.squarespace.com/blog-1/2025/...

Background of a keffiyeh pattern. On the center top, MfP Recommended Read. On the center bottom the book cover of Areej Sabbagh-Khoury's Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba.

Background of a keffiyeh pattern. On the left top, Why MfP Recommends It. On the left center, the book cover of Areej Sabbagh-Khoury's Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba. On the right, the following bullet points: -Examines how Zionist settlers acquired and used land alongside and eventually in replacement of Indigenous Palestinians. -Illustrates that, while the Nakba was a violet event of displacement, it roots lie in policies of landholding under the British Mandate. -Challenges the belief that "Left" or "Liberal" Zionism was not complicit in Palestinian displacement. -Explores how the expansion of Zionist settlement, Left Zionism, and the Nakba are represented in historical memory.

The next book in our recommended reads is Colonizing Palestine by Areej Sabbagh-Khoury which shows how, in the decades before the Nakba of 1948, Zionists settlements, including "left-wing kibbutzim," were integral to the slow displacement of Palestinians.

Archaeology from its inception had been a tool of regimes to steal and rewrite history. Its up to us in the discipline to constantly push back and push for changes and fight genocide and not give in to the money and prestige these same regimes offer us to shill their tyranny.

🚨IOF STEALING HERITAGE
The IOF stormed the town of Al-Maza'a Al-Sharqiyah in the West Bank and stole an ancient column from it!
Does the leadership of @asor-research.bsky.social - who had no problem hosting and partying with many 🇮🇱 archaeologists at their congress 2 weeks ago - have anything to say?

The Cruelty of American Curatorial Silence Many of my fellow curators, especially at institutions, have failed to speak out against fascism. What is it about being a curator that offers a free pass for political silence?

As of late, curator Erika Hirugami has been wondering if the curatorial field is poised to take a revolutionary stand against fascism. Why are curators not as politically active in the public sphere, as artists have been since the dawn of time?

Looking forward to our next @ics.bsky.social – British Museum seminar with another terrific group of speakers, incl @hardeepdhindsa.bsky.social @drmaimusie.bsky.social, Eleanor Newman & Joe Skinner. Register at link below!

🎥 Dr Shadia Abdrabo from ICOM Sudan shares her thoughts on the #ICOMDubai General Conference.
#museums #sudan #icom #icomuk #conference #icomsudan
👀See the full video and coverage of ICOM's General conference on our website: buff.ly/3DBMoxX

It's gift guide time!!!

For ABSOLUTELY NO REASON at all, did you know that the Critical Ancient World Studies volume has three chapters on critical philology which are all OPEN ACCESS?

Join us and help spread the word! This is coming up in a few days and we are still very low on signups. Though many of may be familiar with the term "pinkwashing," Khalil's work shows us how queer people in Palestine are targeted by the occupation in many more, sinister ways. Come learn with us!

some fantastic antiquity/premodern stuff on here, starting with two (2) offerings from @chancebonar.bsky.social!

stunning new #OpenAccess article by Mauro Puddu and Peter van Dommelen on "Subaltern Identities in Punic and Roman Sardinia" - a sensitive and expansive decolonial approach to rural landscape www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

BOYCOTT COMPLICIT INSTITUTIONS

Today is the 47th year that the world marks the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, recognising Palestinians’ inalienable right to self determination, sovereignty and independence from Israeli occupation. This year, Archaeologists Against Apartheid responded to the Palestinian civil society call to join the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement.

Responding to this call-in from our colleagues in Palestine, we hope to provoke action within the discipline, that would increase pressure on the apartheid state of Israel, help stop Israel’s genocide, stop the culturicide, stop the scholasticide, stop the apartheid. Our representative organisations unfortunately do not share our same hopes for or solidarity with the Palestinian People.

As 2025 comes to an end, we are reflecting on almost a year of organising as archaeologists of conscience, holding our representative organisations to account in the face of their negligence, silence and complicity. drive.google.com/file/d/1QPy8...

The American Anthropological Association, Middle Eastern Studies Association, & Society for the Study of the Past, showed their unwavering support for & solidarity w Palestinian people. We recommend archaeos nurture & promote these spaces, committed to equality, equity & justice

Policing Language in Colonial India Vipin Krishna explores how colonial officials in nineteenth-century India turned linguistics into a tool for classification, surveillance, and control.

"Philology served a carceral purpose, helping the state to map, classify, and control populations."

Vipin Krishna on policing language in colonial India.
www.historyworkshop....

Image: A depiction of thuggee strangling a traveller, unknown artist, 1830s. British Library via Wikimedia Commons.

Gaza’s Students Kept Studying Amid the Rubble. Now Universities Hope to Rebuild. Palestinian students learned remotely, with flickering internet, through two years of Israel’s genocide. Now universities need funding to rebuild.

In Gaza, where universities lie in rubble and classrooms have been replaced by screens, education has refused to die.

World AIDS Day. We remember.

"lessons from early medieval Europe echo into our own time - to see what happens when rich people act w/ impunity, when they hoard wealth for themselves & let others suffer, when they try to overthrow governments w/o consequences, when men use their power & position to [violate] vulnerable women."

Some of you may be aware, but one of our beloved W4G comrades has been doxxed, fed jacketed, and harassed for months. This has had severe personal consequences. In addition, sign-ups for workshops and donations for Palestinians have decreased dramatically during this time. (1/6)

Keep Hope Alive: a Gaza Giving Circle We are a team of volunteers in the US and UK, led by two sisters passionate about helping our friends on the ground keep their families and neighbors alive with food, water, & shelter. We saw that their...

If you’ve just come back from a long weekend celebrating genocide, consider paying reparations to people surviving an ongoing genocide you fund.

It’s not about guilt. Hope as an action for six families & a camp—click “weekly” or “monthly”:

Ethnic Relations in the Ancient Mediterranean A fresh perspective revealing how ethnographic thinking shaped the sociocultural landscape of the ancient Mediterranean.   With this book, Philip A. Harland presents a large-scale rereading of social ...

@philharland.bsky.social has a book coming out in Spring -already available for pre-order: press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

#ancientbluesky #classicsbluesky

Maia Kotrosits, "After Transformation: Rewriting Time, Christian Late Antiquity, and the Present" (Duke UP, 2025)

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/n...

open.spotify.com/episode/5tvM...

Against Settler Colonialism: A Reading List From Turtle Island to Palestine, Indigenous people across the world continue to resist settler-colonial domination, extraction, and exploitation of their land and communities. We center these tradi...

Against Settler Colonialism: A Reading List

📢 Enslaved Healthscapes: Bondage, Medicine, and Wellness in the Ancient Mediterranean Realm 📅 December 18, 2025 | 📍 Venice & online (Hybrid) - Want the link? Take a look at the flyer! Remember to check the time difference if you're joining in from Toronto or other places!

Welcome to ASU @platanoclassics.bsky.social!
“Dan-el Padilla Peralta is in the vanguard of scholars working to ensure that the complexities of the past are not flattened in service to the monochrome myths of our day,” said Jeffrey Cohen, dean of humanities at ASU.
news.asu.edu/b/20251112-d...

Syros was not the only pilgrimage spot that seemed, to the Western eye, to have withered on the vine of ancient vitality. When Melville’s ship reached Palestine, his heart sank, just as it had on Syros: “No country will more quickly dissipate romantic expectations than Palestine—particularly Jerusalem,” he wrote in his journal.8 The Holy Sepulchre was “a sickening cheat,” and it is again the arid landscape, lacking the bloom of Western painting, that pains the traveler: “Judea is one accumulation of stones.”9 He also saw Christian Zionist missionaries, for whom he had little sympathy: they were in the grips of a “preposterous Jew mania” that was “half melancholy, half farcical.”10 These forces would, of course, soon accelerate during the 1880s, as Zionism expanded beyond its initial Christian purview to inspire Jewish settlers to colonize Palestine. Yet what is less well-known is that the Greek revolution played a crucial role in this process: before Zionists sought to “make the desert bloom,” Hellenism had to bring Watteau’s lush arcadia to life.

A wonderful essay by McNeil Taylor on Hellenism, Zionism, and the legacies of c19 Western European colonialism. www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/71/ta...

Hello London, next Monday 1 Dec I'll be speaking at Senate House about how the histories of slavery and books in the ancient Mediterranean intersect in Rome. Book historians, slavery scholars, classicists, there will be something for everyone. ics.sas.ac.uk/news-events/...

One of the most colorful figures in the black market for ancient art has died. For @lrb.co.uk, I wrote about Jonathan Tokeley-Parry - a smuggler who made fake fakes to defeat border inspections to get Egyptian artifacts to the UK and US, whose downfall both changed and didn’t change the market.