Archaeological Institute of America Worcester Lectures: “Sensing the Past: Sensorial Experiences in Ancient Mesopotamia”

Dr. Allison Karmel Thomason (Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville) will lecture on  “Sensing the Past:  Sensorial Experiences in Ancient Mesopotamia”

Lecture summary: We are all sensing people, and the basic physical structure of our sensing organs has not changed for many thousands of years.  But how did ancient humans perceive and experience sensory stimuli in their environment differently than we do today?  Dr. Thomason sets out to explore this topic for the ancient Mesopotamians in particular.  The history of the senses and explorations of sensory experiences in the ancient world have been increasingly the focus of scholarly research.  Archaeologists, art historians and textual scholars have tried to recreate past sensory environments and experiences by using evidence from images, artifacts and ancient texts of all kinds.  In this lecture, Dr. Thomason, a specialist in ancient Mesopotamian material culture, explores how ancient Mesopotamian perceptions of sensory experiences can be compared to our own modern ones, with sometimes surprising results.

Bibliography:

Thomason, Allison. 2016. “The Sense-scapes of Neo-Assyrian Capital Cities:  Royal Authority and Bodily Experience.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 26/2: 243-64.

Forthcoming book: Thomason and Kiersten Neumann, eds. Handbook of the Senses in the Ancient Near East. Routledge/Taylor and Francis, expected 2020.

For further reading:

Howes, David and Constance Classen. 2014.  Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society. London and New York:  Routledge.

Hamilakis, Yannis.  2013.  Archaeology and the Senses:  Human Experience, Memory and Affect. Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press.

Dr. Thomason is Professor and Co-Director, of the Graduate Programs in the Department of Historical Studies at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, Illinois. With degrees from Brown University and the University of Chicago, her Ph.D. was in Art History and Archaeology of the Ancient Near East from Columbia University. She has written books and articles on Ancient Mesopotamian and Assyrian material culture, gender, law, and economics.