All AWAWS members are invited to our Anniversary Panel discussion celebrating the first 10 years of AWAWS. Members of the panel will include the founders of AWAWS and long-term members of the Executive Committee, including the Foundation President. The panellists will discuss the genesis of AWAWS, the challenges over the past 10 years, chart the highlights and discuss what the future might hold for the association. Discussion will be opened to the membership at the end. The panel will coincide with our annual AGM. The new committee, the winner of the annual research grant and this year's virtual bouquets will be announced afterwards. 

Professor Gina Walker delivered this lecture as part of our recent 'Modern' Women of the Past? Unearthing Gender and Antiquity ​conference. In this lecture Professor Walker juxtaposed the stark reality of millennia of ignorance about earlier female figures and their authority as knowers in the context of sixty years of contemporary Feminist Historical Recovery that '‘Modern’ Women of the Past? Unearthing Gender and Antiquity' celebrates. Dr Walker described the New Historia initiative she directs at The New School with a global collaborative of researchers who are producing authoritative “female biographies” of attested female figures on various platforms for new audiences. She asked, does the avalanche of fresh data about women demand new knowledge-ordering systems that for the first time include a female dimension?

Dr Rachel Pope gave a rousing keynote lecture at our recent conference 'Modern' Women of the Past? Unearthing Gender and Antiquity. This lecture provides a perspective from the UK and Europe on how preventing women’s access to academia and the heritage sector, both historically, and in our contemporary workplace culture, has impacted our understanding of women in the past. We discovered the irony that, under the banner of objective practice, late twentieth century archaeologists actively erased past women, or wrote them specifically into domestic roles. We investigated the mechanism through which scholars sought to undermine women’s authority in the past, and in the writing too of disciplinary histories, in favour of patriarchal mythmaking, and how that practice lingers on today. We saw how a generation of young scholars had to fight to correct this inherited academic problem in archaeological practice, outside the mainstream, and how a new generation of scholars are now working beyond binary, developing applied method in gender archaeology, to discover the past more as it was, and less in our making.

The Sydney Chapter would like to invite you all to join us for our upcoming events:
 
Online Catch-up

• Wednesday 29th July, 5pm
• RSVP via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/awaws-sydney-july-meet-up-tickets-113423841764?aff=erelpanelorg

we are holding an online catch up session from 5pm. Bring your own snacks, tea or even a glass of wine as we get together and welcome in semester 2 of what has been a truly wild year so far.

 Online Talk - Animating the ancient world – a past that still dances

• Wednesday 12 August, 5pm
• RSVP via eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/animating-the-ancient-world-a-past-that-still-dances-tickets-114375405918

About the talk:
What perspectives can contemporary artists gain from archaeological museums and sites? And what do contemporary practices give back to the understanding of these ancient worlds? With a practice as a sculptor and animator, Hannah Gee has observed and made reference to archaeological artefacts for over ten years. Through visiting archaeological sites and museums in Athens, Turkey, Italy, Crete and Cyprus, the access to objects provides an immense platform to produce work, as well as examine the deep past and acknowledge the shared human impetus to create over millennia. Join Hannah as she discusses the impact of working with archaeologists and archaeological material on her artistic practice and her curatorial approach to exhibit contemporary Australian art.
 
About our speaker:
Hannah has worked with artists and objects since 2011. With a Bachelor of Creative Arts (hons) from the University of Wollongong, her artistic focus remains in sculpture, animation and video installation. Having undertaken a Masters of Museum and Cultural Heritage Studies at the University of Sydney, her critical area of interest is the flexibility of new media in contemporary art as applied to the stalemate within institutions regarding disputes over material repatriation. She is currently the Exhibitions and programs coordinator at Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, where every practice is viewed holistically and every object has its own agency.
 

We hope you are able to join us for one or both of these upcoming events
 
Your Sydney Chapter Co-Chairs
Alex, Genevieve and Candace

We are excited to announce that this year we are hosting an online lecture to mark our AGM.

• When: Wednesday June 24th, 5pm (AEST)
• Where:  Online presentation via Zoom (log in details provided on RSVP)
• RSVP essential: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/for-love-and-money-cults-of-aphrodite-for-ancient-greek-mariners-tickets-106694247366

 
Abstract: Aphrodite was a widely-worshiped ancient Greek goddess, with shrines all around the Mediterranean Sea. Modern scholarship prioritises her depiction in poetry, nude cult statues and putative Eastern origins, not her everyday cultic significance. Yet she was a patron goddess for sailors and courtesans, brides and generals, even whole cities. Key aspects of her network of sanctuaries on harbours and heights, and her controversial connections with prostitution, may best be understood in relation to her role as a patron of ancient Greek mariners. Her cults from Cyprus to Corinth, Eryx to Paestum, clearly developed through travel by sea. Greek, Phoenician and Italian common use of sanctuaries is clear from archaeology, and can clarify ancient comments by Herodotus, Strabo and Pausanias. Offerings made by hopeful or grateful mariners occur at all of her shrines. Maritime Aphrodite’s cult was practiced both at the port and with a view of the sea, with a focus on statues rather than monumental buildings. Aphrodite's network of maritime cults and sanctuaries casts light on many otherwise immaterial rituals of the ancient merchant marine, and the interlocking networks of colonization, trade and religion which linked Magna Graecia with Greece, Cyprus and the eastern Mediterranean.