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Since the early 2000s, classical archaeologists such as Vinzenz Brinkmann have made tremendous strides in the forensic study and reconstruction of polychromy in ancient sculpture. Many of these reconstructions are physical; others are virtual; still others are a combination of the two. What they all share in common, however, is a processual grasping at the “truth” through recursive chains of technical operations.

Over the last few decades, scholars have increasingly highlighted the role of archaeological imagery as a rich repository of both visual clichés and, more importantly, of intellectual stimuli for contemporary visual artists and performers (see, e.g. Roelstraete 2013; Settis 2020). An increasing number of works has attuned to a distinctive historiographic mode, drawing on the archaeological theory and practice in order to explore the dynamics of cultural production, the accumulation and institutionalization of knowledge, and the construction of (social, economic, and political) authority.

Recent evidence points to the roots of Egyptian culture to the south, in Nubia (Wengrow, David, Michael Dee, et al. 2014, Smith 2020, both building on the statements of Mokhtar 1981 and Hassan 1988; also, Wendorf and Schild 2011). This work counters incorrect statements made in the 19th and early 20th century by historians who claimed that Africa had no history and by Egyptologists who claimed that the cultural remains along the Nile were not African in origin and who sought to divorce ancient Egyptian culture from its African context.

This paper explores specific instances in Ivan van Sertima’s They Came Before Columbus (1976) where the influence of Drusilla Dunjee Houston’s Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire (1926) can be detected and it explores an inherent contradiction in their vindicationist approach to writing ancient history.

By comparing the artistic and aesthetic strategies of Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) with Melvin Tolson (1898-1966), this paper argues that the strategies and approaches in monumental and visionary works by minoritized and ghettoized modernist poets situate music, art, and aesthetics at the critical center of discourses involving culture, history, and civilization, and furthermore that their oracular and mystical approaches to art and music produced radically inclusive ways of valorizing the ancient past.

Martin Bernal (1937-2013) concluded the first of his three-volume Black Athena with a gratuitous personal attack on the African American classicist Frank M. Snowden, Jr. (1911-2007). “There is no doubt,” he wrote, “that the time for the ‘old scrappers’ is past and that most Blacks will not be able to accept the conformity to white scholarship of men and women like Professor Snowden” (1987: 434-35). Bernal was hardly the first person to accuse Snowden (a widely-respected figure who had recently been elected president of the American Philological Association) of accommodationism.

Just before the middle of the twentieth century, the late Harvard-trained Black classicist Frank M. Snowden, Jr. began what would become five decades of research on Black people in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Over seventy years after the publication of his first article on the subject, “The Negro in Classical Italy” (1947), Snowden continues to cast a long shadow.

The ArchaeoCosmos Portal is a hub where parallel and collaborating research programs of the members of the Department of History and Archeology of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece) and other researchers are hosted, with an open philosophy and structure. It is being implemented on ArcGIS Enterprise and PostgreSQL. Its main aim is to create an interactive digital map, which will eventually contain all archaeological sites (from Prehistory to Late Antiquity) in the Mediterranean area and the Near East. Already a total of 33,669 sites have been edited and reviewed.

The goal of the Mycenaean Atlas Project is to map every Bronze Age find site and make this information available online free of charge to those interested.  More than 4000 sites are currently mapped.  Along with this database of locations various analytical tools are implemented; elevation analysis, nearest neighbor and intervisibility, chronological charts, and aspect analysis are currently available.  Users can also write out portions of the database that interest them for further analysis.  Each of the 4000+ sites includes a map, a bibliography, and two sections that

Artifacts excavated at the critically important archaeological site of Dura-Europos (Syria) are currently dispersed into collections across the world. The Yale Digital Dura-Europos Archive (YDEA) is aimed at using Linked Open Data (LOD) to reassemble and recontextualize the site’s archaeological data, in an effort to make the site and its artifacts more readily intelligible and discoverable, both for specialist and non-specialist audiences.