The Omaha-Lincoln Society of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), in partnership with Creighton University's Department of Fine and Performing Arts and Joslyn Art Museum, continues its exceptional programming with another free public lecture.
"Decoding Plant and Animal Symbolism in Mesopotamia" presented by Naomi F. Miller, Consulting Scholar and Adjunct Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania Museum.
This talk presents recent work on plant and animal symbolism of objects found at the Mesopotamian sites of Ur (c. 2500 BC) and Uruk (c. 3000 BC), in present-day lowland Iraq. Identifying the animals is relatively straightforward. The plant representations, too, are unambiguous, though identification requires more detailed anatomical argument. The economic, political, cultural, and religious ideas embedded in the plant and animal symbolism, however, are less obvious and more debatable, because insofar as the imagery seems to relate to Mesopotamian myths, there is a 500–1000 gap between the artifacts and the written stories.
For Ur, plant and animal pendants from Queen Puabi's diadems found in The Royal Cemetery at Ur are discussed. Cemetery dates to the mid-third millennium BC, and the tomb of Queen Puabi yielded a number of pendant amulets: four animals (bull, stag, deer, ram) and two plants (date, apple).
Found in Uruk, the Warka Vase dates to the several hundred years earlier, at a time when pictorial imagery and pictographic writing shared some motifs. The relationship between text and image for some key Mesopotamian concepts is explicated, and the significance of the entire composition is illuminated through consideration of plant anatomy, botany, ecology, ethnobiology, archaeobotany, ancient texts.
One of the key characters in the Mesopotamian pantheon was the goddess Inana, about whom there are many myths. The plant and animal imagery discussed in this presentation seems to reference these narratives, demonstrating the time depth of these foundational stories.
NAOMI F. MILLER focuses on the environment and land use in the ancient West and Central Asia through the study of plant macroremains. Through her interest in long-term vegetation change at Gordion, Turkey, she began to work on ways to preserve biodiversity as well as archaeological sites through the passive and active management of native vegetation. In addition to the archaeobotanical site report, Botanical Aspects of Environment and Economy at Gordion, Turkey (2010), she wrote and illustrated a short archaeological memoir, Drawing on the Past, An Archaeologist's Sketchbook (2002), both published by the University of Pennsylvania Museum. She has co-edited several books: The Archaeology of Garden and Field, with K.L. Gleason (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), Yeki bud, yeki nabud, Essays in on the Archaeology of Iran in Honor of William M. Sumner, with K. Abdi (Cotsen Institute, 2003), and Sustainable Lifeways: Cultural Persistence in an Ever-changing Environment, with K.M. Moore and K. Ryan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). She maintains a website that provides bibliographies of archaeobotanical reports from sites in West and Central Asia. Along with Katherine M. Moore, she organized the ongoing Plants, Animal, People archaeobiology discussion group at the Penn Museum.
Founded in 1879, the
Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) was chartered by the United States Congress in 1906, in recognition of its role in the development and passage of the Antiquities Act, which Theodore Roosevelt signed into law that year. Today, the AIA remains committed to preserving the world's archaeological resources and cultural heritage for the benefit of people in the present and in the future. The Lincoln-Omaha Society of the Archaeological Institute of America, chartered in 1995, provides the residents of Nebraska and western Iowa opportunities to attend lectures by prominent international, national, and local archaeologists.