Anastasia Tchaplyghine (formerly Amrhein)

At the time of Donald Hansen’s untimely death in 2005 the results of his groundbreaking excavations at al-Hiba, the site of ancient Lagash, remained largely unpublished. In order to prepare the site’s final reports for publication, Holly Pittman of the University of Pennsylvania, in cooperation with Edward Ochsenschlager, started the Al-Hiba Publication Project with the support of the Shelby White-Leon Levy Program for Archaeological Publications.
The records documenting Hansen’s excavations at al-Hiba consist of thousands of photographs, data sheets, notebooks, drawings, and plans. During the past 4 years these records have been digitized and incorporated into a sophisticated database that stores and correlates digital versions of the materials and offers tools to manage and analyse the data. A team at the University of Pennsylvania is now at work studying these data and preparing final site reports. The first scheduled publication will focus on Area G, which contained a sequence of occupation spanning the Early Dynastic period. This is also the only area of the site where remains from the poorly understood ED I period were uncovered, making it particularly compelling.
Our poster is intended to offer a glimpse of several aspects of our methodological approach, outline some of the problems we have found, and share our progress with the academic community. We hope that this platform can serve to communicate with other scholars who have faced, or are facing, the challenge of publishing materials from old excavations."

33 authors collaborated in this volume on sacred landscapes in the ancient world in a comparative, multi-disciplinary perspective, between Britain and Egypt, Portugal and China.
From generation to generation, people experience their landscapes differently. Humans depend on their natural environment: it shapes their behaviour and it is often felt that one has to appease one's deities that were responsible for natural benefits, but also for natural calamities, like droughts, famines, floods and landslides. In many societies, we presume that lakes, rivers, rocks, mountains, caves and groves were considered sacred. Individual sites and entire landscapes are often associated with divine actions, mythical heroes and etiological myths. Throughout human history, people also felt the need to monumentalise their sacred landscape. But this is where the similarities stop as different societies had very different understandings, believes and practises. The aim of this book is therefore to carefully scrutinise our evidence and rethink our methodologies in a multidisciplinary approach. More than thirty papers investigate diverse sacred landscapes from the Iberian peninsula and Britain in the west to China in the east. They discuss how to interpret the intricate web of ciphers and symbols in the landscape and how people might have experienced it. We see the role of performance, ritual, orality, textuality and memory in people's sacred landscapes. A diachronic view allows us to study how landscapes were 're-written', adapted and redefined in the course of time to suit new cultural, political and religious understandings, not to mention the impact of urbanism on people's understandings. How was the landscape manipulated, transformed and monumentalised, especially the colossal investments in monumental architecture we see in certain socio-historic contexts or the creation of an alternative humanmade, seemingly 'non-natural' landscape, with perfectly astronomically aligned buildings that defines a cosmological order? This volume therefore aims to analyse the complex links between landscape, 'religiosity' and society, developing a dialectic framework that explores sacred landscapes across the ancient world in a dynamic, holistic, contextual and historical perspective.