All events

     On December 9, 2021, Dr. Yara Moualla defended her PhD Dissertation entitled "Mobilising Syrian Cultural Heritage: making change towards social and cultural inclusion and integration. A Meta-Frame Analysis of Two Case Studies: The Case of Mozan, Syria: 2010-2016. The Case of Über den Tellerrand, Germany: 2016-2018".
     An abstract of her PhD Dissertation can be found here.
     A biographical profile of Dr. Yara Moualla is available at this link.

     On December 2-3, 2021, an international conference entitled ILUCIDARE Playground: Heritage Voices Out! will take place at Brussels; Dr. Hiba Qassar will present in this venue a contribution on the topic of "Archaeology for a young future - ILUCIDARE Special Prize International relations winner 2020", on December 3, 2021, at 11.30 AM (CEST); her talk will be focused on the recent results of the "One-on-One" project, dealing with the heritage conservation of the ancient site of Urkesh and with the involvement of the local, young community of Tell Mozan in the process of knowledge and conservation of its historical and archaeological heritage.
     The flyer of the conference is available here.
     The conference will be in presence, but also a participation on remote will be possible by registering at the following link.

     On November 23-26, 2021, an international conference entitled EMPOWER 2021: Young Global Citizens Co-Create Culture was organized in Doha (with online streaming), aiming at building awareness, knowledge, and skills related to global citizenship and mobilise youth as agents of positive change to take action in their communities.
Dr. Hiba Qassar participated in the conference on November 24, 2021, with the panel "Cultural Heritage Through the Lens of Global Citizenship", linked to the "One-on-One" project.
     A short report of Dr. Qassar's panel can be downloaded here.
     The program of the conference can be found here.

     On November 16, 2021 the Politecnico of Milano (Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, 26) will hold a conference in the form of round table entitled "A Multi-Linear Digital Discourse in Theory and Practice: The Urkesh Global Record and the Four Banks Project", focusing on the new possibilities offered by a systematic and digital publication of the archaeological record (Urkesh Global Record) of the excavations at Urkesh/Tell Mozan, along with the digital publication of material included in the vademecum to the volumes pertaining to the "4Banks" project.
     The flyer of the conference can be downloaded here.
     The conference will be in presence, but a virtual participation will be allowed through Zoom.

     On November 15, 2021 the Politecnico di Milano – Polo Territoriale di Mantova (Piazza d'Arco, 3) will host an international congress entitled "Coronomics and Cultural Heritage in the Middle East", discussing about the preservation of cultural heritage in the time of COVID-19.
     The flyer of the congress, reporting also a brief abstract, can be found here.
     The congress will be in presence, but a participation from remote is granted through Zoom.
     Two parallel sections, in the form of seminar, will be focusing on the topics of "Archaeological Excavation" (LAB 1: Zoom 1) and "From Identity to Jobs (LAB 2: Zoom 2).

     On October 24, 2021 Dr. Hiba Qassar granted an interview to the journal Alfa&Omega (section Fe y vida) about the ongoing "One-on-One" project.
     The article (in Spanish) can be read online at this link.
     A PDF of the interview (in Spanish) can be downloaded here.

     Recently, Dr. Hiba Qassar has sent the first report on the Urkesh activities related to the project "Archaeology for a young future", which won the "ILUCIDARE Special Prize 2020 for excellence in Heritage-led International Relations".
     The English text of the report can be downloaded here.

     On October 12, 2021, Prof. Giorgio Buccellati and Prof. Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati granted an interview to the electronic journal ABC (October 12, 2021, "Cultura"), following the conference "A multi-linear digital discourse in theory and practice. An example concerning archaeology and Mesopotamian and Biblical religion", delivered on September 22, 2021 at the Universidad Eclesiástica San Dámaso, Madrid, during the course La "Bibbia" in una prospettiva mesopotamica. Storia, storiografia, ermeneutica, held at the same University on September 20-24, 2021.
     The Spanish text of the whole interview is available at this link; the English translation of the same interview can be downloaded here.

     On September 30, 2021, Prof. Giorgio Buccellati and Prof. Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati granted an interview to the journal Alfa&Omega (September 30-October 6, 2021, p. 22, section "Cultura"), following the conference "A multi-linear digital discourse in theory and practice. An example concerning archaeology and Mesopotamian and Biblical religion", delivered on September 22, 2021 at the Universidad Eclesiástica San Dámaso, Madrid, during the course La "Bibbia" in una prospettiva mesopotamica. Storia, storiografia, ermeneutica, held at the same University on September 20-24, 2021.
     The Spanish text of the whole interview is available at this link; the English translation of the same interview can be downloaded here.

     On September 24, 2021 (Friday), Dr. Jonah Lynch (IIMAS Research Associate and PhD student at University of Pavia, Italy) will present a fascinating contribution in the context of the European Association for Digital Humanities (EADH) 2021 Conference; the title of his talk is "Graph representation and network analysis as a comparative tool: a case study in comparative religion" (session Long and Short Papers: Content Analysis/Visualization): a new digital approach in investigating, analyzing, and visually displaying patterns of religion (focusing on Israel and Mesopotamia) in a digital and structural comparative view.
     The program of the conference is available online.
     A video ("Structural comparison of religion") describing Dr. Lynch's ongoing research can be found on his YouTube personal channel.

     On September 22, 2021 (Wednesday), Prof. Giorgio Buccellati (together with Prof. Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati) will deliver a lecture on new approaches on investigating Mesopotamian and biblical religion. The central idea is to show how a website can serve a purpose that goes beyond the standard of providing information in the form of databases. It is the notion of "digital discourse", that makes the most of the potential of the digital medium by implementing a multi-linear narrative. The approach (proposed by G. Buccellati in A Critique of Archaeological Reason, Cambridge 2017, with companion CAR website) will be exemplified through three websites to be illustrated in the first part of the round table. Respondents will then consider the proposal from three different points of view.
      The flyer of the conference is available online and the event can be followed through an online streaming.
     An interview to Prof. Giorgio Buccellati and Prof. Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati, granted after this conference, can be read at the following link.

     On September 20-24, 2021, Prof. Giorgio Buccellati will teach a course at the Universidad Eclesiástica San Dámaso, Madrid (Spain) focusing on epistemological, historical, and hermeneutical aspects of the biblical texts. The course is structured in five steps, facing, after an introduction (session 1), aspects of Mesopotamian history (session 2) and problems of biblical epistemology (sessions 3-4), reaching a final conclusion in the last class (session 5).
     A flyer presenting the topics of this course can be downloaded here.
     An interview to Prof. Giorgio Buccellati and Prof. Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati, granted at the end of this course, can be read at the following link.

     On September 15, 2021, Dr. Yasmine Mahmoud defended her PhD Dissertation entitled "Anthropomorphic figurines, statuettes and jewelry from Urkesh. An archaeological and historical study". Her PhD research was achieved within the PhD in History (Pre-Classical Ancient Near-East), 33^rd cycle (a.a. 2017/2018).
     An abstract of her PhD Dissertation, including a ToC, can be found here.

     On September 7, 2021, a team of the Urkesh/Tell Mozan expedition (namely, Dr. Arwa Kharobi, Prof. Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati, Prof. Giorgio Buccellati, and Dr. Federico Buccellati) presented a paper (entitled "The Urkesh Global Record (UGR): Overview & Zoom on the Bioanthropological Data") at the "27^th Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists" (Widening Horizons), held in Kiel, during September 6-11, 2021.
     The PDF of the presentation is available at this link.

     Despite the schools closure, due not only to the current pandemic but also to the upcoming summer, AVASA is ready to launch a new project aimed precisely at young middle school students. This initiative is characterized by a completely original approach, according to which individual students in Italy and Syria will enter into contact with each other, on a "one-on-one" basis.
     Meetings will take place under the supervision of our staff and will lead to specific objectives. The peculiarity of the program lies not only in the "one-on-one" relationship, but also in the fact that we propose Urkesh as a specific focus of interest with a unique mentorship. Students, in fact, will be tutored by young graduates or post-docs from Syria and the Arab world who currently live abroad, in Europe and in the United States.
     Updates and reports on the project will be regularly uploaded on this page of our website.

     Today was the last day of the cycle of lectures for PhD students entitled "The exploitation of plants during protohistory", held by Matteo Delle Donne at the University of Naples "l'Orientale".
     The lectures aimed to provide some theoretical and methodological tools needed to understand the ancient relationship between man and the environment, through the presentation of specific case studies - among which Urkesh/Tell Mozan was also included.
     More information on this cycle of lectures, including abstracts in Italian and English for each class, is available at this webpage.

     A major grant from the Kaplan Fund has been awarded to IIMAS, our sister institution with which we carry out our work at Tell Mozan, ancient Urkesh. The grant will allow us to continue the work we started with the support which the Cariplo Foundation gave to AVASA, and even to expand our programs as we respond to new needs that emerge as a result of the many events affecting not only Syria, but our whole world today.
     The name of the Kaplan grant program, "Heritage Conservation," epitomizes what we have been doing over the last several years at Tell Mozan. The recent report which you can find at avasa.it/pride gives an overview of the many activities we have included in our proposal. They include the presentation of the site to visitors and the school project, including the music for young people. And here is a paragraph from the proposal that emphasizes our growing understanding of what heritage ultimately means:
     "Ever sensitive to the presence of local communities and their growing awareness of what was hidden under the ground with which their lives are inextricably interwoven, we have come to touch by hand what "heritage" means. Not a thing to be treated impersonally, but a living reality to be appropriated. The ten years of war that have forced us to be absent physically from the site have only reinforced our ability to interact with the local communities: not only have we continued what we had started, we were also able to broadly expand our programs. We have maintained the full momentum of our work during this long period by keeping concrete programs active. More importantly, we have nurtured even more the sense of social identity that builds on that shared sense of heritage. Thus the site has become a beacon of light, in the darkness of the conflict, for a number of diverging communities who find in this shared past a motive for coming together, instead of being torn apart. It is so because they have come to feel what it means to be inheritors of a common past - however distant and remote".

     A new international collaboration expands around the world the already rich network of contacts of the Mozan/Urkesh Archaeological Project.
     Professor Liangren Zhang from Department of History of Nanjing University (China), director of several research projects in China, Russia and Iran, has expressed an interest in the Urkesh data management system, and one of his students, Yingshan Guo, first year doctoral student in the field of Iranian archaeology, will work under the direction of Dr. Lorenzo Crescioli in the implementation, revision and digital publication of Unit A20, in the UGR format (Urkesh
Global Record). A20 represents an interesting excavation unit investigated during the last years of field work in Syria (2008 and 2010) and has yielded a remarkable variety of structures mainly dating to the Late Bronze Age (1500-1200 B.C.), the Mittani and Middle Assyrian periods.
     This collaboration is made possible through the support of Xu Fanxi, who worked in Mozan during the early years of the excavation.

     In June, 8-12, 2020, Prof. Giorgio Buccellati taught a course at the Universidad Eclesiástica San Dámaso, Madrid (Spain) focusing on epistemological, historical, and hermeneutical aspects of the biblical texts. The course was structured in five steps, facing, after an introduction (session 1), aspects of Mesopotamian history (session 2) and problems of biblical epistemology (sessions 3-4), reaching a final conclusion in the last class (session 5).
     A flyer presenting the topics of this course can be downloaded here.

     Several Italian online videos and articles describe the significant achievement of our School Project, shortlisted for one of the special prizes ILUCIDARE 2020.
     In the section "Reports" of our website you can find three articles published on the website of Agcult, the news agency specialized in public policy related to culture and tourism.
In the media, instead, you can see a report aired on the VCO news, and read an article published on the website ossolanews.it.

     Today our School Project has received a very significant international distincion: "Archaeology for a Young Future" is among the 6 shortlisted projects for the ILUCIDARE Special Prizes, within the European Heritage Awards/Europa Nostra Awards 2020 (funded by the European Union through the Horizon 2020 funded programme, under grant agreement No. 821394”)!
     The Jury emphasized how "Archaeology for a Young Future is a strong example of how heritage can lead to people-to-people dialogue. This project promotes intercultural exchange and mutual understanding between students, teachers and local communities from Italy and Syria.": you can read more on the ILUCIDARE website.
     We are indeed very proud of this achievement, and grateful to all the teachers and students who have seen the educational and cultural significance of this initiative. Winners will be announced in Autumn 2020.

     Federico Buccellati is the new director of the Mozan/Urkesh Archaeological Project. He succeeds Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati, who served as Director from 1984 until 2020, and was appointed following the official approval of the Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums, Damascus.
     Federico has never missed a season of excavations, and since 2005 has served as Assistant Director and Field Director. During his tenure, he has contributed in an essential way to the excavation strategy, the stratigraphic control, the methodological development, and the implementation of sophisticated digital techniques. He has a deep knowledge of the site and its potential, the full confidence of the local people, and an abiding commitment to the community aspect of the project. He has published extensively on Urkesh, and his scholarly profile, solidly rooted in Europe and in the US, will guarantee the high standards which were set for the project over the years, and will at the same time infuse new energy in the project and ensure its continuity.

      Two important articles describing two different aspects of our project at Tell Mozan, originally published in the book SANEM 3, are now accessible online on our website.
     The first one, by Neville Agnew and Martha Demas, offers a critical analysis of the architecture conservation system at Mozan: the two distinguished colleagues from the Getty Conservation Institute highlight the unique features that characterize our approach towards this important aspect of the excavation work.
     The second article, by Diederik Meijer from the University of Leiden, one of the deans of Syrian archaeology, develops in depth the themes that characterize the methodological approach of our project.