Dr. Sauvage will provide a presentation on “Underwater Archeology and Shipping in the Bronze Age.” 

Sauvage earned her Ph.D. (2006) at Université Lumière Lyon (France), where she studied Near Eastern Archaeology and Egyptology. Her dissertation focused on Late Bronze Age maritime exchange in the eastern Mediterranean, and will be published by the Maison de l’Orient et de la Méditerranée Press (Routes maritimes et systèmes d’échangesinternationaux au Bronze récent en Méditerranée orientale). Between 2007 and 2010 she conducted research on the status of objects and their representations in the Near East and eastern Mediterranean area as a whole as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California at Berkeley (on chariots in collaboration with professor Marian Feldman – published in Egypt and the Levant XX) and as a Visiting Research Scholar at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University (on ships 2009-2010). She has been teaching as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University in 2010-2011. From 2008, she has been the recipient of a Shelby White – Leon Levy grant for archaeological publication. This work concerns the publication of the material preserved in the archaeological museum of Saint-Germain-en-Laye (France) and excavated by C.F.A. Schaeffer at Minet el-Beida and Ugarit during the first years of work there. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at Macalester College. Her main research interests include trade and exchange systems in the eastern Mediterranean during the Late Bronze and early Iron Ages, as well as the definition of social identities and groups over large areas, through archaeological objects and their iconography to avoid the classic pitfalls of disciplinary partitioning. She has conducted fieldwork in Syria, Egypt, Cyprus, France, and Italy, where she has worked on sites ranging from the Neolithic to the Late Roman periods. She is a member of the American School of Oriental Research, the Centre d’Études Chypriotes (Paris) and the Cercle d’Égyptologie Victor Loret (Lyon) and was awarded several fellowships and awards including a young researcher award from the town of Lyon (2007), and the prix Louis de Clercq (2011) from the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres (Paris).

Prof. Platte will present three lectures leading up to and at our meeting:

Thursday, Oct. 27 at Gustavus Adolphus
Lecture 1:  Mythic Marriage: the prehistory of Greek language and poetry

This talk will explore the literary implications of the genetic relationship between the ancient Greek language and other ancient languages, such as Latin and Sanskrit. This will include an introduction to some of the science behind the study of this relationship but will then proceed to an application of these principals to the study of Homeric narrative. This will result in the proposition of an alternative, cross-cultural, reading of Homer’s description of the reuniting of Odysseus and Penelope. 
 

Friday, Oct. 28 at the University of Minnesota 

Lecture 2:  Equestrian Poetics

Despite the famous novelty of Pindar’s Olympian 1, several of its apparent innovations are likely to have their roots in an extreme antiquity, both at the level of narratology and metaphor. This talk will investigate this phenomenon through a discussion of Pindar’s description of the chariot race for Hippodameia and its relationship to other chariot-based imagery in the work itself and in the poetries of related cultures. Such an investigation should ultimately help to uncover some of the fundamental mythopoetic and metapoetic strategies embedded in Greece’s Indo-European heritage. 
 

Saturday, Oct. 29 at the CAM annual meeting (Trinity School)
Lecture 3:  Mythic Horsemanship:

This talk addresses the subject of mythic horsemanship in order to explore what students of Greek myth can learn from examining the common linguistic and mythic inheritance of ancient India and Greece. Horsemanship is a natural subject for this sort of discussion because the relationship of humans and horses was fundamental in the shared antiquity of both cultures and has left its marks on the mythology of each. An exploration of certain parallel phenomena that appear in these mythologies should help to uncover new levels of meaning in several famous mythical figures and narratives.

Platte’s interests concern the history and evolution of language and poetic technique in both the Greek and Roman worlds, while his research focuses principally on the Homeric corpus. This work privileges a linguistic approach to literary material and draws heavily from the field of comparative Indo-European poetics. This methodology has developed from a deep interest in Indo-European linguistics, and frequently incorporates study of the Indo-Iranian languages, especially Sanskrit, in order to situate Homeric poetics within a broad cultural and historical perspective. Dr. Platte completed his Ph.D. at the University of Washington in 2008 and is currently working on a book project entitled Equine Poetics.