Fall 2025 – Spring 2026 lecture season
Stay informed about local events by becoming a member of the Archaeological Institute of America and selecting Western Massachusetts as your local society. For a complete list of Classics and Archaeology lectures in the Five Colleges, see the Amherst College Classics Lecture Schedule. All lectures are free and open to the public.
Dr. Megan Perry
AIA National Lecture – Kershaw Lectures in Near East Archaeology
“Life, Death, and Disease: Insights form Petra’s Tombs and Cemeteries”
Thursday, February 26, 2026
Time and location TBD
Dr. Perry is a Professor of Biological Anthropology at East Carolina University. She teaches courses on human osteology, death and disease in Classical antiquity, and human diseases and ancient environments. Most of her research focuses on 1st century B.C. – 7th century A.D. Jordan, but she supervises graduate students interested in numerous aspects of bioarchaeology. She has been working on archaeological projects in Jordan for 30 years and is a member of the Board of Trustees of the American Center of Research (ACOR) in Amman, Jordan. She is currently Director of the Petra North Ridge Project, which focuses on the excavation of 1st century A.D. tombs and 1st – 4th century domestic structures.
Dr. Yannis Hamilakis
32nd Annual Phyllis Williams Lehmann Lecture
Saturday, April 18, 2026
11:00am
Smith College
Dr. Hamilakis is the Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology and Professor of Modern Greek Studies at Brown University. He is an archaeologist, writer, and exhibition curator, and a Guggenheim Fellow (Class of 2025). His main research and teaching interests are the socio-politics of the past, the body and bodily senses, the archaeology of eating and drinking, human-animal relationships, the ontology and materiality of photography, archaeology and nationalism, archaeological ethnography, the archaeology of contemporary migration, and critical pedagogy in archaeology. His main geographical research focus has been Greece and the Aegean, and although much of his fieldwork is to do with the prehistoric (Neolithic and Bronze Age) Aegean, he is equally interested in the archaeology of the contemporary. In fact, many of his projects are multi-temporal. Since 2010, he has co-directed the Koutroulou Magoula Archaeology and Archaeological Ethnography Project in central Greece, and since 2016 he has directed a field project on the archaeology of contemporary migration on Lesvos.
Western Massachusetts Society of the AIA 