2025 PLENARY ADDRESS

Wednesday, November 19
7:00 – 8:30pm EST  |  Hilton Boston Park Plaza

** The Plenary Address will be broadcast live for virtual attendees

The 2025 Plenary Address will be given by Timothy P. Harrison, Director of the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC) and Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology at the University of Chicago. Professor Harrison served as President of ASOR from 2008–2013.

Professor Harrison directed excavations at the Bronze and Iron Age site of Tall Madaba, in Jordan, between 1996 and 2006, and since 2000, he has directed the ongoing Tayinat Archaeological Project (TAP) in southeastern Turkey. These projects form part of a broader, regional research effort that seeks to shed light on the rise of early complex societies in the Eastern Mediterranean. As part of this effort, in 2012, Professor Harrison launched the CRANE (Computational Research on the Ancient Near East) Project, an international consortium of researchers and projects conducting research in the Orontes Watershed and Eastern Mediterranean. In 2020, Professor Harrison was invited to participate in the post-conflict restoration of the world heritage site of Nineveh in East Mosul. Professor Harrison has published extensively on the Bronze and Iron Age cultures of the Levant, including four monographs and more than 140 articles and papers.

The Middle East Cultural Heritage Crisis and Why It Matters

Cultural heritage is at risk now more than at any time in human history. More immediately, the cultural heritages of Middle Eastern communities are undergoing widespread devastation and destruction. The conflicts that have engulfed the Middle East have precipitated a scale of human suffering and dislocation that we have not witnessed since World War II, and the destruction of cultural heritage has played a devastating role in this tragedy, obliterating the cultural identities that have given meaning and a sense of place to communities, in many instances for millennia. This ongoing catastrophe has captivated global attention, galvanizing calls for the documentation and preservation of this threatened and disappearing heritage, perceived by many to represent a collective, global patrimony. Archaeological exploration, meanwhile, and more specifically, European and North American involvement in the archaeological exploration of the Middle East, is undergoing a profound and long overdue change. More specifically, traditional western scholarly involvement in the exploration and study of the archaeology and history of the Ancient Near East faces an existential crisis. Navigating this crisis will require a fundamental change in how we approach and conduct field research, if we are to participate meaningfully, constructively, and productively, in the transformation that is under way. This paper will appeal to the critical importance of this transformation, to the nature of our western participation and engagement with it, and to the prospects for a vibrant and fruitful east-west collaboration in the preservation, study, and celebration of this vital legacy of human history and culture.