bonus

Deep Cuts: Portrait of a Podcaster on Fire

Sure, the title is a stretch, but it's hard coming up with a topical joke about portraiture! This month we dive into some early examples of representing individuals in ancient art from several times and places. Amber inexplicably takes umbrage with the entirety of Byzantine art, and both hosts question what is a face and what is a couple of lines that sorta look like a face. 

Further reading for this month's episode includes:

The oldest known portrait of a human—usually interpreted as a woman—sculpted from mammoth ivory (via ResearchGate)

26,000 years of capturing the human face (Inspiring Ancestry - Genealogy & DNA)

The woman from the Dolní Věstonice 3 burial: a new view of the face using modern technologies (Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences)

Archaeologists Discover an Ancient Portrait of Young Jesus in an Abandoned Israeli Church (Artnet)

The Oldest Modernist Paintings (Smithsonian)

Scientists Analyze Faiyum Portrait Pigment (Archaeology)

Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits From Roman Egypt (The Met)

Egyptian Mummy Portrait Mysteries Solved (Artsy)

Old Masters (The Guardian)

The diagnosis of art: facial nerve palsy in ancient Rome (Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine)

Next Episode All Episodes Previous Episode

About the Podcast

Show artwork for The Dirt Podcast
The Dirt Podcast
Archaeology, Anthropology, and our shared human past.

Listen for free

About your host

Profile picture for The Dirt Podcast

The Dirt Podcast

As science communicators in anthropology and archaeology, we hosts of The Dirt acknowledge that we hold a position of considerable privilege and opportunity, and commit ourselves to continuous learning, unlearning and reflection. We recognize that our disciplines, as well as our own lives, are rooted in and propped up by settler colonialism, white supremacy, and dispossession.

We now reside on the stolen ancestral territory of the Shawnee and Haudenosaunee and on the lands of the Muscogee and Cherokee Nations, but over its lifetime, The Dirt has also been produced on the unceded traditional territory of the Piscataway Conoy and Cedarville Band of Piscataway Indians, as well as that of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, Patwin and Miwok peoples and all those dispossessed by Cession 296. We offer our show as a platform for Indigenous scholarship, history, and cultural expression, through citation and conversation, and we welcome the opportunity to host and compensate Indigenous scholars of archaeology and anthropology as interview guests.

Likewise, we encourage all listeners who reside in settler-colonial states to learn about on whose land they reside, their place in the ongoing process of colonization, and how to contribute materially to reparations and Indigenous sovereignty.