2011 University Lecture

The Wonderful Things of Punt:
Excavations at a Pharaonic Harbor on the Red Sea

by Kathryn Bard,  Professor of Archaeology

Tsai Performance Center
685 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts
Admission is free. The public is cordially invited

Wednesday, October 12, 2011
7 p.m.

2011 University Lecture Poster

Before Kathryn Bard’s career in archaeology began, she traveled overland from Cairo to Capetown, which including hiking to the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro, Uhuru Peak (19,340 ft./ 5,895 m ASL) – the highest mountain in Africa. She studied sculpture at St. Martin’s School of Art, London, and has a BFA and MFA from Yale University. She taught sculpture and drawing for a year at Simon’s Rock College in Great Barrington, MA. Bard then decided to study archaeology and received a MA in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan. Her PhD is from the University of Toronto.

Bard is Professor of Archaeology at Boston University, where she has been on the faculty since 1988. She has published seven books and over 80 articles, reviews and reports. Areas of research involve the late prehistory of Egypt, the origins of complex societies and early states in northeast Africa (Egypt, Nubia, and northern Ethiopia/Eritrea), and the Red Sea trading network in the Bronze and Iron Ages. With Professor Rodolfo Fattovich, University of Naples “l’Orientale, she has co-directed archaeological excavations at Aksum, the capital of an early African civilization in northern Ethiopia, and Mersa/Wadi Gawasis, a pharaonic harbor  on the Red Sea coast of Egypt. She has also directed excavations at the late prehistoric sites of Hu and Semaineh in Upper Egypt.

Bard is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1998 she was given the Chairman’s Award for Exploration of the National Geographic Society, which “recognizes the excellence of the work of grantees of the National Geographic Society who have provided us with new knowledge of our world.”