Dr. Ryan Byrne is the Director of the Archaeology Program and Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Rhodes College. He received his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from the Johns Hopkins University, as well as degrees in Archaeology, History and Religion from the University of Redlands in California, where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. Prior to joining the Rhodes faculty, Dr. Byrne taught ancient history, Egyptology and Judaica at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Hebrew Bible and archaeology at Johns Hopkins. The former assistant editor of the journal Near Eastern Archaeology, he has also conducted extensive ethnographic work among Arab communities in Egypt, Syria, Jordan and the Palestinian territories. Byrne’s research largely concerns the interdisciplinary connections between social history, political theory, cultural anthropology, sociolinguistics and archaeology with a principal focus on the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean world. His interests and expertise spread across several disciplines:

Archaeology

A veteran of numerous excavations in Israel, Syria and North America over the past 15 years, including a stint with the Israel Antiquities Authority, Byrne is principally interested in the archaeology of the Middle East and Mediterranean during Bronze and Iron Ages, but he has excavated several sites in every era from the Neolithic to the Crusader period. More recently, Byrne’s work as a comparativist has brought him to the disciplines of historical (plantation) and prehistoric (Woodland and Mississippian) archaeology in North America. At Rhodes, Byrne oversees the Archaeometry Laboratory, which features state-of-the-art GPS/GIS, laser survey and palaeobotanical equipment, SEM microscopy capability, x-ray florescence spectrometry for elemental analysis, and two twelve-cup Mr. Coffee machines. At present, Byrne is overseeing three major excavations:

Byrne co-directs the archaeological excavations at Tel Dan in northern Israel with his colleague David Ilan of Hebrew Union College. Tel Dan is famous for its discovery of the House of David inscription, a ninth-century BCE Aramaic inscription featuring the oldest historical reference to the Hebrew Bible’s King David. Tel Dan also boasts the world’s oldest intact arched gateway at 4000 years old, as well as the cultic complex attributed to Jeroboam I (1 Kings 12). Byrne will soon begin preparations to publish the final report on the Iron Age gateway complex of the Israelite city (Dan VI: The Iron Age Gate Complex). Tel Dan is currently a candidate for inscription in UNESCO’s manifest of World Heritage sites. The next season of excavations is scheduled for the summer of 2008.

Byrne also co-directs excavations at the Ames Plantation in Tennessee, a 20,000-acre site with over 200 archaeological sites from the prehistoric periods to the twentieth century. Byrne is particularly interested in whether comparative work in historical archaeology can facilitate a theoretical apparatus with which to study the material culture of slavery in different cultural contexts. Current excavations are concentrating on two main areas. The historical project concerns multiple yeoman plantations from the nineteenth century in order to clarify the economic complexities of stratification among the planter classes and their slave communities. The contiguous land base at Ames offers a unique opportunity to conduct comparative studies of the smaller plantations that comprised about ninety percent of the free planter classes. The prehistoric project focuses on four ceremonial mounds from the Mississippian period. There are fascinating earthenwork structures pertinent to research questions about exploitation, elite emulation, homology, and landscape anthropology.

Byrne and Milton Moreland also oversee the archaeological recovery of the Zion Cemetery, the oldest postbellum African-American cemetery in the Mid-South. Using GIS and archival data, they intend to study the spatial and symbolic construction of interment zones along the riverine interior of the Mississippi. There are surprising suggestions in the site formation processes touching on the disposal of bodies during the 1918 influenza epidemic.

The Ancient Near East

Trained broadly in ancient Near Eastern languages and cultures (Levant, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Anatolia), Byrne is particularly interested in political history, ritual and sacred space, cuneiform law, gender, labor, exchange, imperialism, early Arabs, and Semitics (Hebrew, Aramaic, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Syriac, Akkadian, Arabic).

Works in progress include treatments of political rhetoric, the intersection of Mesopotamian cosmology and theodicy, the curricula of peripheral cuneiform schools, Amarna Canaano-Akkadian, Old Assyrian “Trade Akkadian,” and the Late Bronze Egyptian presence in the southern Levant. His chronological interests range from the incipient political formations in Mesopotamia to the aftermath of the Hellenization project of Alexander’s successors.

An epigrapher mentored by Kyle McCarter, Byrne has written various articles on Northwest Semitic palaeography and scribal practice. He is midwifing the final pangs of a volume of essays entitled Reading and Writing in Ancient Israel: Epigraphy, Literacy and Scribal Culture, which includes theoretical and palaeographic treatments of Levantine corpora from the cuneiform cultures of the Bronze Age to the Rabbinic treatises on textual citation.

At the invitation of Brown University and the university of Chicago Press, Byrne is currently working on the Israel chapter for the successor volume to Frankfort’s The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (reprinted by Penguin as Before Philosophy), the classic work on Near Eastern intellectual history. He is also putting the finishing touches on the intersection between Near Eastern philosophy and the early Platonic pedagogies of fourth-century Athens.

Political Theory and Political Anthropology

Byrne is completing two volumes on political philosophy in the West Semitic world. The first book, Statecraft in Early Israel, Volume 1: An Archaeology of the Political Sciences, deals with the archaeological recovery of political hegemony, resistance, monumentality, architectural phenomenology, instrumentalization of writing, and the reification of the state. The second book, Statecraft in Early Israel, Volume 2: Rhetoric of the Political Sciences, treats the construction of national epic and communitarian agitprop in political and mythopoeic media of the state. He is especially interested in how debates about liberty, virtue, sovereignty, ideology, governmentality, legitimation and the state have afforded a cross-disciplinary discussion among theorists of political philosophy, international relations, macroeconomics, and anthropology. Along with the anthropologist Susan Kus, Byrne is preparing a new, long-term research project on the anthropology of the state, especially in the post-9/11 period.

Anthropology of Religion

Byrne has just finished co-editing a volume on the phenomenological aspects of the James Ossuary affair: Resurrecting the Brother of Jesus: The Rise, Fall, and Religion of the James Ossuary.  Byrne has recently begun work on a book-length series of observations on the media’s fascination with purportedly biblical artifacts from both controlled excavations and the black market. A scholar of ancient magic and witchcraft, he has also laid the groundwork for a volume on the theory of magic, which seeks to contextualize the Religiongeschichteschule within the longer historical continuum of the alienation of magic from its roots in the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean, through the conflation of maleficium and necromancy into a single heretical category, which fueled the articulation of the medieval witch finder manuals and ultimately the Protestant rejection of continental evidentiary procedures.

Continental and Ancient Philosophy

As an unapologetic product of the Gen-X postmodern epoch, Byrne began kibitzing with Jacques Derrida and François Lyotard as a teenager in Orange County, CA and continued to irk JD in Baltimore, when they both were at Johns Hopkins. Since his late adolescence, then, critical theory has played a dominant role in Byrne’s pedagogical and research rubrics. He is especially interested in the usual suspects (Foucault, Kristeva, Barthes, Zizek), phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, de Certau, Bourdieu), and aesthetics (Kant, Schopenhauer, Burke, Lyotard). Aristotle and Plato are also constant companions, with the former surfacing prominently in Byrne’s research on the habituation of civic virtue in the polis (Ethics and Politics, obviously) and the latter appearing in a forthcoming study of the semantics of abstraction in Republic and Symposium. Some forays into comparative literature include studies of hospitality, the voyeurism of fiction, disjunctive narratology, and some preliminary proposals for a post-colonial Orientalism (for want of a neologism better serving the wisdom of Said).

Courses Offered in Recent Memory

Dead Sea Scrolls

Origins of Monotheism

Magic and Witchcraft

Archaeology and the Biblical World

Archaeology of Ancient Israel

Hebrew (101, 102, 201)

Material Culture Studies

Research in Religious Studies

Senior Seminar in Religious Studies

The Biblical Tradition

The Bible: Texts and Contexts

The Search for Values in the Light of Western History and Religion (101, 102, 201)

Courses on the Horizon

Phenomenology and Aesthetics

Cosmologies in Myth, Physics and Opera

Archaeology and Ritual of Native America

Mesoamerican Archaeology and Religion

Egyptology

African-American Archaeology

Archaeology of Slavery

Arab-Israeli Conflict

Gods of Baseball

The Great Zombification

Ancient Iraq