Meet the Authors: 2025 AIA Book Awards

Jessica Lamont: In Blood and Ashes: Curse Tablets and Binding Spells in Ancient Greece

Investigating the development and dissemination of ritualized cursing across the Mediterranean, this book provides a history of curse practice— alongside that of binding spells, incantations, and other ritual phenomena— in Greek antiquity from c. 750 to 250 BCE. These rites greatly expand our understanding of daily life in ancient communities, and provide rare insights into how individuals were making sense of the world and coping with conflict, vulnerability, competition, anxiety, desire, and loss. Curse tablets in particular document persons who often slip through the cracks of tra­ditional histories, enabling us to approach antiquity through a broader lens: here are cooks, tavern keepers, cumin-sellers, helmsmen, and barbers. These objects enrich our view of the classical past, populating the Greek world with a more inclusive group of nar­ratives than otherwise afforded by literary sources.

What drew you to archaeology?

The sheer excitement of archaeology as a method for accessing and learning more about the past. In my own areas of research and teaching, the field of ancient Greek history has been such a beneficiary of archaeology over the past 150 years– archaeological excavation has expanded the parameters of “Greek civilization” itself by centuries, revealed much that passes unmentioned by literary sources, unearthed so many new material sources that change how we understand ancient individuals and communities, and has much to teach us about how ancient people lived and died.

How did you get started on your project?

It was a real surprise to me to learn that the ancient Greeks and Romans used to practice magic! And it made Classical antiquity much more interesting–and fun. This book in particular began as a small side project, a matter of transcribing some inscribed lead tablets (“curse tablets”) one summer in Athens, Greece. What drew me in deeper were the deities and historic individuals documented by these objects, and their potential for expanding modern understandings of daily life, religion, and social history in Classical antiquity. The project presents a broad set of narratives: readers encounter an amphora seller and barber in the Athenian Agora, a helmsman transporting enslaved persons in the northern Black Sea, a wealthy sponsor of choregic competitions in coastal Sicily, and a female garland weaver in Roman Corinth. These types of ritual objects show how ancient Greek individuals were managing conflict, competition, and vulnerability, and engaging with the gods, the dead, and the Underworld in rites meant to change the present and future course of events.

What’s next for you professionally?

I’m working on a book about medicine and healing practices in ancient Greece. I’ll always be interested in ancient Greek magic, and excavations are constantly churning up new evidence for these ritual practices across the Mediterranean and Black Sea and well beyond! I’m lucky, too, to be able to teach students about these topics.

Bob Brier: Tutankhamun and the Tomb that Changed the World

It is often thought that the story of Tutankhamun ended when the thousands of dazzling items discovered by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon were transported to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and put on display. But there is far more to the boy-king’s story. Tutankhamun and the Tomb that Changed the World explores the 100 years of research on Tutankhamun that have taken place since the tomb’s discovery, from the several objects in the tomb made of meteoritic iron that came from outer space to new evidence that shows that Tutankhamun may actually have been a warrior who went into battle. Author Bob Brier also takes readers behind the scenes of the recent CT-scans of Tutankhamun’s mummy to reveal more secrets of the young pharaoh.