Washington and Lee Hosts Public Lecture with Erin Walcheck Averett Averett’s talk, which is free and open to the public, is titled “Frightening the Frightful: Grotesque Visages from Ancient Cyprus.”

By Erica Turman
February 12, 2019

Erin Walcheck Averett, associate professor of archeology at Creighton University and adjunct curator of antiquities at the Joslyn Art Museum, will give a public lecture at Washington and Lee University on Feb. 28 at 5 p.m. in Hillel House Rm 101.

Averett’s talk, which is free and open to the public, is titled “Frightening the Frightful: Grotesque Visages from Ancient Cyprus.”

In her talk, Averett will discuss the complex role of the grotesque, the monstrous and the strange in Mediterranean religion, ritual and society. Her focus is the apotropaic imagery in Iron Age Cyprus. The island’s position at the intersection of East and West provided fertile ground for a wide range of grotesque and monstrous representations. In the lecture she will attempt to answer what was the function of these apotropaic devices within local Cypriot contexts and in service of local communities.

Averett has excavated widely in Greece and Cyprus and is the assistant director of the Athienou Archaeological Project on Cyprus, which is funded by an NSF-REU grant. She also serves as the president for the Lincoln-Omaha Archaeological Institute of America chapter. Her research area includes Cypriot art and archaeology, with special focus on terracotta figurines and Iron Age religion in the eastern Mediterranean.

She published an article on Cypriot masked performances in The American Journal of Archaeology on her new 3D imaging project in antiquity, and has co-authored a site report on the last three seasons of the Athienou Archaeological Project in the Journal of Field Archaeology.

Averett graduated with a B.A. in Latin and classical archaeology from the University of Georgia, and received her M.A. and Ph.D. in classical archaeology from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Her lecture is co-sponsored by the Department of Classics and the Archaeology & Technology Cohort.