ARCHAEOLOGICAL INSTITUTE of AMERICA
KENTUCKY SOCIETY
Archaeology Lectures, Fall 2025
With the support of our academic partners at the University of Louisville and Transylvania University, we look forward to presenting a series of talks in which internationally-recognized scholars discuss their latest research on a variety of archaeological topics.
What's in a Face? The Cupbearer Fresco, Race,
and Early Aegean Prehistory
Dr. Anne Duray
Thursday, September 25, 2025 • 6:00 PM EST
Strickland Auditorium
L.A. Brown Science Center
Transylvania University
339 N. Upper Street
Lexington, KY 40507
Don't miss the first talk in our 2025-26 archaeology lecture series! Archaeologist Anne Duray will be speaking about the "Cupbearer Fresco" from Knossos and its early interpretations in light of late 19th-century ideas about race, art, and science.
Shortly after initiating excavations at Knossos in 1900, the British archaeologist Arthur Evans reported unearthing fragments of a fresco depicting "a life-sized figure of a youth," which subsequently came to be known as the Cupbearer Fresco. As this was the first fresco at Knossos to fully preserve the head of a human figure, it was characterized by Evans and others as the "first real portraiture" of the "race" of Bronze Age Crete. Drawing from contemporary publications, media pieces, and reports of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), this talk contextualizes the initial discourse surrounding this fresco in light of the research agendas about the "races" of the prehistoric Aegean and traditions of racial science current in Victorian Britain.
During the late 19th century, the BAAS launched the Ethnographic Survey of the United Kingdom, and several prominent archaeologists of the time, including Arthur Evans, served on its organizing committee. The Ethnographic Survey was concerned with tracing and typologizing so-called "races" over time in the United Kingdom, and used methods such as head measurement (craniometry) and photography to do so. Early commentary on the Cupbearer's head touched upon not only its craniometric type, but its similarity to Classical Greek art, and value in terms of accurate portraiture. In the case of the fresco, I argue, the supposed scientific-ness of photographic portraiture intersected with notions of artistic production—that is, Cupbearer gained a dual status as a racial portrait comparable to past and present human populations, but also as a work of art that prefigured the later achievements of Classical Greece. This interpretation demonstrates how late 19th century racial ideologies provided a motivation, framework, and language for identifying and evaluating early Aegean populations in relation to "Europeans" and/or "Greeks." Finally, this talk concludes by connecting some of the late 19th and early 20th century rhetoric about race to more recent framings of "populations" in analyses and commentary concerning ancient DNA.
Dr. Anne Duray is an AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Science and Technology Policy Fellow.
What's in a Face? is presented by the Kentucky Society of the Archaeological Institute of America and the Departments of Classics and History at Transylvania University.