Please join us for an in-person screening and informal discussion of the Archaeology Hour talk by Alison Futrell (University of Arizona).

In ancient-Roman ‘arenas’ — structures and spaces like the Colosseum in Rome — mass events were staged that exaggerated, aestheticized, and then normalized extreme and shocking forms of violence, deploying a twisted, voyeuristic ‘pleasure’ intended to be derived from unreal genres of amplified bloodshed and death reserved *only* for those presented as variously criminal, exotic/strange, non-human and/or lesser-human… and fully disposable. This presentation will ask: how did the arena impact the lives of ordinary individuals… in the sands, the seats, and the substructures, beyond the emperor’s box?