The Ancient Sculpture Association is a new international platform aiming to promote the study of ancient sculpture. In universities around the world, sculpture has a somewhat dusty image, as a topic that used to be in vogue in nineteenth-century archaeological scholarship. That this image is unjustified is clear from exciting recent studies in both the appearance and meaning of ancient sculpture. Statues had and have a life of their own, which makes them invaluable tools in studying the society that produced them, and teaches us much about people of the past, as well as present.
The importance of bringing the fascination of ancient sculpture back to both general and specialist audiences has become clear over the past years by the rapid loss of ancient statues to purposeful destruction in Africa and the Near East, as well as to looting all over the world. Sculpture, like other ancient artefacts, tells us where we come from, and its preservation is the preservation of our pasts.
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The ASA (www.ancientsculpture.org) will be officially launched on December 4th, 2015, at the conference “War, Identity and Cultural Heritage” at University College Roosevelt in Middelburg, The Netherlands (http://www.ucr.nl/academic-p rogram/Research/kairos/Pages/News.aspx).
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For more information see the news section at the website: www.ancientsculpture.org.