ROM ‘Minoan’ Goddess Hangout: battling with technology!

I’ve just finished a Google+ Hangout talking about the ROM ‘Minoan’ goddess with a colleague and expert in ancient ivory and gold statues, Dr. Kenneth Lapatin.  It was Ken’s research and publications about the suspect Minoan ivory figurines in several museum collections that first prompted the ROM to reconsider the display of their own ‘icon’ (see my blog post for more on this story).  It was a lot of fun having a live chat with a colleague in California (Ken was talking from the J. Paul Getty Museum where he is a curator of Antiquities), but there were a few technical difficulties!

The half hour we had flew by very quickly.  We only got to talk about a fraction of the story, and didn’t have time to respond to all the questions, either the live questions or those people had raised with me beforehand.  But as the story of the ROM goddess unfolds, and Julia Fenn and I, continue to write research blogs, I hope we will manage to answer some of your questions.  The ROM goddess story is available online via the ROM research page, so keep visiting to see the latest results.  To read about the details of the several other suspect ‘Minoan’ figurines, have a look at Kenneth Lapatin’s book Mysteries of the Snake Goddess. Art, desire and the forging of history (Boston 2002).  For those of you who missed it live, you can see the archived hangout (technical hitches and all) on the ROM youtube channel.