Antioch Comes to Wellesley: Exhibition Reuniting Treasures Excavated in the 1930s Opens

The exhibition “Excavating Antioch: The Archaeology of an Ancient City” opens today, September 25, 2026, at the Davis Museum of Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and will remain open through May 30, 2027. Admission is free, Tuesday through Sunday, 11:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.

More than 140 artifacts — mosaics, sculpture, architectural fragments, ceramics, lamps and objects of daily life — are reunited for the first time in nearly a century from six American museums: the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Davis Museum, Dumbarton Oaks, the Harvard Art Museums, the Princeton University Art Museum and the Worcester Art Museum, according to ArtDaily and the Davis Museum, Wellesley College.

The materials come from the 1932–1939 excavations in ancient Antioch — today’s Antakya in Turkey — directed by Princeton University in collaboration with the Louvre, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Worcester Art Museum and Harvard University. During the campaigns, around 300 mosaics were documented: half remained in Antakya, while the rest was dispersed through the partage system of the time. Many of the objects spent decades in museum storerooms, uncatalogued and never exhibited.

The exhibition’s curators are Nicole Berlin and Elizabeth Molacek, who worked for three years with Wellesley students on the scholarly research. The exhibition traces in parallel the history of ancient Antioch and the history of the colonial-era excavations themselves, along with the fate of the dispersed collections.

“We conceived this exhibition to offer a new look at the history of the excavations through the artifacts, but also to shed light on how knowledge of art history and archaeology is actually produced — and how we present it to the public,” says curator Nicole Berlin.

On opening day, September 25, the scholarly symposium “Archaeology, Labor, and Knowledge Production” is also held, in collaboration with Turkish archaeologists Banu Özdilek and Onur Tıbıkoğlu, active in the Hatay region. The curatorial team plans a second phase of research devoted to the Antioch fragments in Princeton’s collection.