Dr. John Wineland to speak on archaeology in Jordan

I am pleased to annouce that Dr. John Wineland, Professor of History and Archaeology at Kentucky Christian University, will present The Archaeology of Ancient Jordan: Highlights and Treasures of an Ancient Crossroads tonight, March 25, at 7:00 in SOBA 173. Dr. Wineland has excavated in Jordan since 1984, primarily at the sites of Abila of the Decapolis and Khirbet Mudaybi in Central Jordan. All are invited to attend.

Melanie Miller ('12) at the First Division Museum

Life the year after graduation is filled with great expectations as well as disappointments, and several curveballs. My summer after graduation started out exactly as I wanted: excavating several ancient Maya sites in Belize and gallivanting across Central and North America. Then I returned from my post-graduation honeymoon and had a long-delayed appointment with reality. I was near broke, living at home, and frantically searching for an archaeology-related job to no avail. Practicality arising from a desperate need for cash flow forced me to widen my job-search net landing me in the world of retail. After being offered positions in everything from hardware to eye-care to electronics, I finally ended up as a sales consultant for cell phones at Best Buy Mobile. Many of you who know me will find great irony in this: the girl with the brick flip phone who just got texting this past summer and is one of the least tech-savvy people when it comes to smartphones now makes much of her living from selling phones.

I still wanted to do something that was archaeology or museum related so I decided that if no paid positions were open, then volunteering was the best avenue. I quickly discovered that unlike requests for paying jobs, people rarely turn down the offer of free labor and respond to your inquiries much faster. I chose to volunteer at a local war museum, the First Division Museum at Cantigny Park, where I helped in the digitization of hundreds of original documents and artifacts from WWI to the Iraq War. After volunteering over 50 hours in four months’ time, the museum encouraged me to apply for a paid internship position in the archives department. This was rather unexpected, but it proves that just getting your foot in the door can lead to greater opportunities. I have been working as an intern since February and am in charge of cataloguing and reorganizing thousands of documents and artifacts from a donation that fills 25 teetering banker’s boxes. The challenge I face now is balancing three jobs, as I still work at Best Buy and consistently babysit, which makes for a few twelve-hour work days and work weeks of nearly 60 hours. I am also studying for the GRE, which I am set to take next month. The best advice I can give on that is to take the GRE as early as possible so it is not looming over you!

Although my life mostly consists of work, study, and sleep when there is time, I can already see the benefits of my hard work. Clearly, the internship is one of them, but the money I saved from working three jobs is allowing me the opportunity to participate in another archaeological dig this summer, the Jezreel Expedition. This fall I will apply to grad schools for Mesoamerican archaeology while continuing to work. In short, while life after graduation may find you living back at home with a non-archaeology-related job, do not worry or give up. Instead, concentrate on preparing for grad school, save the money you earn for something to strengthen your archaeology resume such as field schools or conferences, and stay involved in something archaeology related, whether it is a class or volunteering, to help prevent you from losing focus or desire to go back to school for archaeology. And for those moments when you feel discouraged, sit back, drink a root beer, and watch the fourth Indiana Jones movie to reinvigorate your fervor to educate the public that aliens have nothing to do with archaeology and to put on your fedora once again.

Less than a year after graduation: Kelly Goodner at the Explorium

It’s hard to believe that I graduated college less than a year ago. I decided to take a year off between undergrad and grad school and I am really glad that I did. After graduation I was able to relax for a few weeks and prepare for my trip to Israel to participate in the Jezreel Expedition (I recommend this to all current and prospective UE students!). I also spent considerable time sending out resumes and cover letters in hopes of securing a job when I returned from Israel and my side trip to Jordan.

When I returned to the States, I was fortunate enough to get a job interview with a local children’s museum - the Explorium of Lexington - and was offered a position in visitor’s services. My job involves working with visitors of all ages as well as cleaning and maintaining the museum. During the fall of 2012, I also had the opportunity to complete an internship with the program director at the museum. This allowed me to help plan the museum’s weekly programs. It also gave me the opportunity to design an archaeology-themed scavenger hunt and alter the museum’s “Dino Dig” exhibit and turn it into an “Archo Dig” exhibit for National Archaeology Day.

As far as my future goes, I am returning to Israel this summer to again take part in the Jezreel Expedition, which I am really excited about. I also plan to travel to a few places in Europe after the field season is over. In the fall I will be attending graduate school to complete a master’s degree in museum studies. The education and experiences I received at the University of Evansville have prepared me for both the real world and graduate school.

Less Than One Year After Graduation: Emily Mella at American University

Hello UE Archaeology!  I graduated in May 2012 and spent the month of June in Israel as part of the Jezreel Expedition, which was a great experience.  We surveyed for two weeks, excavated for a week, and then spent another 12 days traveling through Israel and Jordan.  It was exhausting, but a fabulous way to spend a summer.  After getting back to the US, I picked up and moved to Washington DC to start graduate school.  I am pursuing my MA in International Affairs from American University and with a focus in the Middle East.  The first few months were a weird transition for me – I was determined to find a job that wasn’t waiting tables or working at Starbucks, but couldn’t find one and settled for an unpaid internship instead.  I got a position archiving for an NGO called the Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy, which focuses on dialogue and conflict resolution.  My job was to go through their old program files, organize the documents, and write a project report reviewing each one.  The work was a bit boring, but I got to attend their staff meetings and interview the organization’s founder, a former US Ambassador, about the projects I was working on. 

This semester, I am doing another internship (also unpaid) for an organization called the Partnership for Global Security.  As their nuclear research intern, my job has been to gather and analyze data regarding civil nuclear programs all over the world.  My final product will be a report about the future of the civil nuclear industry for the organization.  In addition to my internships, I have been taking Arabic classes, which have been really interesting.  Living in DC is fun – I had a bit of culture shock being on the east coast (I’m from Texas originally), but the city is beautiful.  I never get less excited to see the national monuments and still haven’t explored all the city’s museums.  Plus, going to the presidential inauguration was really cool, even though it was freezing!   My plan for the summer is to try to get a job of some sort (even if it is waiting tables) and to volunteer somewhere, like the National Children’s Museum.  With a little more museum experience, I would really like to get a job designing educational programs at a museum after I graduate.

Students help publicize Jezreel 2013

On Friday January 18, UE archaeology and art history students and friends came out to Ridgway to publicize the 2013 Jezreel Expedition.

The 2013 season of excavations at Jezreel, Israel, is scheduled for May 19 - June 15. Undergraduate students can earn three 300-level credits from UE and graduate students can earn three credits from the University of Haifa for participating in this four-week field school. The first deadline for applications is January 25. Please contact je55@evansville.edu for more information!

Student Elizabeth Frost Digs at Poggio Civitate in Murlo, Italy

This summer I participated in a dig at Poggio Civitate in Murlo, Italy. Since this was my second summer there I was able to specialize in conservation where I cleaned and preserved Etruscan artifacts. Over the summer I worked with two professional conservators who taught me the process. First I learned to clean the different types of recently found artifacts we work with, such as terra cotta, bronze, and iron. I put artifacts back together and learned how to stabilize them using plaster and other materials.

I worked on one project through the entire six weeks I was there. It was a fragmented pan tile that had been previously worked on but not finished. This is what it looked like before:

I spent many hours figuring out which pieces went where, like an odd puzzle. Then once I figured out where they went and which ones did not even belong to this artifact, it was time to adhere it together, which I did at least three times because it kept falling apart (It was a really humid summer!). But finally after much hard work and determination I finally finished it!  Now all that’s left to do is to paint the fills.

Although it could be frustrating at times, this was one of the best ways I could have spent my summer. I learned many new things, all of which helped me figure out I want to go to graduate school for conservation. Life on any dig is interesting, but life at Murlo is something I will never forget.

Graduate Melanie Miller in Belize

This summer I participated in the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance Project (BVAR). This project focuses on the research of Maya sites in the Belize Valley and it is presently working at three sites: Cahal Pech, Lower Dover, and Baking Pot. I had the opportunity to work at latter two sites.

 I spent the first couple days in San Ignacio, Belize learning the basics of excavation before I went with a group to the remote jungle site of Lower Dover for two weeks. We stayed in cabins in the jungle where we slept with mosquito nets, showered with rain water, and walked with flashlights at night to avoid stepping on tarantulas. The site was about a half mile hike in the jungle from the camp. Lower Dover is a Terminal Classic site where excavations only recently began in 2010. This field season focused on excavating a plaza structure to determine its architecture to establish a chronology of Lower Dover. I helped to excavate a ceramic cache, which also contained faunal remains and obsidian, and then painstakingly re-uncover it with a spray bottle and paintbrush after a torrential downpour covered it in mud. I also worked in another unit to establish the site’s chronology by uncovering as many stratigraphic levels as quickly as possible before the season ended. This involved recognizing when there was a level change and very reluctantly having to break through several plaster floors of the plaza with a pick.

The last two weeks I worked at the site of Baking Pot, which has been under excavation for about 20 years and dates back to the Preclassic Period. Baking Pot is covered by modern farms and we had to navigate through a maze of corn fields to reach the mound under excavation. The objective was to expose the architecture of one structure and determine the mound’s chronology with a test pit that measured around 20 feet at season’s end. Since it was the end of the field season, most of the work at the mound was last minute digging, endless screening, and backfilling. Most of the time I was washing and processing artifacts at the ‘lab’ located on a livestock farm. The lab was really just a barn for storage, the porch of the livestock veterinary office, and the outdoors. Thus, we had some curious four-legged visitors that would attempt to eat or play with our equipment and we periodically had to run for cover whenever a stampede of cattle ran through the lab area while we crossed our fingers that they would not trample our drying racks full of 

artifacts.

On the weekends I visited other Maya sites in Belize and Guatemala. I’m looking forward to participating in another field school next summer, whether it is with BVAR again or another program in Belize. Overall, I learned a lot from my experience in Belize and gained invaluable insight into archaeological fieldwork. Nothing in the classroom can ever completely prepare you for work in the field, but fieldwork offers invaluable experience and the best stories definitely come from the field.

Student Sami Miller Participates in the Poggio Civitate Archaeological Project in Italy

This summer I participated in the Poggio Civitate Archaeological Project in Italy. Elizabeth Frost and I had been accepted into the program in Summer 2011 and were invited back as staff members for the 2012 season. Instead of working as a student, I was a junior staff member. This meant that I was working as an assistant Trench Master, learning proper archaeological documentation methods, both on and off the field. I learned that actually running the trench is very different from working in it. I still played an important role in my trench, but instead of helping to dig it, I was recording what everyone in the trench did. This included setting up the trench, drawing the trench and all the artifacts found, keeping a daily record of any action taken in the trench, and elevations of the trench floor.

This season was very different from last season. Last year, trench masters had their excavation areas in specific spots that were within walking distance of each other. This time around the area I was working in had trenches that were side by side for a total of ten trenches covering an approximate area of 16 meters by 12 meters. We were working off the side of what is known as the “medieval road” which is a medieval era footpath still used today. On the other side of the road there were eventually six trenches that uncovered lots of material from the Iron Age, Etruscan Orientalizing and Archaic periods.

One unique opportunity I had in the trench was to excavate what is potentially a post hole, which involved a lot of lying down on my stomach with my head and one arm inside this hole. There is the big taboo about sitting in the trench, so there was a great rush of excitement about getting to actually lay down in one, but that euphoria was soon diminished when I realized lying down with your head below your body was not a good feeling. Especially in 100 degree weather and no shade. It was a great experience overall and I learned the finer points of delicate excavation, but which can come in handy later if I ever encounter another post hole. Because of an injury later in the season I spent the last two weeks working in the lab with alumni Theresa Huntsman cataloguing artifacts (meaning Theresa did the cataloguing and I did whatever task she told me to, which was usually munselling new finds and entering the colour designations). 

My first summer here I learned about the Italian Iron Age, which has become one of my favourite topics in archaeology. This interest evolved into my honors thesis with which I received UE’s Undergraduate Research Grant, which allowed me to return to Poggio in the summer of 2012.  Every weekend I was going to a new museum or city to conduct research, and I was able to build on the Italian that I learned last year.  If you want to learn the basics from an exceptional field school, consider Poggio Civitate.

Student Lydia Maurice at New Harmony

This past summer I participated in USI's field school in New Harmony, Indiana with several other students. The first day we stayed inside, listening to our instructor, Dr. Mike Strezewski, explain what we would be doing at the site and what kind of things we would be looking for.  He explained to us that we were looking for pottery left behind the Harmonists, a group of people who came from Germany to start a utopian community at the site.  After that first day, we drove out every morning to New Harmony and began setting up our units.  We practiced digging straight down 10 centimeters at a time until we got the feeling of maintaining a flat surface across the bottom of the unit. At the end of each section, we had to fill out paperwork describing the unit and what we found in the soil. We found many bricks and rocks as well as some pesky mole holes that always seemed to appear in the unit I was digging. We also had to describe the soil color and texture, any charcoal or organic material within the soil, and, most importantly, if there was any mottling within the soil.

Lydia poses with dig mascot, "Christoph Weber."

After going down about 30 centimeters, we took all our units down to the same level and some features began to emerge.  While some of us worked on digging and cleaning the units, others screened the dirt, looking for pottery sherds and other artifacts that could tell us more about the people who once lived there.  Every morning two people would clean the artifacts we had found the previous day so we could better identify what they were.  Many people came to visit the dig while we worked, and if Dr. Mike was busy one of us would explain what we were doing at the site. We worked out at New Harmony for five weeks and only had to leave early one day due to bad weather conditions. Towards the end of the dig we also took half a day to visit a local potter and got to try making our own pottery.   

        

Fragment of a chamber pot found at New Harmony.

Overall I took a lot away from this course and gained some new insight as to what it was like working at a dig. Working at New Harmony taught me how to work with others, take careful notes and measurements, and handle delicate artifacts.  As much fun as I had, this dig helped me realize that, while I liked digging, I preferred doing the paperwork and the cleaning. I would recommend the New Harmony dig to anyone who wants to get out there and experience some cool local history with new people.   

Archaeology students dig at New Harmony, IN

USI's excavation at New Harmony has been featured on the local news.  UE archaeology majors Lydia Maurice and Alyssa Reynolds are participating in the excavation this season.  Check it out!

UE Announces Co-Sponsorship of the Jezreel Expedition

The University of Evansville has officially announced its co-sponsorship of the Jezreel Expedition, Israel, with the Zinman Institute of Archaeology at the University of Haifa.  Project directors are Jennie Ebeling, chair of UE's Department of Archaeology and Art History, and Norma Franklin of the Zinman Institute.  Eight UE archaeology students will travel to Israel June 1-22 to participate in a two-week survey season at Jezreel and one week of excavations at nearby Megiddo.  Stay tuned, as we're planning to bring many more students to Jezreel to excavation in summer 2013!  For more information, see the Jezreel Expedition's website.

Student Kevin Kay in Turkey

“This was the Alaska of the Roman world: vast, untamed, and rich in natural resources. This is where people came who did not want some far-away government telling them what to do. When the Greeks and the Romans tried, they fought back. Not much has changed since.”

This was my introduction to Rough Cilicia, now a part of the Antalya province on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, as I sat at a long table outside of Konrad’s Green Oasis Café, a hub of expatriate activity in the small but bustling coastal town of Gazipaşa.

I had come to participate in the Rough Cilicia Archaeological Survey Project. This was a regional survey in the same vein as the famous Oaxaca Valley Survey, which reshaped archaeologist’s conception of Mesoamerican civilization by filling in the 99% of the map that wasn’t covered by large, excavated monumental cities. Our objective was to cover as much terrain in the highlands and midlands of the Taurus Mountains as we could, finding any remnants of the past inhabitants of the region—from the stone ages to the 20th century—that remain on the surface. In addition, we would be collecting samples of the deep soil in various locations: pollen in these samples can tell us how the dense cedar forests have changed over the years, and by combining that knowledge with our survey data, we can recreate how the region’s vast resources were used by people in the past.

The project had two parts to it: one surveying and digging pollen cores up in the mountains, above the modern tree line, and one following leads from the locals to sites in the midlands, high enough in the mountains to be unexplored (To this day, no accurate road maps, archaeological maps, or maps of towns and villages exists for the areas above 600m in the mountains of Rough Cilicia. The locals navigate by memory; outsiders navigate with help from the locals, or more likely just avoid the region altogether.)

For the first part, we stayed in a small rented house in the tiny mountaintop village of Gökgüzlük. We alternated between days of digging pollen cores—often hacking at dense clay soil on hillsides for hours with pickaxes—and survey, in which we’d line up at evenly spaced intervals and walk across the landscape looking for any signs of pottery, architecture, or other human material remains. During this phase, we made several exciting discoveries—a pre-pottery Neolithic (Stone Age) bead-making site on an island in the middle of a seasonal lake (pushing the earliest known occupation of the high mountains back by several thousand years), a Ptolemaic-era logging camp or trading post with diagnostic Cypriot sigillata-style pottery, and the remains of an ancient forest fire, from which we were able to extract an entire carbonized tree trunk. In addition, we explored a large part of the otherworldly highland landscape, and got to meet many of the locals, some of whom (the shepherds) still live a semi-nomadic lifestyle that in many ways hearkens back to prehistoric times. We camped in the yard of the house, and in the process, became acquainted with other elements of the local population.


The evening procession of sheep through our yard to the secure pastures within the village.



Taking my turn digging a pollen trench into a road cut, just below the tree line.

During the second part of the project, we lived in Gazipasa, a quarter mile from the sea, and drove up in the team minibus (dolmus - Turkish for "all filled up") to sites in the mountains that we'd heard about from various local informants, or to survey areas where we thought sites were likely to have existed. Although we all missed the cool mountain air and the village-life feel of Gökgüzlük, this part of the expedition was when we made some truly spectacular discoveries, including a hitherto unknown fortress of some sort on a butte overlooking the modern village of Corus, with walls preserved at some points up to 5m or taller. In addition, we found Hellenistic or Roman-era native cemeteries and a Roman-era hamlet. The locals also managed to send us on a couple of "wild castle chases." We referred to the fruitless days as "The New Archaeology," poking fun at the tendency of regional survey to turn up long lists of data consisting of nothing but zeros. As Dr. Nick Rauh, our director, reminded us frequently, even a zero is data: we can say with some certainty that there are no major remains in the places we surveyed and found nothing.


Revisiting the small fortress at Doganca, found in previous seasons of the survey. There we compiled data from all of the stone-cut tombs on-site (and took a break to seek out a spectacular panoramic view from the top of the walls).

 It was thus a successful season, and also the project’s last. Over fourteen years, the Rough Cilicia Survey has located over one hundred sites spanning nearly 9000 years of history, in an area where little was previously known beyond the major coastal sites. The pollen cores we extracted will give an ecological context to all of this information, allowing an even more refined picture of one of the most rugged and understudied regions in the eastern Mediterranean, a region whose inhabitants—woodcutters, vintners, shepherds, and pirates—played an integral role in the ancient economy and who often violently opposed intrusion from outside. I enjoyed my month as a part of the expedition, and miss Turkish culture and the daily promise of adventure very much. Next summer I hope to return to Turkey for a longer stay, perhaps to study the language, or to do research at an excavation. The country is beautiful and fascinating, and the archaeology is too good to miss.


Project director Nick Rauh practicing "The New Archaeology."



Student Katy Schmidt at the Lower Pecos Rock Art Recording Center and Preservation Project

I spent this past summer in Comstock, Texas participating in a field school through the Lower Pecos Rock Art Recording and Preservation Project sponsored by SHUMLA, a nonprofit archaeological education and research center. In the field school we learned reserch methods and how to properly record the rock art of the area. Some of the stages of the recording process are figure identification, initial figure counts, figure photographs, making forms for the figures, figure illustration, and putting all of the information about a figure into a data base. Each figure got its own set of forms in which we recorded all information about that figure. During the field school we recorded a site known as Panther Cave in Seminole Canyon. The site is endangered due to rising humidity resulting from the Amistad Reservoir and from mud-daubers nesting in the cave. During the field school we clocked in thousands of man hours and recorded hundreds of figures.

After the field school ended in June and the other students left I stayed on at SHUMLA as an intern until the beginning of August. For the internship I was responsible for figure illustrations, attribute checks on the figures, field checks of all of the attributes in the field, and entering data into the SHUMLA database for each figure recorded. During the internship I also had the chance to work on rock art from the site of Delicato. The figures at Delicato are badly damaged from dust deposits and very difficult to see at times. This is one of the reasons why it needed to be recorded. Luckily we managed to finish the recording process during the summer. All in all, my field school and internship experiences this past summer were very rewarding and enjoyable.

Student Rachel Lawrence at Porolissum, Romania

In summer 2011 I spent just under 6 weeks in Romania on the Porolissum Forum Project and I had the time of my life. I flew in to the city of Cluj-Napoca, an ancient city in Transylvania settled by the Romans, and there I met the rest of the field crew. We were given a tour of Cluj before heading toward Porolissum. We stopped at a Roman military site and explored the ruins, a salt mine that has been in use since pre-Roman times (used by Dacians), and finally we arrived at Porolissum. Porolissum is a very large Roman military site that was on the border between the Empire and Barbaricum. It controlled a number of local forts that were much smaller, and we were able to visit some of them on weekend trips. On weekends, we took local trips or one organized by the Project to the northern part of Romania, Maramures, famous for its gorgeous woodcarvings and maintaining traditional practices.

Rachel in Trench 11, framed by the two Roman walls; check out the hypocaust!

At the site, we opened six trenches over the course of the five weeks we excavated. We were digging in an area we thought was the forum and I was placed in what was believed to be the basilica. In my original trench, we found a large wall with the plaster still intact, and then a smaller wall in the same trench. The wall ran through another trench that was right next to the original, and we found a concentration of tiles. We found three separate hypocaust systems (ancient heating), as well as several stamped tiles, some of which had finger prints and paw prints on them. This season unearthed quite a few coins, some excellent bones (animal, not human…sorry!), wonderful pottery, glass, bronze and iron, and even some pieces of wood. One day, we found a bronze disk with wood still attached and the nail through it! Some days we would wash the artifacts, and a few times I remained at the camp and catalogued. Local Romanians helped us with the excavation, taught us some of the language, and we grew into a family. It was an incredible experience.

Rachel at Castle Dracula.

My favorite bit was in the fourth week. The site director gave me permission to leave the excavation and do research on Vlad the Impaler, the subject of my senior thesis. I went to Bucharest (the capital of Romania) and saw the palace there, as well as his alleged grave. I visited Târgoviste, the medieval capital that still contains Vlad’s palace, and ended my journey with visiting Castle Dracula, Vlad’s mountain fortress. To finally see everything I wanted to see was indescribably awesome for me.

Student Marley Rardin at Courson Archaeological Research

In summer 2011 I participated in the Courson Archaeological Research (CAR) project in Perryton, TX, right outside Amarillo.  The Courson project includes multiple sites on land owned by Mr. Courson, who has a huge interest in archaeology and the plains area of Texas.  Since 2000, geophysical surveys and archaeological survey and excavation projects have been carried on land used for grazing cattle and for farming.  For the first two weeks of this three-week project in 2011, I dug test pits at an Archaic site called Spider Peak; we found a lot of chert debitage as well as bison bone fragments.  During the third week, when I was not in the lab, I had the chance to use a metal detector twice as we searched for historic sites with metal remains that may have been used by Native Americans, soldiers, or both.

Marley (center) on a windy day at Spider Peak.

Alumna Profile: Ti M. ('07) at Fort Garland, CO and in Cincinnati



Ti at Fort Garland, CO.

In the summer of 2008 I participated in Adams State College’s archaeological field school at Fort Garland, CO. We lived at the Fort in our own little tent city (I went through two tents by the end of it as the zippers on the first one I bought broke and the tent leaked like crazy!). It excavation lasted 6 weeks. During the first part of the season, we dug in the garbage section of the Fort for practice, and after that we moved on to the area near the stables and into the cellar of one of the buildings that is no longer standing (the building had burned down, but there was still some food remains, including seeds, left in the cellar). The well I helped excavate was 25 feet deep (below). At the bottom we found literally hundreds of horse shoes, and we have no idea why they were thrown in the well. We had lots of other experiences including Civil War days where reenacters came to the Fort to live like they would have during the Civil War era, and also went to see some early Native sites. It was a wonderful experience overall.



Ti goes down the 25-foot well.

Since graduating from UE I have been working for my father’s company, Nightingale-Alan Medical, and at Old Navy. I've worked on and off for my father for years, and the current accountant is planning to retire, so the job was offered to me by my father and his business partner. I had trouble finding a job in Cincinnati using my degree, and I decided not to do CRM, so I was glad to take this job. In exchange the company is helping pay for my Masters of Science degree in accounting and financing (I am undecided on pursuing an MBA) online through the University of Maryland. My boyfriend Scott and I recently bought a house, and we are doing some major remodeling. Between the house, school and two jobs, I keep very busy.



Alumnus Profile: Andrew R. ('94) in Princeton, NJ

I double-majored in archaeology and writing at UE, and co-founded the Archaeology Club (now SAHA) as well as the literary magazine Pendulum (now the Evansville Review). To satisfy my love of both archaeology and publications, I spent alternating summers excavating at Poggio Civitate (Murlo) and interning at Archaeology magazine. I also served as the copy editor for the University Crescent (when it was still a newspaper) and edited the English department's poetry chapbook, On Time.


 A.R. wears his pottery-reading cap at Isthmia.

After graduating in 1994 with the first class of students to complete the new four-year program in archaeology, I headed to graduate school at the University of Missouri - Columbia, where I studied under Kathleen Slane and Bill Biers, the author of the introduction to Greek archaeology textbook used at UE. During my two years at Mizzou I worked at the Museum of Art and Archaeology and had a summer internship at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. I kept my interest in publications alive by designing and publishing the book of abstracts for the biannual graduate student symposium shared with the University of Kansas.


Graduating in 1996 with an MA in Art History and Archaeology, I excavated at the site of Isthmia, serving as a photographer, database administrator, and pottery reader. I was able to analyze the pottery and stratigraphy from under the Roman Bath's mosaic to place it in the time of Hadrian, a date that was suspected but not yet confirmed. One of my photographs of human remains from the site will be appearing in the Isthmia 9 volume to be published in 2011 by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.



I next spent ten years as a museum software professional managing database software rollouts, documentation, and implementation in the US, Canada, and the UK. In 2007 I joined Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, specialists in Greek and Latin textbooks. My core responsibilities were to manage all digital publications and to create a long-term strategy to support our textbooks online. I designed a Latin iPhone app and created the first social network, eClassics, for exploring technology and Classics pedagogy. My obsession with online gaming and language education led to a conference paper given in Trondheim, Norway, which is to be published in 2011 as part of the conference proceedings.

In August 2010 I became the Director of Publications for the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (offices in Princeton, NJ) where I am finally able to join my love of Mediterranean archaeology, print publishing, and digital publishing into a highly satisfying career. I manage the production and publication of the Agora and Corinth excavation reports (the "blue" and "red" books) as well as for other affiliated sites like Isthmia, Lerna, Samothrace, and others. I also work with the journal Hesperia and the Hesperia Supplements. As a person with one foot squarely in traditional publication and the other in digital environments, I am discovering ways to support our print publications online while at the same time planning a future of born-digital books, articles, and tools for archaeologists and researchers. Combine all of that with a plucky office dog named Hector and a free, annual trip to Greece, and you have the recipe for a perfect job. I've never been happier or this busy.


Corinth XVIII Part II is shocking reading!



Thanks to the attention and instruction of Pat Thomas, Erik Nielsen, Allison Griffith, and Shirley Schwarz, I was fully prepared for graduate school and beyond. It's my pleasure that I get to publish some of Dr. Thomas's research, and I look forward to publishing the future work of others who are currently UE undergraduates. 

Student A.D. in Tennessee

A.D. (right) at Sachsen Cave Shelter.

This summer I participated in a three-week excavation at Sachsen Cave Shelter, Upper Cumberland Plateau, TN. The site dates to the Middle Archaic to Middle Woodland period. Every morning the other students and I drove to the area, hiked a short distance to the site and helped set up the transit. There were a total of twenty-four 1x1 meter units, eight of which were opened this summer. We dug down in 1 cm increments, and each layer was 10 cm. The unit my partner and I excavated was very productive: we found two nutting stones, five whole bifaces, seven halves of bifaces, many bones including a beaver mandible and a deer jaw, several pieces of turtle shell, several pieces of cord marked pottery, and two pieces of steatite.

I think the most interesting aspect of an excavation is finding an artifact, plotting it and cleaning it. Whenever I find an artifact, I know that artifact will either support or oppose my hypothesis regarding the site. Most of the time the artifact will provide evidence to support hypotheses; however, occasionally it will help to disprove hypotheses. For example, while I was digging in the Middle Archaic layer of soil, I found a piece of pottery. Previously, it had been though that people in this period did not have pottery because no pottery has ever been found dating to that period. The piece that I found was 4 cm away from a very small looter’s pit; however, it is unlikely the pottery came from the pit because the pit disappeared in the next 1 cm layer and the pottery was too far from the pit to have been part of that layer.

A.D. is a junior Archaeology major at UE.

Student Colleen Westmor at Fort Ancient, OH



Colleen (left) with shovel.

This summer I had the opportunity to participate in Wright State University’s field school at Fort Ancient in Warren County, Ohio with Dr. Robert Riordon. Despite its name, Fort Ancient is actually an Ohio Hopewell hilltop enclosure that overlooks the Little Miami River. Geophysical data from a 2005 magnetometry survey first showed a wooden circle 200 feet in diameter with possible interior structures. For seven weeks this past summer, the team continued to excavate Moorehead Circle in the North Fort of Fort Ancient. In previous summers the team discovered a large fired soil pit in the center of the circle surrounded by ritually broken pottery, which led to the suggestion that the site was being used for ritual purposes.

Laboring in the heat, the team uncovered numerous postholes (up 150 cm deep), alternating rows of limestone pavement and gravel trenches, stone-filled pits, and a large number of artifacts ranging from imported chert and mica flakes to burnt deer bones to shell beads. Thirty-five excavation hours a week gave me ample time to meet and network with archaeologists from local dig sites, CRM firms, and even an employee at the British Museum. The team was close and worked well together despite our diverse backgrounds and interests. I have to say, I miss every hot, bug-ridden, back-breaking, muddy second.

Colleen is a senior Archaeology and Classical Studies double-major at UE.

Student Katy Schmidt in Ohio

This summer I was able to gain experience both in a museum and at an archaeological excavation near my hometown.  First, I worked as a Museum Attendant at the Dr. John Harris Dental Museum in Bainbridge, OH. My responsibilities included opening and closing the museum on the days I worked and keeping it clean, and I also gave tours of the museum and answered visitors’ questions.

Katy on a visit to Cahokia.

I also volunteered at the excavation of a Middle Woodland Hopewell site called High Bank Works. The site is located in the Hopewell Culture National Historical Park outside of Chillicothe, OH. This summer, the team focused on excavating part of what appeared to be a large circle of post holes; however, by the end of the season we had only uncovered one post hole. I was responsible for many tasks during the excavation, including sifting, helping to measure and draw profiles of unit walls, and using a susceptibility meter, among other things.

Katy is a sophomore Archaeology major at UE.