Tim S. in Italy

As an Art History and Archaeology double major it was clear that I would study abroad from the moment I picked my majors.  After all, one of the main reasons I picked archaeology was to travel.  Evansville has a fantastic program for study abroad at Harlaxton in England, but it just didn't seem right for me.  With my interests in Renaissance art and Roman archaeology, Italy and the program with AIFS seemed like the perfect match, and I have not been disappointed.  Studying abroad in Rome has been the best experience of my life, and I am not exaggerating.  The classes I took were Italian, History of the Italian Mafia, Drawing, Art and Culture in Rome, and Renaissance and Baroque Art.  As part of the program, I spent two weeks in Florence taking an intensive Italian class.  When I got to Rome I continued taking Italian so I could learn the language and be able to order and hold small conversations in Italian.  The History of the Italian Mafia class has been very cool.  It was interesting learning about the origins and history of the mafia as well as the Italian state and government.  It has also been great learning how to draw in Rome.  Almost every class is spent at a piazza or a famous monument like the Pantheon.  My favorite classes have been my two art history classes, Art and Culture in Rome, and Renaissance and Baroque Art.  Just like drawing, I have spent very little time in a classroom; instead we went to places like the Vatican museum or the Borghese Gallery and studied the works of art of the great painters in person.  There is nothing quite as fantastic to an Art History and Archaeology major than seeing Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling or holding class in the Coliseum.  Classes were held four days a week so I had three day weekends to go exploring around Rome or visiting a different city in a different country.  I visited many cites in Italy like Venice, Florence, Palermo, and many others, as well as Paris France, Interlaken Switzerland, and Barcelona Spain.  Most of the Italian visits were scheduled as part of the AIFS program. This adventure has been absolutely amazing, and I highly recommend when it comes to study abroad to follow your interests whether they lead you to Harlaxton England or Rome Italy.

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.

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.

Theresa H. ('02) Receives Etruscan Foundation Research Fellowship and the Bothmer Predoctoral Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

This spring I was recipient of both the Etruscan Foundation Research Fellowship, intended to fund the work of advanced PhD students and junior faculty in Etruscan art and archaeology, as well as the Bothmer Predoctoral Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an academic year in-residence fellowship where I will be working with Dr. Carlos Picon, Curator of Greek and Roman Art, to study the objects relating to my dissertation in their collection, as well as their other Etruscan holdings.

My dissertation is entitled "Eternal Personae: Chiusine Cinerary Urns and the Construction of Etruscan Identity." My project is a cross-collection study of Hellenistic period Etruscan cinerary urns produced at the site of Chiusi. The urns are made of terracotta or stone and are composed of a cask, usually decorated with mythological relief scenes, as well as the name of the deceased, and the lid which bears a three-dimensional effigy of the deceased either in a banqueting posture or a fully recumbent pose. There has yet to be a systematic study of the sculpted, figural lids, and I also seek to redefine the Etruscan conception of portraiture and identity as it has been discussed in previous scholarship. Rather than a simple reflection of physical appearance, I argue that the Etruscan mortuary “portrait” was performative, a collection of mutually affirming social indicators that reflected familial relationships, prestige derived from participation in elite banqueting customs, and the need for the deceased to maintain agency in the afterlife through the lid figure, an animated funerary effigy.

An urn at the British Museum.

Alumnus Profile: Jack G. ('04) in Palermo, Sicily

Jack in Monreale, near Palermo, Italy.

This year I received a Fulbright grant from the J. William Fulbright Program  to conduct my dissertation research in Italy for my doctoral studies in medieval history at Western Michigan University, and I am now halfway through my time in Palermo, Sicily. The Fulbright program provides wonderful opportunities for graduate and post-undergraduate students to conduct research in all fields of study from the arts to the sciences. My current research in State Archives of the city of Palermo examines slavery and wage-labor for fourteenth-century Palermo. Palermo offers an important perspective on slavery in the Middle Ages because it possessed one the highest concentrations of slaves in the medieval world, as much as 12% of a population of around 50,000. I hope to understand the institution of medieval slavery better by comparing this ancient method of acquiring forced labor, with the labor markets for ‘low-skilled’, free workers.

This kind of study would be impossible for an American student to conduct if not for grants like the Fulbright. The best way for scholars to learn about slaves and laborers is to search through the extant records of notarial archives. Notaries were vital to the urban world of the later Middle Ages, particularly in the large, commercial centers of the Mediterranean that emerged after the eleventh century. They were the official record keepers for all business transactions such as bills of sale, marriage contracts, wills and testaments, and many others. They offer unique insights into the workings of everyday life. These are not easy documents to access, however; very few are published and they are typically written in Latin but in shorthand with scripts that can be daunting (most people who look at notarial hand for the first time mistakenly think it is Arabic!). Finally, the registers of these notaries can be very large, numbering in the hundreds of pages. The process of sifting through these records is strenuous and time consuming but also exciting. You never know what exciting revelations the next volume could contain. I often describe what I do as an archival historian as a sort of 'documentary archaeologist,' though I remain a lot cleaner at the end of the day than when I was digging at Murlo as a UE undergraduate.

Student Elizabeth Frost at Poggio Civitate, Italy

This summer was one of the best I’ve ever had: I participated in the excavation at Poggio Civitate in Italy with the University of Massachusetts Amherst. When I first signed up I was incredibly excited, but as time grew closer, I began to feel more and more nervous. I had never been out of the country before, and this was a pretty big step. Luckily, everyone who was going could get in touch with one another through Facebook and I had plans to meet up with some of my fellow student volunteers in Rome before the dig. When I got there I knew no one, but by the time the six weeks were over we were family.

I expected that when you participate in an archaeological dig, you dig the entire time you are there. As it turned out, this was usually the case except that due some recent changes to the laws in Italy our permit to dig did not start until two weeks after we were due to start. This change in plan didn’t faze the staff, and for the first week they gave us tours of the site and the magazzino, the sort of laboratory we shared with the public cars of Murlo. We listened to lectures, played a few name games, and learned where everyone was from, what their major was, and why they were here. The next week we were split into teams and worked on different projects that needed to be done. I was put on the team that was working with Roman materials. The town had recently put in a new playground and many Roman materials surfaced during construction; they were collected and given to us. My team cleaned, measured, muncelled, and catalogued all one hundred and eighty-odd items in only in four days.

The next week we were finally able to dig. We started out with five trenches, two of which had been started the year before. I ended up in one of these, so my first week was spent digging out the backfill of a rather large, wet, smelly trench. Still, I had a great time working with everyone. Every week we changed trenches. During the next week I was in a trench that was full of material like broken pieces of terra cotta, pottery, bone, and even statue fragments. This week was much more tedious than the first where I got to use a shovel and haul dirt. Now I had to use my trowel, being careful not to pop anything out of the ground, and define rocks like nobody’s business. By the end of the second week at least six new trenches were opened and a few more had extensions added. With our limited time this seemed pretty daunting, but the staff was great at keeping up morale and also the flow of chatter so we were never bored.

Elizabeth (center right) on a day trip in Italy.

Every weekend was free time. We were on our own and could do whatever we wanted, so we traveled a lot. I went to Florence, Siena, Orvieto, San Gimignano, Tarquinia, and many other places. It was great to experience all of these places, each with its own long history.

My trip to Italy was an experience of a lifetime and something I will never forget. I traveled, I dug, and I even discovered what I might want to do for the rest of my life. This summer was one that changed me completely and gave me a new reason to keep going after my dreams.

Student Summer Plans 2011

The Department of Archaeology and Art History is pleased to announce the summer plans of its majors, which include internships and employment at a variety of institutions and participation in archaeological projects in the US and in Italy, Egypt, Turkey, Hungary, Romania and Cyprus.

Lizzie B., PAST Foundation's Slobodna Underwater Field School, Key West, FL
Elizabeth B., Internship with the History of Prince William Forest Park’s 45 Cemeteries and Homesteads, National Park Service, VA
Josephine C., Internship with Palm Beach County archaeologist, FL
Elizabeth F., Excavations at Poggio Civitate (Murlo), Italy
Amber F., Excavation and Internship at James Madison’s Montpelier, VA
Chris G., Summer Program Coordinator, Fort Collins Museum and Discovery Science Center, Fort Collins, CO
Kevin K., Rough Cilicia Archaeological Survey Project, Turkey
Kaman L., Internship in the Department of Membership and Development and paid position in the museum, Evansville Museum of Art, History and Science, IN
Rachel L., Excavations at the Porolissum Forum Project, Romania
Stephanie L., Education Programs Assistant, Angel Mounds State Historic Site, IN
Samantha M., Excavations at Poggio Civitate (Murlo), Italy
Ben O., Internship at the Glenn Black Laboratory of Archaeology, Indiana University, IN
Marley R., Excavations with Courson Archaeological Research near Perryton, TX
Alyssa R., Internship at Evelyn Lehman Culp Heritage Collection, IN
Anna S., Totah Archaeological Project Field School, NM
Katy S., SHUMLA Field Methods in Rock Art Field School and Internship, TX
Sara S., National Science Foundation – Research Experience for Undergraduates funded Koros Regional Archaeological Project, Hungary and Cyprus
Leah T., Internship at George Washington’s Mt. Vernon, VA
Lauren W., National Science Foundation – Research Experience for Undergraduates funded Fellowship in Bioarchaeology, University of Notre Dame, IN
Colleen W., Excavations at Tell Timai, Egypt
Porsche W., Facilitator at the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, IL

In addition, five Archaeology majors will participate in the Summer Session I trip to Jordan in May-June led by Professors Byrne, Ebeling and Milner: Nate B., Emma D., Emily M., Ashley M., and Marie M.

Dig Poggio Civitate, Italy, in Summer 2011!

The Poggio Civitate Archaeological Project is among the oldest and best known field schools in the world and is co-directed by UE Archaeology alumna, Theresa Huntsman ('02). Our program provides students the opportunity to excavate at the site under the direction of a staff of professional archaeologists, conservators, illustrators, and photographers. Participants receive training in all aspects of field work, including excavation and data collection, archaeological survey and drawing, objects conservation, illustration, photography, and cataloguing.

At Poggio Civitate, we believe that the best field experience is comprehensive. Students are encouraged to work directly with directors of excavation units, follow artifacts from discovery through conservation and into cataloguing. Most of our Participants come with no field work experience – many have never even taken an archaeology or classics course –and by the end of the season, we believe, each comes away with a foundation in Etruscan Archaeology and field methods, as well as an appreciation for Italy and rural Italian culture.

The 2011 field season will focus excavation on an area of the hill recently discovered to preserve remains of the sixth century B.C. archaic complex, as well as to explore other areas for traces of non-elite architecture. Work is conducted Monday - Friday, with the weekends free to explore Tuscany and further afield in Italy.

The 2011 Season runs June 28-August 2 at a cost of $4200 (excluding airfare). Program costs include up to 6 academic credits through UMass-Amherst, and participants are housed in a building of the Albergo di Murlo, a local hotel, in double to quad rooms. All meals are provided Monday - Friday, and are prepared by the excavation chef.

For an application, contact Assistant Director Jason Bauer at digmurlo@gmail.com

Theresa Huntsman lecture on February 14

On Monday February 14, 7:00-8:00 pm in SOBA 73, Theresa Huntsman ('02) will give a presentation entitled "Poggio Civitate: 45 Years on the Piano del Tesoro."  The 2011 field season marks the 45th successive year of archaeological exploration at Poggio Civitate (Murlo) located in central inland Tuscany.  The excavations have brought to light a massive complex, the largest in the region during the seventh and sixth centuries BCE.  During two phases of occupation the inhabitants constructed monumental buildings including an elite residence, a religious building, and a workshop, all elaborately decorated with sculptures.  For reasons still unknown, the site was burned to the ground in the third quarter of the sixth century BCE, never to be inhabited again.

Students at UE have the opportunity to participate in the 2011 summer archaeological field season.  Participants will experience all aspects of archaeological work, including excavation, conservation, survey, illustration, and photography.

Theresa Huntsman is a PhD candidate at Washington University in St. Louis, where she also earned her MA in 2005.  She received her BA in Archaeology at UE in 2002 and has participated in the excavations at Poggio Civitate since her first trip as a field school student in 2001.  Currently, she serves as cataloguer, collections manager, and field school instructor for the project.

Alumna Profile: Hilary W. ('09) at Tufts University

After graduating from UE in 2009 with a double major in Archaeology and Art History, I almost immediately drove across the country to New Mexico in order to take a summer position as the on-site archaeologist at Philmont Scout Ranch, the Disney World of Boy Scout camps. For three months, I was the director of an excavation of an Anasazi and Mexican homestead site on the ranch (I am surveying the site in this photo), and responsible for designing the excavation, training the staff, educating and supervising the scouts, processing and recording the finds, and writing a final report summarizing not only the work but also my analysis of the site. While this sounds like every archaeologist’s dream come true, I found the position to be frustrating; disagreements between my supervisors and I about the importance of using proper archaeological practices resulted in continuous struggles. Additionally, I had only participated in three other excavations previously and did not feel qualified to direct my own dig.

Soon after this, I headed to Massachusetts to start the MA program in Classical Archaeology at Tufts University. I am currently about to embark on my second (and hopefully final) year in the program. I have already significantly improved my Latin skills, of which Dr. Thomas would be proud, and have a more thorough understanding of the science and analysis involved in the field.

Hilary at Pompeii

This past summer, I served as an Assistant Trench Supervisor on Saint Anselm College’s excavation at Coriglia, Castel Viscardo, near Orvieto, Italy. Originally thought to have been an Etruscan healing sanctuary, the site was later utilized by the Romans as a bath complex. My particular trench housed the almost intact remains of a vasca, or basin, which was later filled in with rubbish deposits. Through this position, I not only gained more experience as a supervisor of a site, but I also became very familiar with various types of pottery and roofing tiles, as I was in charge of counting and weighing brick, pan tiles, and curved tiles.

Once I finish my MA, I hope to enroll in an MA or MSc program in the UK for Practical Archaeology in order to pursue a career in Contract Archaeology in the United Kingdom. Perhaps I will eventually pursue a PhD; however, for now, I’m content to follow my passion for the field and get my hands dirty again as quickly as possible.