Summer digs

Travel far and dig deep.

That was the special assignment over the summer for a group of five students who are majors in the university’s B.A. Program in Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations (AMC).

Baker College senior Joyce Jones spent several weeks in northwest Belize this summer as part of an excavation program focusing on the pre-Hispanic Maya lowlands region.

“Students thrive on experiencing life on an excavation,” said Michael Maas, director of the AMC program and professor of history and classical studies. “If (the students) are doing archaeology, they’re literally in the trenches,” said Maas, who is also managing committee chair of the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome.

“These excavations are often in remote places, so the students are in daily contact with the local culture,” he said. “That alone for students, whose horizons may previously have not gone too far beyond the hedges, is just terrific. They also learn that what they’re studying involves cultures that very well may have ended long ago but nonetheless have proven enormously influential for us. The students realize that everything didn’t start just yesterday.”

Four of the students’ archaeological excavations were made possible through new funds made available by the President’s Office, and the fifth student was the recipient of a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship.

Danny Graves, a member of Will Rice College and a double major in AMC and classical studies, spent six weeks at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece. The senior’s trip was made possible through a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, which provides mentoring and financial support for entry into Ph.D. programs and a career as a scholar and faculty member.

The American School’s program introduces participants to the topography, history and monuments of ancient and modern Greece. It also, in part, serves as an opportunity for participants to network with eminent scholars in archaeology.

Danny Graves, a Will Rice College senior, was able to tour the Parthenon with Greek architect and archaeologist Manolis Korres, one of the leading Parthenon experts in the world. Graves spent six weeks at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.

“One of the most exciting parts of the trip was being able to tour the Parthenon with Greek architect and archaeologist Manolis Korres, one of the leading Parthenon experts in the world,” Graves said. “With him, we were permitted to enter and to experience the space for about four hours in the hot Greek sun while he lectured on different aspects of the building.”

Northwest Belize was the site of Baker College senior Joyce Jones’ excavation experience. Led by the University of Texas at Austin, the program she was in teaches students the fundamental skills and practices of field archaeology and artifact analysis, specializing in the pre-Hispanic Maya lowlands region. The program allows students to work at three different archaeology sites on a rotation to gain experience in different types of archaeological sites, from hinterland sites to larger city structures. The program also focuses on strengthening students’ laboratory skills, including lithic, ceramic and bone analysis.

Going into the program, Jones was not sure if she wanted to pursue archaeology in the future, the anthropology and AMC double major said. “I had never had any ‘real’ archaeological experience in the field, so I did not know for certain if archaeology was the right path for me,” Jones said. “However, at the end of this program, I knew without a drop of uncertainty that I wanted to continue studying archaeology.”

In the short-term future, she plans to pursue her own research within Mesoamerican archaeology to complete an honors senior thesis in the Anthropology Department. In the long-term future, she plans to study archaeology and zooarchaeology (analysis of animal bones) in graduate school. “I will most definitely pursue archaeology as a career, either as a professor or museum researcher/analyst,” she said.

Kevin Kim, a double major in AMC and history, spent five weeks in Sandanski, a small Bulgarian resort town about a three-hour drive from Sofia, the country’s capital. Kim’s program, led by the American Research Center in Sofia, helped students develop a sense of how actual archaeological fieldwork is done and how to analyze findings according to when they were made and which shape they would have originally had, Kim said.

While Kim’s team found very interesting artifacts such as a gold earring and a very well-decorated arrowhead made of bone, he personally enjoyed the scientific method needed to conduct fieldwork. “Since it was my first archaeological experience, I thought the most important thing at sites would be to dig as much as one could,” Kim said. “However, I learned to always be aware of how deep I was digging because we were labeling our trench according to different stratigraphic units, meaning the change of soil color and textures.”

Chynna Foucek, a Duncan College senior and double major in AMC and biochemistry and cell biology, participated in the Sanisera Field School, located on the Spanish island of Menorca. Sanisera was an ancient Roman port city that dates back to the first century B.C.E. “I spent half of the program digging in the city itself, and the other half digging in the surrounding necropolis, which contained numerous tombs with skeletal remains,” Foucek said.

The American Research Center in Sofia’s Archaeological Field School at Heraclea Sintica, a Roman site in Bulgaria, was where Arlen Walker experienced his excavation work. “I really wanted the chance to do something hands-on related to my AMC studies, so I ended up choosing this one partly on the basis of the nature of the site and the program and partly on the recommendation of Danny Graves, who was in the program the summer before me,” Walker said.

Walker relished the opportunity to get his hands dirty in exploring a site that had thrived in the Roman and Late Antique periods and declined in the early Middle Age. “I thought one of the really neat parts was when, while digging through one of the destruction layers, we started finding lots and lots of painted wall plaster,” Walker said. “Part of why it was neat was that it meant finding something other than pottery shards, but I thought it was really cool to be able to see the physical evidence of a Roman practice that I had certainly read about, but never gotten to experience like that.”

AMC students will be able to participate on excavations again next summer, Maas said. For more information about AMC research and programs, see http://amc.rice.edu.