The Poggio Civitate Archaeological Project is one of the longest-running archaeological field schools in Italy.  Based in Tuscany, near the city of Siena, we instruct field school students in excavation techniques, archaeological conservation, cataloging, photography, and digital data collection and processing.  The site of Poggio Civitate is an Etruscan settlement inhabited from the 8th through the 6th century BCE and preserves some of the earliest examples of monumental domestic, sacred, and industrial architecture in all of peninsular Italy.  The center of the site, known as the Piano del Tesoro, became the nucleus of a larger, dispersed community, and was inhabited primarily by the community’s leading aristocratic family.  During three consecutive occupational phases, this family constructed some of the largest and most opulently decorated buildings in the Mediterranean that aimed to communicate the family’s wealth, status, and authority.  Therefore, the site of Poggio Civitate is crucially important for the study of social stratification and urbanization in pre-Roman Italy.

Contact: Kate Kreindler

​LZAP, or the Later Zanzibar Archaeology Project, is a collaboration between Adria LaViolette, Neil Norman (William & Mary), and Abdallah Ali (Zanzibar Antiquities), to examine the early European colonial period in the Zanzibar countryside. It focuses on two walled Portuguese ‘farmsteads’ in northwest Zanzibar, built to manage attempts at commercial agriculture, as well as the immediately surrounding countryside of Swahili settlements. They are studying the kinds of interactions between Swahili and Portuguese people taking place in the 15th-16th centuries that are discernible from the archaeological record. Although ultimately the Portuguese failed at colonizing this region in these centuries, their efforts signaled the beginning of Arab and European colonization of eastern Africa and other Indian Ocean regions. This work builds on Prof. LaViolette’s ongoing research into Swahili life, 7th-15th centuries CE, and opens up new questions about the less well-examined, last 500 years of Swahili archaeology. Archaeological research featuring the last few centuries is of great interest to local communities and visitors on Zanzibar, and thus this project includes heritage management conservation and education in cooperation with local heritage and archaeological authorities.

Contact: Adria LaViolette

Inhabiting Byzantine Athens is a digital project in collaboration with The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH), employing computational methods to identify and systematically extract information from the Athenian Agora Excavations’ archives pertaining exclusively to the Byzantine and Frankish periods. Such methods will allow the project to interrelate different types of information (artifacts, maps, notes) and integrate different media (text, images, 3D reconstructions, video etc.) that will in turn support a detailed study, visualization and interpretation of the excavation results. The project also deals with new solutions in dealing with legacy data that can be replicated and used by other archaeological projects that face similar challenges in making their archival collections more usable and accessible.

Contact: Fotini Kondyli

Featuring archaeological artifacts excavated at Flowerdew Hundred, a historic site on the James River, this exhibit presents material evidence of Virginia's early inhabitants: Native American pottery sherds; arms and armor used to defend the new colony; refined, imported wares from Europe; and American-made goods, including items manufactured by African Americans.

Contact: Meg Kennedy

Insurgent Artifacts studies the exploitation of archaeological materials in areas of armed conflict, with a particular interest in the Syrian civil war. Artifacts were systematically damaged by the Islamic State as part of its propaganda campaign against secular learning and pre-Islamic civilizations. They were also damaged via systematic looting of archaeological sites, a practice undertaken by several insurgent groups in the region. This project seeks to break new theoretical ground by asking whether artifact exploitation correlates with direct violence against civilian populations. Students with interest in archaeology, sociology, anthropology, and political science are particularly welcome to inquire about research opportunities.

Contact: Fiona Greenland

The Pompeii Forum Project is a collaborative research venture that is archaeologically based, heavily dependent upon advanced technology, and so conceived as to address broad issues in urban history and urban design. Evidence gathered to date challenges commonly held and widely published notions about the evolution of the forum, especially during the final years of the city's life. The goals are to provide the first systematic documentation of the architecture and decoration of the forum, to interpret evidence as it pertains to Pompeii's urban history, and to make wider contributions to both the history of urbanism and contemporary problems of urban design.

Contact: John Dobbins