3D Archaeology of Archaeology: remote sensing and digital mapping to rediscover the ancient Greek city of Heloros (Sicily)

Davide Tanasi
Professor, Department of History, University of South Florida

Heloros, located on Sicily’s Ionian shore, is believed to be the first sub-colony of the Greek city of Syracuse. Despite its historical significance, it remains relatively obscure. The Heloros Advanced Digital Exploration and Surveying (HADES) project seeks to clarify the site’s architectural and topographical evolution from its uncertain foundation in the late 8th century BCE to its heyday, in the Late Hellenistic period, and beyond. By digitizing and verifying legacy data and integrating them with newly acquired 3D geospatial documentation—employing global positioning, digital photogrammetry, drones, LIDAR, and ground-penetrating radar—this project reveals new insights into Heloros' history, including its pre-Greek occupation and revised interpretations of key structures. Using Heloros as a case study, this talk illustrates how the 'digital excavation' approach can yield substantial archaeological knowledge without new physical digs. The process of datafication, which involves creating new data through the layered collection of natively digital and digitized legacy data, guided the efforts for virtual reconstruction and future planning. This methodology resurfaced unpublished or previously unknown information about the site, verified interpretative hypotheses, and generated significant new data to rewrite the history of this important yet little-known Greek city.

An Indigenous Hermeneutic Approach to the Archaeology of Potsherd Pavements in Yoruba Culture

Olanrewaju Lasisi
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Race, Place, and Equity, UVA School of Architecture

Through the lens of indigenous hermeneutics, this talk expands upon the previous interpretation of potsherd pavements in Yoruba culture, moving beyond their role as architectural floors. It emphasizes their multi-functional roles, serving as sundials, naturalistic art objects, and cartographic maps. By examining festival ceremonies associated with potsherd pavements in two Yoruba kingdoms— Ijebu and Ile-Ife— the presentation reveals that the newly identified functions of these pavements are integral to the Yoruba's systems of time-reckoning, ritual practices, power dynamics, and spatial politics, as well as to the broader fabric of their social organization. Therefore, this talk advocates for a nuanced approach to Yoruba archaeology, one that considers the 'unwritten documentations' found within this hermeneutical framework as a basis for locating sites, excavating units, and interpreting finds. Through this hermeneutical lens, we open new avenues for understanding social complexity in pre-colonial African societies.

Co-sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Archaeology Program and the Carter G. Woodson Institute

​A Scholarly Divide in Research in the Forum at Pompeii: Archaeological Basics Yield Dividends

John Dobbins
Professor Emeritus, Department of Art and Archaeology Interdisciplinary Program, UVA

This talk presents the clash between archaeologists who adhere tenaciously to nineteenth-century views on the Forum at Pompeii and the Pompeii Forum Project (UVA), a late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century project that sees things differently because we use evidence. 

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Changing Social Relationships Between Plantation Owners and Their Laborers in the 17th-century Chesapeake: Evidence from Tobacco Pipe Assemblages from 44PG92, Flowerdew Hundred

Beth Bollwerk and Fraser Neiman
Department of Archaeology, Monticello

Enslaved Africans, indentured servants, and land-owning family members lived and worked together in close proximity at 44PG92, a mid- to late 17th-century occupation at Virginia’s Flowerdew Hundred. The artifact assemblages, carefully excavated by Dr. Ann Markell and cataloged into the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS), contain a wide variety of domestic refuse, including thousands of imported and locally made tobacco pipes. Using detailed contextual and artifact data, we track how these pipes were used across the site and what these patterns can tell us about who used them. We begin by developing a fine-grained, seriation-based chronology, which allows us to measure synchronic spatial patterning and change over time in multiple dimensions of variation among pipe assemblages. We discuss how the results clarify the extent to which locally made pipes were predominantly used by enslaved and indentured laborers or by landowners. 

A global history of insular worlds in the western Indian Ocean: the periodization of transfers and sociocultural changes over a millennium

Laurent Berger
Associate Professor of Anthropology, School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS, Paris) and Research Fellow at the Laboratoire d'anthropologie sociale (Collège de France, Paris)