Projects
The Azoria Project
Azoria is an Early Iron Age town located in east Crete. The project is a five-year excavation, undertaken to examine “changing dynamics of crop processing, subsistence, and land-use practices on this site and to relate these changes to social processes involved in the formation of small-scale polities in the eastern Mediterranean during the first millennium B.C.” The dig is focused on developing a chronology for city-formation and a “methodology for examining the process of city-state development.” Recovering and understanding various elements of animal consumption and crop processing, and the creation of temporal frameworks, informs this ultimate purpose de For more information, visit the project’s website.
The Gordion Excavations:
Dr. Kenneth Sams, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has directed excavations of the Phrygian capital of Gordion in central Turkey since 1987. The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (UPM) began excavations of the city in 1950. Excavation information is available on the museum website.
Among the discoveries, was a well-preserved monarchical tomb, assumed to be that of King Midas, considered to be the earliest known intact wooden structure in the world. Wooden furniture and bronze pottery vessels with food residue were found in 1957 by the University of Pennsylvania team, providing insight into the burial ceremony, arts and funerary customs of the ancient Phrygians.
Excavation continued in the late 1980s focused on the stratigraphic evidence of artifacts and floral and faunal samples, to support study of the Late Bronze to Early Iron Age, as well as to study regional settlement patterns. In the 1990s, study focused on the Middle Phrygian through Hellenistic/early imperial Roman periods.
Professor Mary Voigt, of William and Mary directs fieldwork relating to the rise of the Phrygian state “in the early 1st millennium BC, the effect of the Persian conquest of Gordion (ca. 550 BC), and the nature of the migration by ethnic Celts to Gordion (ca. 250 BC).”
The Aphrodisias Project
Aphrodisias is a city in south-west Turkey which flourished from the second century BC until the early seventh century AD., well known for its sculptures and inscriptions, cut in the local marble. New York University has directed excavations at the site since 1960s. There are over 1,000 inscriptions at the site which detail life of a city the Roman Empire. The desire to publish the texts on the World Wide Web spawned the Epidoc project, in which electronic version of inscriptions, commentaries, indices, have been made public, and are searchable in both Greek and Latin. This initiative, started by Tom Elliott of the University of Chapel Hill in North Carolina, represents an attempt to develop agreed XML markup standards for epigraphic texts.
Morgantina Project
Located in East Central Sicily and inhabited since the early Bronze Age, Morgantina was an "important Iron Age settlement of longhouses centered on an acropolis known as the Cittadella." The Morgantina project began in 1955, directed by Princeton University professors Erik Sjöqvist and Richard Stillwell, and continued on under the direction of Prof. Hugh Allen of the University of Illinois, beginning in the late 1960's. In 1978, Malcolm Bell III, professor of classical art and archaeology at the University of Virginia, took over the project with the goal of continued excavation and publishing late Classical and Hellenistic Morgantina. In 1990, Carla Antonaccio of Duke University (formerly of Wesleyan University), herself also a Princeton graduate, assumed responsibility for excavating and publishing the post-8th century BCE settlement on Cittadella. The project now involves the collaboration of several scholars at institutions in the U.S., Italy, Sweden, and Great Britain.
For more information about the project, as well as details about Morgantina's early history, visit Princeton University's Visual Resources
See also, Princeton's Morgantina Project website.
A site under development at Duke will be posted in 2007.
Sepphoris, Galilee
Carol L. Meyers is a specialist in bible study and archaeology in Duke’s Religious Studies Department. She is co-director of Duke’s summer in Israel program, and affiliated faculty member of Duke’s Women’s Studies Program. Her husband, Eric M. Meyers, specializes in the Hebrew Bible, biblical archaeology, and Second Temple Judaism. Dr. Meyers has directed or co-directed digs in Israel and Italy for more than thirty years
Together, the Meyers are involved in digging at Sepphoris, in Galilee. Extant as early as the Hellenistic period, the city was a regional center and trade crossroads during the Roman period. Sepphoris was also an important center of Jewish scholarship, as it was that there Rabbi Judah the Prince edited the Misnah (the oral Torah). As well, the site provides valuable information pertaining to the history of Christianity. The site provides historical support for the study of Jesus’ ministry and parables, because one can study the family trades in wood and stone working.
Dr. James Strange has been in charge of excavating Sepphoris for the past twenty years. Eric and Carol Meyers of Duke University continue their excavations separately, as part of The Merion Project, the excavation of the synagogue in the lower town of ancient Gush Halav (c. 250 C.E.-c. 550 C.E.)
Yotvata Project:
Professor Jodi Magness, is the Kenan Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence in Early Judaism, in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She now co-directs excavations at the late Roman fort at Yotvata, Israel (since 2003).
The fort is a Roman Castellum built by one of the praeses (governors), named Priscus during the reign of Diocletian and other tetrarchs from 293-305, the fort demonstrates that it would have guarded an oasis and its garrison would have escorted caravan traffic. There is additional evidence pointing to early Islamic occupation in the 7th-early 8th centuries.
The Shala Valley Project:
Professor Wayne Lee leads this project in the Shala Valley, located high in the mountains of Northern Albania. The project is an on-going archaeological excavation of a late Bronze Age/early Iron Age fortress and settlement site on the southern edge of the village of Theth. The site was discovered in 2006 and so far has only had test pits excavated and cores taken. It is the first evidence for bronze or Iron Age occupation in the whole region, and overturns the traditional understanding of the settlement of the valley. The eventual findings from this excavation potentially will rewrite the history of northern Albania.