Fieldwork
Current Field Projects
Candace Rice, director
The Antiochia ad Cragum Archaeological Research Project is an international collaborative initiative investigating the archaeology, history, and environment of the Roman to Byzantine port city of Antiochia ad Cragum on the coastline of Turkey (Türkiye). Cilicia’s location made it a locus for sociocultural and economic exchange between the Near East, central Anatolia, and coastal Asia Minor, facilitating integration across the Roman Empire. Antiochia, the only newly founded city of Antiochus to be systematically excavated, grew to be one of Rough Cilicia’s principal ports and remained a dynamic and prosperous city for centuries, continually transformed as its inhabitants adapted to evolving political, social, economic, and religious practices.
Candace Rice, director
Archaeology of College Hill, an ongoing fall term course and fieldschool for Brown undergraduates, has worked at multiple sites in the area immediately surrounding the Brown main campus. Begun in the fall of 2006 at the First Baptist Church in America, the field school moved in fall 2008 to the John Brown House Museum, to the "Quiet Green" of Brown University in 2012, and to the grounds of Moses Brown School in 2015, where work concluded in 2022. The project now continues in the area surrounding Brown University's List Art Building, at 58 College Street.
Laurel Bestock, executive director
The site of Abydos is one of the most important for understanding early kingship in Egypt. Brown University, in conjunction with a long-running project at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, as well as with the Ministry of Antiquities in Egypt, has embarked on a multi-pronged project of publication, conservation, and excavation at this critical site. Beginning by digitizing and publishing the results of legacy excavations, the project's longer-term goals include extensive excavation of everything from monumental royal religious structures to a late Predynastic settlement site, with a particular focus on the temples built by the kings of the First and Second Dynasties.
Candace Rice, Davor Bulić, and Andrew McLean, co-directors
The Economic Landscapes of Roman Istria Project (ELRI) investigates the regional economic development of Istria, Croatia during the Roman period. The project is initially focused on the archaeological investigation of the extensive Roman-period rural complex at Barbariga, including a large factory-style olive oil production facility, related domestic complexes, including a maritime villa located some 300 m from the productive facility, cisterns, and harbor infrastructure.
Parker VanValkenburgh and Steven Wernke, co-directors
GeoPACHA is a collaborative “virtual” survey project to map archaeological sites at large scale across the Andes. In the current project stage, the project has developed a Vision Transformer (ViT) foundation model from high resolution satellite imagery, fine-tuned it with a range of human-labeled data to identify archaeological features and deployed it to an AI webapp, where results are being refined by a series of international teams. The project will then use these audited data to improve the model’s performance to human- or better-than-human sensitivity and specificity, for deployment over virtually all of the Andes — an area of about 2 million square kilometers in an area approximately coincident with the historic footprint of the Inka Empire.
Laurel Bestock and Lutz Klein, co-directors
Kiosk is a tablet-based recording software and data management package being developed at Brown University for documenting archaeological work, both excavation and survey. Open-source, highly customizable, running without access to the internet, and still growing, Kiosk is currently utilized by projects from Peru to Cyprus to the Archaeology of College Hill. The software is available for use for any Brown-affiliated project, including those run by graduate students, and there are also opportunities for interested students to be engaged in development, testing, and documentation of the software.
Yannis Hamilakis and Nina Kyparissi-Apostolika, co-directors
Koutroulou Magoula is a multi-period archaeological site in central Greece with the main period of occupation around 6000 BCE (Middle Neolithic period). There are also burials dating to the Bronze Age (1500 BCE), and the Medieval period (c. 1200 CE). It is a finds-rich site, with buildings surviving to more than 1 m. in height, pottery, lithics, animal bones, and an impressive corpus of more than 350 clay figurines.
Christopher Ratté, director, and Felipe Rojas and Jana Mokrišová, senior archaeologists
Notion in Ionia is a well-preserved ancient city, which was occupied from the early first millennium BCE until the Ottoman Ages. A systematic pedestrian archaeological survey was conducted at the site from 2014 to 2018, and excavations began in 2022. Brown University focuses on the excavation of Archaic period levels and on ethnographic fieldwork.
Felipe Rojas and Sarah E. Newman, co-directors
The Brown University Petra Terraces Archaeological Project (BUPTAP) is working to refine scholarly understanding of the history and dynamics of Petra’s agricultural landscapes, concentrating on the agricultural hinterlands immediately north of Petra and, more specifically, on the Wadi Baqa’ east of the road between Umm Seyhoun and Bayda and west of the rock of Shammasa.
Esther Chávez Álvarez, Catalina Mas Florit, and Miguel Ángel Cau Ontiveros, co-directors
The Roman and Late Antique city of Pollentia is located in northern Mallorca, in the path of well-trafficked trade routes in the western Mediterranean. Founded in 123 BCE at the time of the Roman conquests of the Balearics, the city was actively inhabited through the Catalan conquest of 1229 CE. Excavations initiated in the early twentieth century uncovered the remains of a forum, a theatre, and residential and industrial quarters, as well as several Roman cemeteries.
Andrew Scherer and Charles Golden, co-directors
The Proyecto Arqueológico Busiljá-Chocoljá is exploring the ancient cultural and natural landscapes of the of the Classic Maya kingdoms (AD 250-900) of Piedras Negras, Yaxchilan, and Sak Tz'i'. Current fieldwork aims to deepen our knowledge of Maya political history through the comparative study of competing polities in the western Maya lowlands, focusing especially on warfare, economy, and environmental history.
Peter van Dommelen and Alfonso Stiglitz, co-directors
First built in the Bronze Age, nuraghi, the famous stone towers of Sardinia, are usually regarded as prehistoric monuments. They continued to be inhabited throughout later millennia as well, however, and it is these later phases of the Archaic to Roman periods that are under investigation at the monumental site of S'Urachi on the central west coast of Sardinia (Italy).
Candace M. Rice, Tyler V. Franconi, Dylan Bloy, and Gary D. Farney, co-directors
The Upper Sabina Tiberina Project, in operation since 2011, seeks to understand the long-term development of rural settlement and economy in the Sabine region of Italy. The project focuses largely on the excavation of a mid-Republican to mid-imperial multi-phase villa located in the town of Vacone. The villa has an elaborately decorated residential area and large agricultural production area with one of the largest olive oil production facilities known to date from central Italy. There is evidence for sporadic occupation of the site following the abandonment and collapse of the villa, along with numerous burials dating to the Lombard period.
Fieldwork Opportunities
Students interested in archaeology are strongly encouraged to think about exploring fieldwork opportunities, either by participating in a project led by a Brown University faculty member or by finding other projects that focus on regions or topics of particular interest to the students.