April 8, 2024
Here at the AIA we are unleashing the power of archaeology to provide a better understanding of the past and present and to create a brighter future.
Meet this year’s AIA Fellowship winners! The 2024 Fellowship cohort includes seven AIA Fellows embarking on new research project to expand our knowledge of the past. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg on how the AIA is advancing archaeology this year!
Susanna Faas-Bush (PhD Candidate, UC Berkeley), will travel to Chicago, Italy, and France to examine data and artifacts from the 1895-1899 excavations of the Villa Pisanella near Pompeii. Though the villa is famous for the Boscoreale Treasure, a hoard of silver and gold Roman artifacts buried in the wake of the Mt. Vesuvius eruption in 79 CE, Faas-Bush will turn her attention to the day-to-day objects recovered from the site, and examine their use and distribution across the site to reconstruct a more nuanced picture of daily life at the villa for both its wealthy owners and the enslaved laborers who lived there.
Justine Lefebvre (PhD candidate at the University of Montreal), one of the winners of the 2024 Anna C. and Oliver C. Colburn Fellowship, will travel to the American School of Classical Studies to conduct some of her doctoral research on the production, trade and technical knowledge of bronze production in Archaic and Classical age Northern Greece.
Rebecca A. Salem (PhD candidate, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University), will engage in dissertation research to study ancient Greek architecture at Samos narrowing in on the Temple of Hera. Rather than just reflect on the end product, she will examine the temple as an evolving and ever-changing work of architecture and seeks to determine what the gradual modifications to its structures meant in the context of other developments at Samos over time.
In her dissertation “Archaic Domestic Architecture in Rome, Latium, and Etruria,” Amelia W. Eichengreen (PhD candidate, University of Michigan), 2024 winner of the AIA’s John R. Coleman Traveling Fellowship, will use domestic architecture to demonstrate a rapid transformation of homes and society.
Dr. John Charles Willman (researcher, University of Coimbra) will use high-resolution microcomputed tomography (microCT) scanning of ancient teeth in order to create and study virtual models that will shed light on the mobility and population dynamics among prehistoric peoples located in present-day Portugal.
Anna Belza (PhD candidate, University of Cincinnati) will conduct research on the pottery, small finds, and architecture of the Late Bronze Age site of Ayia Irini on the island of Kea in Greece that she hopes will recontextualize the importance of the Cycladic Islands, which have previously been classified as “marginal” to the Greek Mainland in the Mycenaean period.
Dr. Regina Uhl (German Archaeological Institute, Berlin) will spend a semester in the United States studying how metal objects, technologies, and burial mounds on the Eurasian continent tell us about social and political activity during the Iron Age.
Stay tuned in future weeks as we interview our 2024 Fellows and announce our 2024 research and publication grant winners.
