Lynne A. Kvapil is an archaeologist specializing in ancient Greece and Aegean Prehistory. Her research focuses on the Mycenaean Greeks, particularly farming, warfare, the manufacture of ceramics, and labor organization and management. As an active field archaeologist, Dr. K travels to Greece every summer, where she is the Assistant Director of the Nemea Center of Archaeology Excavations at the Mycenaean cemetery at Aidonia and the Petsas House Excavations at Mycenae. Dr. K has been awarded research funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mediterranean Archaeological Trust to support her ongoing research on the Mycenaean Greeks, and she has been a part of a successful grant-writing team that has been awarded funding from the Archaeological Institute of America and the Loeb Foundation to support the excavations at Aidonia.
Dr. Calvin Mires is a maritime archaeologist and heritage specialist with nearly three decades of global experience documenting, interpreting, and protecting underwater cultural resources. His work bridges archaeology, marine science, and public storytelling, focusing on how underwater cultural heritage can deepen scientific understanding, inspire education, and connect communities to the past. As a Research Associate at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Mires helped establish WHOI’s interdisciplinary field of maritime heritage ecology, which investigates how submerged archaeological sites function as oases for biodiversity and evolve through natural and cultural processes over time. He also serves as a Lead Archaeologist for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), where he helps locate, identify, and excavate downed WWII aircraft to account for, recover, and repatriate missing U.S. service members. A dedicated educator and public communicator, Mires directs field schools, teaches at universities, develops outreach programs, and collaborates with museums, tribal partners, and marine sanctuaries to expand public engagement with underwater cultural heritage. His research has been published in International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, Journal of Maritime Archaeology, Historical Archaeology, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, and Marine Ecology Progress Series. His latest book, Intertidal Shipwrecks: Management of a Historic Resource in an Unmanageable Environment, received the 2025 John R. Lyman Book Award in Nautical Archaeology and Maritime Archaeology Honorable Mention.
Mark Munn is Professor of Ancient Greek History and Archaeology at the Pennsylvania State University. He holds a BA in Classical Studies from the University of California, San Diego, and a PhD in Ancient History from the University of Pennsylvania. He has been a Junior Fellow of the Center For Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C., and a Regular and Associate Member of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, leading two Summer Sessions for the ASCSA in Greece with his wife, Dr. Mary Lou Zimmerman Munn. In the field in Greece he has served as Assistant Director of the Southern Argolid Survey, Director of the Dema Tower Excavation, Director of the Skourta Plain Survey Project, and Co-Director with Vassilis Aravantinos and Sharon Gerstel of the Panakton Excavation Project. Most recently Mark has been studying the monuments of Phrygia and Lydia in Turkey. The scope of Mark’s research is the history of classical Greece through its literary and material culture and in its broader Mediterranean context. From texts and archaeological evidence Mark investigates the environmental conditions and ideological formations that motivated social and political action in the Greek world from the early Archaic to the Hellenistic periods, with special interest in the influence that Anatolian civilizations of the Iron Age had on the Greeks. Among other books and articles, he is the author of The School of History: Athens in the Age of Socrates (University of California Press, 2000), and The Mother of the Gods, Athens, and the Tyranny of Asia: A Study of Sovereignty in the Ancient Religion (University of California Press, 2006), “Why History? On the Emergence of Historical Writing” in Ancient Historiography on War and Empire (2017), “Inscriptions from Panakton” Hesperia 2021, “Sophists Between Aristocracy and Democracy” in The Cambridge Companion to the Sophists (2023), “The Phrygian Inscription W-03 on the Arslan Kaya Monument” Kadmos 2024, “The Lydian Origin of the Cult of Attis: A Study of Kingship and Divinity” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 2025, and “Herodotus on the Death of Atys: An Anatolian Heroic Archetype” Journal of Hellenic Studies 2026. He has been the recipient of research grants from the Pew Memorial Trust, the American Philosophical Society, the Packard Foundation, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Institute for Aegean Prehistory. In 2026 he received the Class of 1933 Distinction in Humanities Award from the College of the Liberal Arts, Penn State.
Matthew Notarian is a Roman archaeologist whose research explores the intersection of social history and archaeology, focusing on the cities of Roman Italy. At present, he co-directs the Sentinum City Archaeological Research Project, a new excavation of a Roman urban center in Marche, Italy. He has also worked at several sites in Italy and Greece, including with the Tharros Archaeological Research Project in Sardinia. Broadly, he is interested in how urban institutions shaped the daily experiences of their inhabitants, and he is especially interested in using computational and quantitative methods to better understand social phenomena. To this end, he employs GIS modeling, network analysis, photogrammetry, and other 3D analysis techniques in his research. Notarian currently holds academic appointments at John Carroll University and the University of Akron. Previously, he was Associate Professor of Classics at Hiram College and taught at Tulane University and Johns Hopkins University. He earned a PhD in Classics from the University at Buffalo, and was a fellow of the American Academy in Rome and an exchange fellow of the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.
William (Bill) Parkinson is an archaeologist who specializes in European and Eastern Mediterranean Prehistory. His anthropological and archaeological research explores the social dynamics of early village societies and the emergence of early states. He has over 30 years experience conducting archaeological field work and developing museum exhibitions for the Field Museum. He and Attila Gyucha co-direct the Körös Regional Archaeological Project, an international, multi-disciplinary research project aimed at understanding the social changes that occurred on the Great Hungarian Plain throughout the Holocene. Bill also co-directs the Southern Mani Archaeological Project with Chelsea Gardner and Rebecca Seifried, an archaeological project that explores the social changes that occurred on the southern Greek mainland. In addition to his research in Europe, Bill also runs an archaeological project in Illinois.
Seth Pevnick is the Alexander Durn Curator of Greek and Roman Art and Chair of Art of the Ancient Mediterranean, Africa, and Europe to 1800, and Decorative Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where he has worked since 2019. His primary responsibilities include researching, presenting, and augmenting the collection of art of the ancient Mediterranean world, including Greece, Rome, Egypt, and the ancient Near East. Pevnick has curated numerous exhibitions, including Poseidon and the Sea: Myth, Cult, and Daily Life (2014), for which he edited and contributed to an accompanying catalogue. He has spoken and written widely, particularly on Greek vase painting, bronze sculpture, and the history of collecting. His upcoming 2027 exhibition, titled Named and Unnamed, explores ancient Greek artistic identity and a related paradox—the names that survive in signatures on artworks rarely align with the names of the artists most celebrated in ancient literature.
Prior to his employment at Cleveland, Pevnick worked at the Tampa Museum of Art (2009-19) and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Villa (2008-09), as well as on archaeological excavations in Greece and Albania. He holds a PhD in archaeology from UCLA and a BA in classical archaeology from Dartmouth College and has received fellowships from the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the American Academy in Rome. A board member of the Cleveland Archaeological Society and adjunct art history professor at Case Western Reserve University, Pevnick has also served as a committee member of the Archaeological Institute of America.
Dr. Briana Pobiner is a paleoanthropologist in the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History whose research centers on the evolution of human diet, with a focus on meat-eating. She has done fieldwork or collections research in Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Indonesia, Romania, Czech Republic, and the US. Her favorite field moments include watching a pride of lions eat a zebra carcass on the equator and discovering fossil bones that were last touched, butchered and eaten by one of her 1.5-million-year-old ancestors. Since joining the Smithsonian in 2005 to help put together the Hall of Human Origins, in addition to continuing her active field, laboratory, and experimental research programs, she leads the Human Origins Program’s education and outreach efforts which includes managing the Human Origins Program’s public programs, website content, social media, and exhibition volunteer training. She is the recipient of the 2024 Evolution Education Award from the National Association of Biology Teachers, the 2021 Communication & Outreach Award from the American Association of Physical Anthropology and Leakey Foundation, and a 2021 Friend of Darwin Award from the National Center for Science Education. Briana is also an Associate Research Professor of Anthropology in the Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology at the George Washington University.
Felipe Rojas is an archaeologist and a philologist as well as an architect by training. His main research deals with the archaeology and history of the eastern Mediterranean between the Iron Age and Late Antiquity, and with the comparative history of archaeology and antiquarianism worldwide. Within these expansive fields he has long-standing interests in the archaeology of memory and of the senses, the archaeology and history of the scripts and languages of the Eastern Mediterranean, and the history and theory of fakes and forgeries.
Dr. Ryzewski is a professor of anthropology with expertise in archaeology and interdisciplinary social science scholarship. Her research combines historical, archaeological, and other data to understand how people navigated social and environmental transformations in the past and how legacies of those relationships continue into the present. She focuses her research on the people, landscapes, and socio-political processes associated with the development of North American cities and Caribbean island settlements. Her archaeological work overlaps most closely with the sub-fields of historical and contemporary archaeology, but in the Caribbean she works with material culture and sites that span the past 6,000 years.
Dr. Ryzewski’s practice of archaeology involves collaboration with local residents, community organizations, museums, and government agencies. Through these partnerships she applies archaeological findings to examine a variety of topics, including urbanization, identity, migration, and historic preservation. Her expertise in archaeometry (materials science) and digital humanities (deep mapping) is also integrated into her work.
Over the past three decades, she has conducted fieldwork on land and underwater in the Midwest, New England and Caribbean. Her current work involves projects on sites in (Metro) Detroit, Hamtramck, and Montserrat. Along with her colleagues at Michigan Tech University, she is a founding member and co-director of the NEH Community Deep Mapping Institute, whose first cohort of 70 fellows are drawn from 13 different disciplines.
Jane Sancinito is Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She is a specialist in the social and economic history of the ancient Mediterranean world and author of the book, The Reputation of the Roman Merchant (University of Michigan Press, 2024). Her current research focuses on ancient stereotypes and the concept of greed in antiquity. She is also a numismatist, specializing in the coinage of Roman and Byzantine Syria, the iconography of money, and numismatic education.
