The unique, interdisciplinary nature of the department is demonstrated in the breadth of ongoing research projects and archaeological excavations by faculty and students alike at the Department of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies.
Apulum Roman Villas Project (Romania)
Professor Matthew M. McCarty co-directs excavations of a Roman villa at Oarda (Romania). This is one of the first scientifically excavated villas in the entire province; the key questions driving the project are about the fine-grained diachronic processes of the formation, development, and disintegration of villa socio-economic systems in the region.
A preliminary geophysical survey of the site in March 2018 has confirmed the importance and massive scale of the site. The project piloted a range of micromorphological analyses for studying Roman agricultural production and digital archaeological recording systems. In conjunction with this project, Dr. McCarty led a field school in the summer of 2019.
Previously, from 2013 to 2018, he co-directed the excavation of a Roman temple and a medieval village in Alba Iulia, Romania. The archaeological project focused on reconstructing aspects of ancient cults and practices in the Roman Empire and understanding the dynamics of the post-Roman period in Dacia. The project also served as a field school for introducing students to modern excavation techniques and interpretive practices.
The Centre for the Study of Ancient Sicily (CSAS)
The Centre for the Study of Ancient Sicily (CSAS) at the University of British Columbia was created in 2007. It continues under the directorship of Emeritus Professor Roger Wilson.
Sicily is a wonderful laboratory for the study of ancient Mediterranean history. It is the largest island in the Mediterranean and is strategically set at its very centre, at the crossroads of major shipping lines. As a result, there is an abundant harvest of literary and historical evidence, a considerable amount of inscriptional data, a rich numismatic tradition, and a wealth of archaeology. There is, therefore, a vast set of varied data in need of publication and evaluation or re-evaluation; fresh syntheses are constantly required as our perspectives on the island’s past change.
Sicily is also a key area for studying processes of cultural contact: between Greeks and native peoples from the eighth to fourth centuries BC; between Indigenous peoples and the Phoenicio-Punic heritage of western Sicily over the same period; between Greeks and Phoenicians in the eighth and seventh centuries BC; between Greeks and Carthaginians from the sixth to the third centuries BC; and between the predominantly Greek culture of Sicily and the impact of Rome from the third century BC down into late antiquity. Sicily is a lively academic landscape with enormous potential for study from multifarious viewpoints: the evidence to be quarried is inexhaustible.
Mission statement
The Centre for the Study of Ancient Sicily has the following aims, both at UBC and beyond:
- to conduct and publish world-class research on ancient Sicily
- to offer undergraduate and graduate students the possibility of studying ancient Sicily, particularly via a field school
- to offer graduate students the possibility of studying for higher degrees at UBC on Sicilian topics
- to conduct first-rate archaeological fieldwork in Sicily
Membership
The CSAS has the following members in four categories:
Professor Sam Migliore
Kwantlen University College
A Sicilian-born anthropologist of Sicily and the Italian-Canadian community has written on the role played by the Sicilian antiquities in folklore and identity and a book on the evil eye (Mal'uocchiu: ambiguity, evil eye, and the language of distress, 1997); he has also co-edited Italian lives, Cape Breton memories (1999). His present research project, funded by SSHRC in 2005, is entitled ‘Culture, well-being and a sense of place.’
Professor Roger Wilson
Director
University of British Columbia
An Oxford classicist and ancient historian by training, is now principally an archaeologist, but one competent at handling a wide range of historical and archaeological evidence. He has been studying Sicily, often making more than one visit per annum, for 48 years and is well known throughout the island as the leading expert in the world on Roman imperial Sicily. He has close academic contacts with all the key players in Sicily, both in the universities and in the Soprintendenze of the Region’s Archaeological Service, and other Sicilian scholars worldwide. He has published very extensively on aspects of ancient Sicily, as well as three books, Piazza Armerina (1983), Sicily under the Roman Empire (1990), Caddeddi on the Tellaro: a late Roman villa in Sicily and its mosaics (2016). Since 2013 he has been directing excavations at Gerace in the province of Enna, in which UBC students participate; two SSHRC grants have funded these.
Professor Johannes Bergemann
University of Gottingen
Studied at Munich (PhD 1987) and Gottingen (Habilitation 1994) before teaching at Leipzig and Bochum, where he was also Dean of the Faculty of Arts (2003-05). Since August 2009, he has been Director of the Archaeological Institute of the University of Gottingen. He has directed the Gela survey in Sicily and is conducting another survey in the Agrigentino. His doctoral dissertation was on Roman equestrian statues (Romische Reiterstatuen, 1987), and he has published books on Attic grave reliefs (Demos und Thanatos, 1997), on the ancient Albanian city of Butrint (1998), and an introduction to Classical Archaeology (2000). His comprehensive multi-period survey of the hinterland of Gela was published in three volumes as Der Gela-Survey. 3000 Jahre Siedlungsgenschichte in Sizilien in 2010, and he is currently conducting a similar survey near Agrigento.
Professor Ernesto De Miro
Agrigento
Long-time former Superintendent of Antiquities for the Agriento Soprintendnenza, and also Professor Emeritus of Classical Archaeologyat the University of Messina, has made innumerable and invaluable contributions to Sicilian archaeology over the past fifty years, especially at Agrigento, Eraclea Minoa, and at many Indigenous hill-towns of the Sicilian interior, as well as at Lepcis Magna in Libya. His many publications include, most recently, Agrigento II. I santuari extraurbani. L’Asklepieion (2003), Leptis Magna: dieci anni di scavi archeologici nell'area del Foro Vecchio (with A. Polito) (2005) and Agrigento romana: gli edifici pubblici civili (with G. Fiorentini) (2011). A Festchift in his honour was published in 2003 as Archeologia del Mediterraneo: studi in onore di Ernesto De Miro. He is also the editor of the distinguished periodical Sicilia Antiqua.
Professor Giovanni Di Stefano
University of Cosenza
Director of the Polo dei Beni Culturali for Ragusa province and Professor of Late Antique Art and Archaeology at the University of Cosenza. His principal research has centred on the archaeology of the province of Ragusa in all periods of antiquity, on which he has written voluminously in the form of academic papers, conference contributions, books, and guides, with a notable focus on the Greek city of Camarina. He has also been Director of an archaeological mission at the Roman sanctuary site at Champlieu in the Forest of Compiegne, France, and excavations at Carthage in North Africa.
Dr. Lorenzo Guzzardi
Soprintendenza per i Beni Culturali, Siracusa
Currently director of the Polo for the cultural heritage of Syracuse province and formerly Soprintendente of Caltanissetta province, has conducted numerous important excavations in Syracuse and its province over the past twenty years. A former Director of the Lentini museum, he has also worked in Enna province, where he recently discovered Sicily’s latest example of a Greek theatre at Monagna di Marzo. He is the author of numerous contributions to the archaeology of eastern Sicily in learned journals, conference proceedings and books.
Dr. Maria Costanza Lentini
Naxos
Formerly the director of the archaeological park and museum of Naxos, where she has directed excavations for many years; more recently, she is the Director of the Polo of the cultural heritage in Catania province. She has published extensively on all aspects of its archaeology. Her most recent books include Vasi del Wild Goat Style dalla Sicilia e dai musei Europei (2006) and Naxos di Sicilia. L’abitato coloniale e l’arsenale navale. Scavi 2003–2006 (2009). She has also co-edited Damarato: studi di antichità classica offerti a Paola Pelagatti (2000).
Professor Paola Pelagatti
Rome
Formerly Soprintendente alle Antichità in Syracuse (1973–9), and later Superintendent of Southern Etruria and Professor of Archaeology at Cosenza and Viterbo, is an Academician of the Accademiadei Lincei, Italy’s highest academic honour; she is also a Corresponding Member of the German Archaeological Institute and an Honorary Fellow of the British School at Rome. Her excavations at Syracuse, Naxos and Camarina have brought her worldwide renown. She is an acknowledged expert on archaic and classical Greek Sicily and ancient pottery in Sicily, both local and imported. A Festschift in her honour was published in 2000 as Damarato: studi di antichità classica offerti a Paola Pelagatti.
Dr. Jonathan Prag
University of Oxford
Fellow and Tutor at Merton College, Oxford, whose doctoral research concerned Sicily during the Roman Republic, is a historian who is conversant with the rich vein of epigraphic, numismatic and archaeological evidence. He is the author of several important articles on Republican Sicily, has edited Sicilia Nutrix plebes Romanae: rhetoric, law and taxation in Cicero’s Verrines (2007), and is joint editor of both Petronius: a handbook (with I. Redpath) (2013) and of The Hellenistic West (with J. Quinn) (2013).
Dr. Francesca Spatafora
Soprintendenza per i Beni Culturali, Palermo
Director of the Polo for the cultural heritage of Palermo province and Director of the Museo Archeologico Regionale of Palermo, where she supervised its spectacular new display of Greek and Roman antiquities on the ground floor; she is a long-time colleague and collaborator of both Professors Wilson and De Angelis. Elected a member of the German Archaeological Institute in Rome, she has conducted many excavations in western Sicily over the past 25 years in Palermo and its hinterland. She is the author or co-author of numerous specialist papers and books, including Monte Maranfusa (2003) and Das Eigene und das Andere: Griechen, Sikaner und Elymer: neue archaeologische Forschungen im antiken Sizilien (2004).
Dr. Stefano Vassallo
Soprintendenza per i Beni Culturali, Palermo
Has directed excavations at the Greek colony of Himera for many years and sites in the hinterland, especially in the hinterland Colle Madore e Montagna dei Cavalli. His books include Colle Madore (1999), Himera: città greca (2005) and (with F. Spatafora) Das Eigene und das Andere: Griechen, Sikaner und Elymer (2004), and he is also the author of numerous specialist papers. His most recent project has been the spectacular excavation of over 7000 burials from the northern necropolis of Himera, which included victims of both the iconic Battle of Himera in 480 BC and the battle in 409 BC.
All graduate students at UBC who have research interests which embrace some aspect of Sicily will be invited to become research associates of CSAS; but any graduate student who can demonstrate an interest in and knowledge of res Sicilianae may also request enrolment from the Director.
Emeritus Professor Paul Mosca
University of British Columbia
Is a Phoenicio-Punic epigraphist who works on Phoenicio-Punic language, culture, and religion across the entire Mediterranean. He has been closely involved with both the American and British excavations at Carthage and is an expert on the stelai from the Sanctuary of Tanit there (the ‘Tophet’). He is a leading authority also on the Phoenician, and Punic institutionalized rite of infant sacrifice, which took place in the Tophet, not only at Carthage but at Motya in Sicily and elsewhere, a topic on which he is writing a book.
Fieldwork
Fieldwork is an essential part of historical research: it provides the oxygen for fresh discoveries, which allow the subject to be continually re-assessed and our knowledge about the ancient world to be ever-expanding.
Student involvement in this fieldwork will be strongly encouraged and promoted by establishing field schools in Sicily. This provides UBC students, both undergraduate and graduate, with experiential education in which valuable skills, particularly scientific and life skills, will be gained.
UBC’s recent and current Sicilian field projects:
The Kaukana project is designed to investigate the character and economic context of the late Roman and Byzantine village of Kaukana near Punta Secca, on the south coast of Sicily in the province of Ragusa. The site was noted but not published by Paolo Orsi early in the twentieth century and was only brought to scholarly attention in the mid-1960s when building expansion for holiday homes encountered ancient structures.
Surface clearance identified a village settlement of 25 individual structures scattered haphazardly along the coastal strip. Some of these were partly investigated by Professor Paola Pelagatti in a series of campaigns that lasted until 1972. One of those structures, the church, has also been investigated more recently by Professor G. Di Stefano, co-director of the present project.
The Kaukana project concentrated on Building 6, where the excavation occurred between 2008 and 2010, funded by the Social Studies and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
Reports on this work have been published in Journal of Roman Archaeology (2009), Minerva (2010), Current World Archaeology (2010), American Journal of Archaeology (2011), Kalos (2011), Antike Welt (2011), International Journal of Osteoarchaeology (with C. Sulosky Weaver) (2012), Mouseion (2013), Phoenix (2013), Sicilia Antiqua (2013) and Sicilia Archeologica (2017). See also the text of the XIth Byvanck Lecture delivered by Professor Wilson in Leiden in 2017: http://www.babesch.org/downloads/BABESCH_Byvanck_Lecture_2017_Wilson.pdf
The Gerace project, launched in 2013 and running at least until 2019, is designed to study a Roman villa in Enna province in its historical, social and economic context. Two SSHRC Insight Grant awards have generously supported this.
Horvat Midras Excavation (Israel)
Professor Gregg Gardener leads the archaeological field school at the Horvat Midras site in Israel. This course trains students in the principles and methods of field archaeology as practiced in the Mediterranean and Near East. The course provides students with an understanding of the archaeology and history of ancient Palestine, with special attention to the Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Ayyubid and Mamluk and Roman eras (fourth century BCE through sixteenth century CE). It includes fieldwork, guided study trips to other archaeological sites in the area, visits to museums, and lectures. This project collaborates with Dr. Orit Peleg-Barkat of the Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Students will be doing more than just digging. Instead, you will contribute directly to the research goals of the excavation and create new scholarly knowledge. By excavating, recording, processing, and identifying new archaeological finds, you will contribute to discovering, collecting, and interpreting new sources in the ancient and medieval world.
Your participation in this course will directly enhance our knowledge of the history and material culture of the Near East. The coursework will also illuminate the region’s rural settlement patterns – a topic often overlooked and under-studied as scholars focus on urban sites. In many ways, students’ work in this course will shed new light on the region’s history.
This course can also count as credit toward UBC’s new minor in Jewish Studies.
Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environments Project (Cyprus)
Professor Kevin Fisher co-directs the Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environments (KAMBE) Project, an interdisciplinary investigation of the relationship between cityscapes, social interaction, and social change on the island of Cyprus during the Late Bronze Age (c. 1700-1100 BCE).
The project offers students opportunities for experiential learning in cutting-edge archaeological methods. A UBC archaeological field school is held in some years in conjunction with the KAMBE project.
Ancient Commentators on Aristotle Project
The Ancient Commentators on Aristotle project is currently co-directed by Professor Michael Griffin (UBC). Since 1987, the project has published over 100 volumes of translations of late ancient philosophical texts into English, usually for the first time. Based at King’s College London and the University of British Columbia, it has been described as ‘a massive scholarly endeavour of the highest importance’, with collaborating scholars across the world.
From Stone to Screen Project
Since 2011, AMNE graduate students have led a digitization project, From Stone to Screen. Strictly on a volunteer basis, students have worked to digitize our extensive squeeze collection (with over 1,000 pieces), collected by Malcolm McGregor, the head of this department, from 1954 to 1975.
This project includes a digital database of a substantial artifact collection donated to the department in 2005. In addition, the project wishes to allow public access to the two collections to facilitate teaching and research opportunities for those without direct access to the collection. Through various online databases and websites, and with the help of the AMNE faculty members, they have catalogued almost the entire artifact collection and have photographed about 70% of the squeezes.
Through the considerable efforts of our students, the project has become very successful and gathered support from the university. In early 2014 it received a Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund Grant and used it to collaborate with the Digital Initiatives Centre at the Irving K Barber Learning Centre.
Project members were invited to present the project at the 2014 EAGLE Conference and wrote a blog for the Biblical Archaeological Review. In addition, they have set up extensive fundraising by selling products featuring squeezes and artifacts, applying for various grants, and soliciting donations on their website.