Mac Master's Student working in Italy

Liana Brent (M.A. `12) recently returned from a summer of research and fieldwork. She reports:

This summer, I was an assistant trench supervisor at the Coriglia Project near Orvieto with a team from St. Anselm’s College in New Hampshire for May and June. The site was in use from the sixth century BC until the fourth century AD, with various Etruscan and Roman phases. It was the first time I’ve ever worked at an Etruscan site, and we had some pretty interesting finds. Weekends were spent site-seeing in Tuscany and Umbria at sites such as Orvieto, Cortona, Perugia, Florence, and Assisi.

After leaving Orvieto, I spent a week researching for my MA thesis at the British School at Rome. The School has a great library with many archaeological publications that are not available anywhere in Canada. For July and August, I went down to Gravina in the Puglia region of southern Italy where I was a trench supervisor at the Vagnari Project. There I worked with a team of undergraduate anthropology students from McMaster University (under the direction of Dr. Tracy Prowse, Dept. of Anthropology) in a first to third century Roman cemetery. Since my MA research is related to burial practices in the Vagnari cemetery, working in the necropolis was the highlight of my summer, next to all the incredible Italian food!

(Photo of author working on-site at Vagnari, Italy)