Event, Place, Performance - Central Turkey - June/July 2007 In June of 2007, I served as a research assistant to professor Omur Harmansah on a reconnaissance season in central Turkey looking at the relationship between Hittite rock-relief sites and springs, both natural and artificial. The goal of the project is to investigate issues of place-making and various multi-temporal interactions with specific sites. The Hittite rock-reliefs demonstrate landscapes that have been altered or inscribed by a central political institution that necessarily engages with diverse populations. These sites reflect an intersection between the aims and practices of the Hittites and the daily practices of the local inhabitants. While future investigations are not yet well established, goals might include the study of the nature of place-making at such sites on a supra-regional level, analyzing the "contended" landscapes from a micro-practice level, to regional investigations in the vicinity of relief and spring sites.
Chorography of Greek Landscapes - August 2007 For two weeks in August of 2007, I served as a Research Assistant to Dr. Christopher Witmore in the Southern Argolid, Greece. The project involved the documentation of polychronic interactions with various parts of the Greek landscape, along a course that began in Corinth and ended in Methana. Using the travelogues of antiquarians as our guide, we investigated the relationship between the sites described in literature, the sites themselves, and our own interactions and observations at the sites. The project holds as a fundamental tenet that landscapes are inherently distributed through various media and interactions that serve to amplify them; the project holds that how we as archaeologists go about studying ancient and modern places is influenced by an aggregation of relationships between innumerable people and things in a web of temporal and physical complexity. Documenting these landscapes was undertaken through the use of various media (notebooks, audio, video, photography) that sought to draw out this complexity while adding to it at the same time.
2003-2006: Sangro Valley Project, Abruzzo, Italy The Sangro Valley Project began in 1993 as a regional survey project run by Dr. John Lloyd and Dr. Gary Lock of the University of Oxford. The survey continued through the 1998 season. Dr. Susan Kane and Dr. Ed Bispham have been the project directors since this time. Since 1998, the project has focused on the middle Sangro valley, conducting excavations on Monte Pallano and its immediate hinterland, supplemented by topographical survey, in-woods shovel testing, and GPR.
View of the Maiella (photo by Brad Sekedat)
2001-2002: Aztalan, Wisconsin Aztalan is a Late Woodland to Middle Mississippian village in Jefferson county, southern Wisconsin. Archaeological investigation of Aztalan has been ongoing since the 1920s and has continued intermitantly since. My experience at Aztalan was initially as a fieldschool student under Dr. Lynne Goldstein at Michigan State University. I participated in post-excavation laboratory work throughout the 2001-2002 school year, and returned to Wisconsin in the summer of 2002 with a smaller crew to conduct further excavation. My experience at Aztalan was the basis for a paper delivered at the 2001 Midwest Archaeology Conference in Lacrosse, Wisconsin (see cv).
