As I prepare to leave my own home and fly to Gazipa\u015fa, I find myself thinking about the homes we will be excavating in the city of Antiochia ad Cragum. What will these structures look like? How were they designed? What functions did their rooms hold? How was space divided? Were these places of leisure or of work? Was this a home of the city’s elite or of someone more ordinary? If this is an elite structure, what traces did those enslaved leave on this place where they worked and lived? How did this structure evolve throughout this city’s centuries of habitation? From what we’ve read in preparation for this work, I expect to see some sort of evolution within these buildings, starting, perhaps, with a Greek style home, both private from the outside and intimate on the inside. Perhaps a symposium used for entertainment is prominently featured, disconnected from the private living areas. How will Roman rule reshape this space? In the mid Sixth Century AD will this house become more of a workplace, changing from manor to a profit making enterprise? I am not usually one drawn towards studying domestic life, yet from these readings I find myself often thinking about it. I think what I am most interested in studying here is how these individual houses interacted with the larger city.<\/p>\n
On a professional level I want to learn about what archaeological research actually looks like in the field. I’ve read about stratigraphy, I’ve taken an entire course on the theoretical and ethical frameworks that archaeologists use to interpret data found in excavations, but I am excited to gain a better understanding of how this data is gathered in the first place. It’s one thing to read about stratigraphy and sterile layers but it’s another thing entirely to actually dig and sift and brush things that haven’t seen the light of day in over one thousand years. I’ve studied other scholars’ archaeological findings, but collecting this data first hand will allow me to understand this research in a way I could never get from a textbook. On a personal level, I hope this internship will help me figure out where my next steps after St Olaf will take me. As of right now I think I will study museum studies in grad school and work in an archive or special collection, but what if I fall in love with archaeology and working on a site?<\/p>\n
One question I have wrestled with both in preparation for this internship and in my studies at St Olaf is the question of who History is for and honestly, I don’t have a good answer. I think history should be democratic, I think we all benefit when we learn about the past. We see different ways of being and living. We can better understand how the world became what we see today. I think history is vitally important to the people whose ancestors we study in our research, so they can better understand where they came from and have a closer connection to their past. I think history can be a tool of social change, holding a mirror up to our world today and making us question whether this is the world we want to live in. As an archaeologist working on this site, I think I have a duty of care, both to the people whose world we are unearthing again as well as to the people who live in Turkey today. I think I have a duty to make sure I help people find answers to the questions they have about their own local history, to help them find the evidence they need to make sense of it. I think it’s my duty to learn from them, the people of the past and today, to hear their perspectives and to find new ways to think about this history and the people who made it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As I prepare to leave my own home and fly to Gazipa\u015fa, I find myself thinking about the homes we will be excavating in the city of Antiochia ad Cragum. What will these structures look like? How were they designed? What functions did their rooms hold? How was space divided? Were these places of leisure […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5655,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Iz8A-Xc","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/antiochia2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/antiochia2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/antiochia2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/antiochia2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5655"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/antiochia2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3670"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/antiochia2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3670\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3681,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/antiochia2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3670\/revisions\/3681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/antiochia2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/antiochia2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/antiochia2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}