When I started this major, I set out to create a methodology which would help me answer these questions:
1. How do material things inform culture?
2. How does material culture affect humans?
3. How does the material culture reflect back on the society which created it?
4. How is the image of society that people portray in their literary works informed by archaeological evidence?
5. In what ways do the literary and physical evidence work together to provide a well rounded account of an area’s history?
Through my coursework and fieldwork, I have dived more deeply into these questions. None of them have a clear answer, although I did discover myself being pulled more to study inscriptions, which led me to explore questions such as:
- How does the study of inscriptions modify or supplement a purely archaeological or literary approach?
- In what ways can literary and archaeological methodologies strengthen an interpretation of inscriptions?
JuliAnne and her unit partner, Abigail Wollam ’20, recording field notes about their unit.