STUDENT-FACULTY RESEARCH

back to the June 2003 frontpage

Ripon College’s Classics, Anthropology, Art, and History faculty only recently have discovered the scope of a collection of ancient art acquired by the Latin Department a century ago. For reasons today unclear, the collection was consigned to storage after only a decade or so of use. Last summer, EDDIE LOWRY & a student assistant, ANDREW RICH, began in earnest to identify the Roman coins (mostly imperial bronze) and consider their political meaning. Lowry & Rich have presented different aspects of their research in various venues. They described Roman coins & the modern euro as communicative systems at a winter workshop of the Wisconsin Association of Foreign Language Teachers. A coin identification workshop, held in connection with the Racine Municipal Museum, was attended by some 50 Latin high-school-ers; the success of the event means that it will likely become a regular outreach project to Latin (& World History) classes in area schools. And, as noted earlier in this newsletter, they gave a paper at CAMWS. This summer, Ed. is supervising a student’s work on the three dozen Roman lamps in the art collection (an early example of student research -- a 1910 senior thesis -- reveals that the Ripon collection once encompassed some 60 lamps. Where have the others gone to?). In short, the rediscovery of this long-forgotten resource will supply ample material for student research in the years to come. Fortunately, too, eight-week competitive summer research grants are available to students of the college.

Beginning in July, the Villa of Maxentius along the Appian Way will see the start of archeological work & the development of a student fieldschool. This fourth-century imperial complex includes an imperial tomb and a circus for chariot-racing, but it is the residential/ceremonial structure which will be the focus of the investigations sponsored by Kalamazoo College, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the Sovraintendenza Archeologica of the Comune di Roma. ANNE HAECKL of Kalamazoo College is one of the directors of this project, partially funded by the Loeb Classical Library Foundation. Two Classics majors from Kalamazoo are participating in this first, non-digging season, assisting the archaeological survey and the GIS database as their Senior Individualized Projects. In summer 2004, the team plans to begin at least four seasons of excavation in conjunction with a six-week fieldschool for up to 25 students with archaeological aspirations.