Gabii Project at ASMOSIA X

Jason Farr (Ph.D. candidate, IPCAA, University of Michigan), will present a paper on his ongoing research into the local tufo at Gabii - lapis Gabinus - and its exploitation by means of quarrying in the late republican and early imperial periods. Farr's dissertation research seeks not only to better understand this tufo type, but also to explore connections between the Gabine quarries and the construction industry in Rome and Latium. Farr's paper, "Lapis Gabinus: new evidence for quarrying at Gabii", will be presented in Rome at the ASMOSIA X (Association for the Study of Marble and Other Stones In Antiquity), conference. This international conference takes place in Rome, from 21 to 26 May 2012, and is hosted by the Università di Roma 'La Sapienza'. Farr's talk is scheduled to for 09.00am on 23 May in the session entitled "THEMATIC SESSION III: Provenance identification II: (other stones)". The conference website is here.

Gabine research and the web

The Gabii Project team is a multinational group and is, during the winter and spring, dispersed among many countries, several continents, and quite a few time zones. Despite being in different places, the work of the project goes on as we work not only on post-excavation projects but also on moving various studies to publication. In this off-season work, the project is increasingly aided by the collaborative potential offered by internet platforms; team members routinely confer and meet to discuss research projects and plan excavation strategy and policy for future seasons.

Today, the team tried a new experiment, that being a collaborative research seminar online - thus, webinar. Through the miracle of Skype (thanks, Skype!), we convened for nearly four hours with almost 20 team members for a thought-provoking and stimulating session. We heard reports on various work in progress, including work on the dating and contextualization of Gabii's orthogonal plan (Marcello Mogetta), investigation of recovery rates for metal artifacts (Laura Banducci and Jason Farr), human osteology (Kristina Killgrove), quarrying of the local tufo, lapis Gabinus (Jason Farr), and anthropomorphic terracottas (Chiara Pilo). In addition to these reports we also discussed, thanks to Laura Motta, Marcello Mogetta, and Ivan Cangemi, an ongoing sampling experiment on-site that allows us to consider unit volume and recovery rates for various anthropic and organic materials. 

The webinar was a great success and an excellent case study in harnessing the power of the web to promote collaboration and discussion. The team plans future webinars in the next months to continue our fruitful discussions of this morning.

Gabii Project 2011 field campaign approaches

After a long (and cold) winter in the United States, it hardly seems possible that summertime could be near, but it does, in fact, approach apace and the Gabii Project team is already hard at work planning another season of fieldwork. In some respects it seems as if the fieldwork of 2010 just concluded a few days ago ... nonetheless there is already a palpable anticipation as we begin to think of being in the field once more. The goals for this campaign center on the continued investigation of features revealed during the first two field campaigns (2009 and 2010), including the ancient city's grid of streets, an industrial zone, and a former area of occupation that transitioned to an ad hoc necropolis in the Imperial period. The investigations in various sectors will again be accompanied by environmental sampling and digital mapping. These threads, woven together, are contributing to the collection of a rich data set for the urban center of ancient Gabii and are already facilitating our study of the site and reconstruction and modeling of the ancient city. We are witnessing the potential of digital recording and modeling, both of which are changing not only procedures in the field but also granting new analytical opportunities. Major questions about Gabii remain, including the chronological trajectory of its rise as well as the onset of its contraction and eventual abandonment.

A look across the Ager Gabinus from July 2010.

The project will again offer its volunteer field program this summer, bringing student volunteers to the field to participate in all aspects of the excavation process. This season the team is once again multi-national and represents many institutions.  Those institutions represented include: the University of Michigan, Brown University, Davidson College, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Auckland, Kalamazoo College, Stanford University, University of California Los Angeles, University of California Berkeley, University of Maryland Baltimore County, Bryn Mawr College, Carleton College, Oberlin College, Boston University, Harvard University, Washington and Lee University, and Williams College. The project will also again welcome graduate student participants from the Summer Program in Archaeology (SPA) sponsored by the American Academy in Rome. In 2011 the Gabii Project is pleased that its field program has been certified by the Register of Professional Archaeologists; we also have entered a partnership with the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies (ICCS) in Rome and have several Centristi signed up to join us in the field. We plan more extensive blogging by staff and students this season, so join us in following those posts over at Ager Gabinus: dispatches from the field.

The project's directors always welcome your inquiries. Watch this space for continuing updates throughout the 2011 field season!

Will the real Lapis Gabinus please stand up?

Jason Farr

Jason Farr, assistant trench master with the Gabii Project and Ph.D. candidate in Classical archaeology at the University of Michigan, will present a paper at the upcoming Duke-UNC Graduate Colloquium in Classics taking place April 1-3, 2011. The colloquium, a long-standing graduate forum, centers this year on the theme of "Refuse and Reuse: The Challenges of Repurposing and Re-imagining in the Ancient World" and will feature keynote speaker Eric Varner (Emory). Jason's paper, "Re-Purposing Lapis Gabinus and Re-Imagining Gabii: the Exploitation of a Stone Resource and the Memory of a Latin City" will discuss the Roman quarrying of lapis Gabinus, as well Gabii's role as a symbol in Latin literature. Jason has defended a dissertation proposal at Michigan in fall 2010 entitled "The Quarries of Gabii and Lapis Gabinus" and is in the early stages of his work on the Gabine quarries.