|
 Professor Joe Rife specializes in Greek literature, history and archaeology, particularly funerary ritual and social structure in the eastern Mediterranean. He teaches courses in Greek and Roman Culture and History, Greek and Latin Language and Literature, and Archaeology.
|
 |
Excavating the south ridge. |
From Israel to Greece to Madagascar, Macalester students are digging in the dirt through Macalester-led excavations.
Learn more about the Omrit dig in Israel.
|
Stop living in the past Move on. As a society we're constantly told to look to the future and stop dwelling on past. For an archaeologist that's just nonsense. What better way to help society move forward than to learn from the past.
Classics Professor Joe Rife has assembled one of the largest excavation teams in Greece this summer to unearth the past. While digging around in a cemetery may not appeal to everyone, it is a good way to learn more about a society that is long gone. Professor Rife knows this well. He has been digging around in Kenchreai, the eastern port of Corinth, in southern Greece, since 2002. This year the dig runs from June 14 to July 23.
The site is endangered by illicit excavation, vandalism, and dumping. Despite these dire threats to the cultural heritage, the cemetery provides important evidence for the use of funerary ritual and mortuary space in the surviving architecture, wall-painting, artifacts, inscriptions, bones, and depositional remains.
This summer a team of students, 38 including both undergraduate and graduate students (14 from Macalester), joins an international staff of experts in artifacts, wall-painting, human and animal bones, art history, geology, and GIS to study a major cemetery of Roman date (1st-7th centuries C.E.) situated next to one of the busiest ancient harbors in southeastern Europe. The team is also experiencing something new this year as the program takes on a structured educational program through which students can receive credit. Guest lectures visit the site, which compliment lectures and readings done in the spring before the team left.
The research program applies a new approach to the study of Greek cemeteries that documents and interprets funerary rituals as expressions of social structure. This approach has four stages:
Integrate the techniques of archaeology, art history, anthropology and geology to document the physical remains and natural setting of the cemetery.
Reconstruct funerary rituals from their material residues as documented by integrated techniques.
Explore the relationship between social structure and funerary rituals as reconstructed from their material residues. A social structure is a network of relations in society that is variously defined by hierarchical roles, group memberships, and ideologies. Funerary rituals across cultures serve as an arena for the assertion and contestation of separate identities within a social structure
Trace the diachronic and regional variation in social structure as expressed in ritual activities performed in cemeteries.
|
The day begins with a walk up a steep incline nick-named by some as “Cardiac Hill.”