Last fall, Josephine DeMarco, now a rising senior, opted to take a “fun” class outside her two majors, computer science and French.
Little did DeMarco know that “Art and Architecture in Ancient Greece,” taught by Giovanni Lovisetto, would connect her passions for computer science and art, resulting in a life-changing summer in Italy.
“I loved that class,” she says, adding that Lovisetto, a visiting assistant professor in the Art History Department, “so clearly genuinely cared about what he was teaching.”
DeMarco is proficient in 3D modeling and geographic information systems (GIS) — technology that collects location data and displays it as digital maps.
Inspired by Lovisetto’s enthusiasm, she approached him after class one day to ask if her skill sets would be useful to his fieldwork.
That’s when Lovisetto told her about his summer plans at Selinunte, an archaeological site located on the southwestern edge of the Italian island of Sicily. Between 650-250 BCE, Selinunte was a prosperous city in the ancient Greek world, perched on a cliff face which juts into the Mediterranean Sea. Today, a joint mission of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and the University of Milan conducts research on the walled “sanctuary" — the urban religious district containing the ruins of several temples.
Archaeologists consider Selinunte, which is relatively well preserved, to be one of the most important sites of the period when southern Italy and Sicily were colonized by ancient Greeks. People also inhabited the region before the arrival of Greek settlers and during Roman and medieval eras. Layers of evidence reveal clues about life during those times.
As a senior member of the excavations team at Selinunte, Lovisetto leads the group’s mapping and survey work.
DeMarco spent the spring semester reading about ancient Sicily and studying how GIS applies to the field of archeology through a directed study course she took with Lovisetto; during the semester, she also also practiced making maps using data from the site.
After being accepted for an internship working in the field at Selinunte, DeMarco applied for funding from the Emory College Pathways Center. Awards from the center offset living expenses associated with summer internships, research projects, apprenticeships, artist residencies and clinical shadowing opportunities across a range of disciplines.
For six weeks this summer, DeMarco worked with Lovisetto to survey the site using GPS devices and export that geographic data to create new maps. When completed, these maps will detail every layer of the settlement’s 1,000-year history.
Prior to this summer, DeMarco wasn’t sure what direction her life would take after graduation. But the internship in Selinunte demonstrated what it feels like to use her computer science skills in a field that fascinates her. She plans to apply to master’s programs focusing on geospatial data.
Logan Clark, a rising sophomore with dreams of a career in archaeology, also took part in the directed study course on Selinunte with Lovisetto. And, like DeMarco, he garnered an internship in Selinunte supported by the Pathways Center. Clark, who is double majoring in anthropology and classics, focused on hands-on excavation work. “The internship solidified my interest in the field as a profession that I will pursue later in life,” he says.
“This is a unique opportunity, especially in the first year of college,” says Lovisetto. “They’re both learning a lot and contributing to the knowledge at a major excavation site.”
DeMarco and Clark joined a team of 35 archaeology professionals as well as graduate and undergraduate students from around the world.
Mapping from chaos
Although both students had read about Selinunte’s rich history, setting foot on its ancient stone walkways was a different experience.
“I remember the first day,” says DeMarco. “I was so giddy. I was like, ‘This is so cool. There’s the ocean. Oh, my God, that’s the temple we read about!’”
On the ground, Selinunte may look “very chaotic,” says Lovisetto. In the ancient city center, a space about the size of three Emory Quads, “you see the Greek temples, but you also see houses built by Punic settlers [from the north African coast] in the last quarter of the fourth century BCE, as well as medieval structures.”
DeMarco’s survey work helped delineate building contours, ground elevations and exact locations where notable artifacts were found, providing “a great first step to figure out how the sacred topography of the sanctuary changed over time,” says Lovisetto.
Spending mornings in the hot sun mapping the site with Lovisetto and afternoons working in the lab exporting mapping data appealed to DeMarco.
“I like being outside and physically doing things,” she says. “And I also really enjoy getting to work on the computer. So, it was kind of the ideal workday.”
DeMarco recalls Lovisetto standing aside to let her explain their work to the other archeologists on the team.
“That meant a lot,” she says. “The work I was doing was very satisfying and fun and genuinely engaging to me, and I’m so grateful for the opportunity to do it.”
Artifacts, heat and dirt
While DeMarco added to the broad view of the ancient settlement, Clark got up close and personal. He began each day at 8 a.m. in an excavation trench, where he learned the basics of working with trowels and brushes to unearth artifacts.
After lunch, he helped wash the dirt from pottery pieces the team found — a menial but crucial chore. During these sessions, everyone pitched in and Clark would talk with specialists about their areas of expertise, including architecture, archeobotany and zooarcheology.
“We’d all be at a big table, talking and laughing,” he says. “It was such a cool experience to be able to hear about all that they’ve done. It shows that archaeology, though maybe a small field, is so vast in its possibilities.”
He ended each 10-hour workday shadowing those specialists as they analyzed, photographed and preserved the day’s finds. He developed a special interest in the iron and bronze spearheads the team excavated and chose to spend his final week learning all he could from the conservation team working with metal objects.
Clark, who plans to pursue master’s and doctorate degrees in classical archaeology, says he has learned a lot this summer. And the internship inspired him to learn even more.
At Selinunte, “I heard all these really intelligent undergraduate and graduate students discussing these scholarly things that I don’t yet have a grasp of,” he says. “And it makes me really curious about all of it. I want to work harder so I can reach that level.”
