AJA lecturing to students on the Venice Study Group of Colgate University in the Forum of ancient Rome.
Map showing the sites in and around the Forum of ancient Rome: those sites in gold date to the Regal period (drawing by Joel Katz).
Walter Alvarez, a geologist and professor at Berkeley and Nicola Terrenato (then a graduate student and now a professor at Michigan working on a core stored in the dark depth of an old quarry inside the Capitoline Hill. This is an example of the excellent collaboration that I had on my projects in Rome. Walter along with his father Luis Alvarez, a Noble Prize winner in Physics, are famous for their explanation of the extinction of dinosaurs as a consequence of a major impact event.
Detail of a diagram showing the stratigraphy and the dating of the respective geological units in the Capitoline Hill by means of argon/argon dating at Berkeley.
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JA and Nicola Terrenato are standing at the site of Sant’Omobono located on the east bank of the Tiber below the Island at the time of the discovery of the deeply buried foundation of the early Temple of Fortuna. The foundations occur at a depth of about 3 meters below the modern water-table in this part of Rome.
Venice
Rowing in my boat in Venice: AJA’s hobby there. More importantly, it was the use of the small boat that led to a number of our discoveries in Venice and the Lagoon.
AJA making a deep core by hand, using a Dutch soil auger, below the Marciana Library at Saint Mark’s Square (once the site of the city’s mint in the early centuries). This was a very demanding core that went down to a depth of 14 feet in the ground and produced evidence for human presence on a marsh island in the 7th century A.D.
Basilica Team 2015. It shows the people who worked in collaboration with me on the study of the deep cores made beneath the mosaic pavement of the Basilica di San Marco. The second person on the left is Ettore Vio, the Proto of San Marco, who asked me to do the project
Cross section of Saint Mark’s Square (Piazza San Marco in Italian) with the Ducal Palace on the right and the Basilica on the left. It shows the stratigraphic sequence – first the archaeology and then the geology – below the pavement of the Piazza today. The section runs from the waterfront on the right to the Clock Tower (drawing by Hannah N. McClennen).
AJA and Peter Kuniholm, a dendrochronologist, at work on the cores beneath the Basilica in the Prison located on the other side of the Bridge of Sighs of the Ducal Palace. AJA once had for years his own storage room in the Prison.
Athens
AJA sitting in the stone chair of the “archon” of the Royal Stoa in the Agora, the civic center of ancient Athens, at the end of a long day in the field. The Royal Stoa stood in the NW corner where the archon, a high-ranking official, had his office and where new laws of the city-state were posted.
Cyprus
Dive boat at Aspros on the west coast of Cyprus. At Dive Site C, at 130 m from the coast and a depth of 12 m in the water, we made the important discovery in 2007 of a stone age site dating to around 12,000 years ago – the only submerged site of such an early age (Palaeolithic) in the Eastern Mediterranean.
View of the late Palaeolithic site of Aspros (on land) on the west coast of the Akamas on Cyprus with its rough formations of aeolianite, old fossilized sand dunes.
Paestum
View of the excavation in progress on the north side of the Temple of Athena at Paestum, the Greek city-state in southern Italy. The fieldwork was carried out in 2019, and the temple (behind) has always stood on top of a large artificial mound of travertine masses for the last 2,500 years.
: AJA and Adam Zaharoni, a student at Colgate University, examining the soil on a mass of travertine rock recovered from trench 6 at Paestum.