April 15, 2024
Here at the AIA we are unleashing the power of archaeology to provide a better understanding of the past and present and to create a brighter future.
Meet this year’s AIA Research Grant winners! These scholars encompass a variety of geographical and topical areas of study, and are all seeking answers to an interesting array of questions about the past. With the support of a Research Grant from the AIA, they can fund their travel and analyses to further their research goals.
This summer, Dr. Alvise Matessi (postdoctoral fellow, University of Bilkent) and his colleagues will embark on a multidisciplinary archaeological, linguistic, and geochemical search for the lost second capital of the Hittite Empire, Tarhuntassa, and test new methods to find forgotten ancient cities.
With a 2024 grant from the Julie Herzig Desnick Endowment Fund, Dr. Daniel Plekhov (Portland State University) and his colleagues will begin a survey project in the southern Municipality of Ulqin, Montenegro to investigate long-term historical change in population distribution across landscape. With this deeper understanding of the landscape, Dr. Plekhov and his team will ask questions about why the sites are located where they are, how the people living there responded to the changing political forces over time, and how the historical factors might be influencing current trends in the region’s populations.
Dr. Rachel Horowitz (Washington State University) will use a 2024 grant from the AIA’s Kathleen and David Boochever Endowment Fund for Fieldwork and Scientific Analyses to answer the question, “How did chert lithic resources circulate through economies in the lowland Maya region?” With Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry sourcing, Horowitz’s project will trace chert stone tools previously excavated from the site of El Perú-Waka’ in Guatemala from extraction through production, exchange, use, and discard to provide new information on economic activity in Classic period Maya society.
With a 2024 AIA grant from the Ellen and Charles Steinmetz Endowment for Archaeology, Dr. Kaja Tally-Schumacher (Cornell University) and her colleagues from the Casa della Regina Carolina Project at Pompeii will create a 3D virtual model of the Roman house and garden and populate it with diverse avatars and botanically accurate digital plants to produce a richer, more inclusive understanding of what life was like for many different inhabitants of ancient Pompeii.
With a 2024 AIA grant from the Ellen and Charles Steinmetz Endowment for Archaeology an international team of American, Brazilian, and Indigenous researchers led by Dr. Robert Walker (University of Missouri) will identify, document, analyze, and publish the massive earthwork geoglyphs of the southern rim of Amazonia while developing interactive tools to share results and promote the preservation of these important ancient indigenous archaeological sites.
Stay tuned in future weeks as we interview our 2024 publication grant and scholarship winners.
You can also learn more about the 2024 AIA Fellowship Cohort.
