I come from this beautiful place called Stabia, a little known chairman of Naples, but nobody knows that actually buried the below 15 feet of ashes, there is an entire Roman city
This is a site of enormous villas of some of the richest and most powerful people of the last decades of the Roman Republic. Stabia is the only place in the Caribbean Naples where archaeology can uncover this.
The work that we're doing out here in Stabia focuses on the Roman villas, and the two that we've worked on most of the villa Ariana and the villa San Marco. These villas represent the best preserved and the most accessible group of wealthy villas anywhere in the former Roman Empire.
It is a huge privilege to maneuver yourself as an archaeologist into a site like this. It is just almost unheard of for students to be able to A. get access to a site like this and B. to operate this very high level of graduate level research.
I've been involved at Sabia for 10 years now. I have seen the program evolve from analog measuring methods to the newest, most cutting edge technologies such as EDM, LIDAR, and 3D models.
So it's really cool to get this hands-on experience, doing field work with different kinds of equipment. So we're all learning together, and then we're able to kind of help each other out with the skills that we do have from school.
We're changing the course of history almost by uncovering and learning all these things that we can then share with the world through documentation.
This program allows people from different backgrounds, age groups, and experience levels to come together and work in an environment that encourages people to develop and grow skills and come back as staff members.
The discipline of looking at a historical artifact and learning how to understand its role in history, how drawing helps us understand that, teaches a discipline in approach that I think is useful in almost anything you do as a profession.
And what's really, really unique of the site, that because of this concentration of the villas, we have the opportunity of study, not only the villas themselves, but their urban fabric and environment where this villa would originally be.
We've been able to take not just an archeological focus, but also an urban design focus. I think that the sort of vast territory, and the issues that sort of exist here are endless in terms of the kinds of things our students could get out of it. When you walk through the village in Stabia, they're exposed so you think that there's nothing else to learn, but the fact is, we still barely scratched the surface.
Most of the villa has yet to be excavated before it actually comes apart from the archaeological part. One of the most spectacular excavations that have to be done it starts right here in this courtyard. This is also a place which we can bring students to and universities and museums. Bringing back American and other resources to help the Republic of Italy save this place and present it to the world and work here for the next generation.