Research and Scholarly Activity Fund Award Final Report
Name:

Jennifer Knapp

Department:

IDS (Classical Studies) and HLPS (History)

Faculty:

Arts/Social Science

In no less than 350 words, please reflect on the status of the project for which you received an
RSAF award. You may wish to address: potential new avenues for the project enabled by the
award; how the funded project builds on previous projects and/or collaborations; any
publications, conferences, talks, classroom modules, etc., coming out of the funded project; the
outcomes of collaboration facilitated by the award; the potential for future research and scholarly
activity projects made possible by the award; or the funded project's impact on your activities in
general at the College. As this report will be posted on the Scholarly Activity website, please
submit an electronic copy.
The RSAF award final reports may also be published in the Research and Scholarly Activity
annual report. You will be notified of this and given final approval of content before publication.
You may also be asked to participate in events promoting research and scholarly activity at the
College.
Please write in the space below or attach an additional PDF page.

See attached page.

I initially received funding to take a student with me to excavate and study ceramics at the
Bregatorto project, but after the funding for the main excavation fell through, I reapplied to have
the funding instead used to pay the student to help me work with data from a previous excavation
at Monte Palazzi.
Monte Palazzi is an archaeological site in the Aspromonte mountains in Calabria, Italy. I
participated in excavations in 2005, 2006, and 2007; my responsibility was the analysis of the
pottery. In summer 2016, a Langara student and I designed two databases for the ceramic data I
had recorded in notebooks (by hand) on site and we entered all the data into these databases, one
that can be used to look at the amounts of pottery found in every excavated area of the site, and
one that records the inventoried pieces. The first database includes counts and weights of every
sherd of pottery found on site; the second database includes further information about pieces that
were of especial importance. The creation of these databases was the first step in preparing this
data for publication; the information can be sorted and used in various analyses, such as dating
the site or identifying concentrations of a particular type of vessel.
In addition to entering the data, I took the opportunity to instruct my student in approaches to
studying ceramics, and he was able to learn about how archaeological data in general is
processed, as many of these approaches apply to any type of material evidence. We discussed
the identification of pottery, vocabulary used to describe it, what elements should be recorded,
and of course how to design and maintain a database of archaeological data. This gave the
student insight into an important aspect of archaeology, which he is interested in pursuing as a
career. Given his interest, I promised to instruct him in drawing profiles of pottery, which led to
my developing a 2-part workshop that I held in November 2016, which was also attended by 5
other students. I will hold several more in Spring 2017 as the students were enthusiastic to
continue practicing and learning.
Although the data from my notes is now completely entered thanks to the work funded by the
RSAF grant, I still have some work to do identifying and dating the pottery and finding
comparanda; after this work is completed, I can begin the final analysis and write-up for
inclusion in the publication of the site. There is also still material from a fourth excavation
season that I was unable to attend, so I will need to study this pottery on site in Italy. I plan to
apply for another RSAF to help me fund student assistance with some of that work as part of the
2017 excavation season.