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Barbara Tsakirgis, Ph.D.
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“A Day in the Life of an Archaeological Dig in Athens and in Sicily AND
Celebrating Everyday Life in Ancient Times in the Greek and/or Roman House”
Barbara Tsakirgis, an expert in Greek and Roman archaeology, has studied ancient Greek and Roman houses which have been excavated at sites in Sicily and in Athens. Using what she knows about Greek houses, what the houses looked like when they once stood, what the plans of them were, how the people used the individual rooms, and how they lived their lives in the houses, she has studied the architecture and examined the "small finds". Small finds are the little bits and pieces of people's lives which are left behind, in and around the houses. These include pieces of pottery,
pieces of objects that were used for creating cloth, objects used for cooking, for playing, and the many things that are used in living everyday life. These excavations have yielded insight into both past history and human behavior as patterns and activities of human behavior have been repeated over time. This videoconference will highlight a day in the life of an archaeological dig in the heart of Athens and in Sicily. Then a discussion will describe everyday life in ancient times in the Greek and/or Roman house gleaned from what Barbara Tsakirgis has uncovered during her many excavations.
An Interview with Dr. Tsakirgis....
Q: How is it that you are a Professor in two departments?
Professor Tsakirgis: Since there are not very many departments of archeology around the country, it is very common situation for someone like me to have an appointment in classics and an appointment in fine arts, which is where art history is located.
In her office at the classics department
with Zeus looking on.Q: What is a classical archeologist? What does a classical archeologist do?
Professor T: In terms of research what I do is work on excavations in the Mediterranean where there were Greeks and Romans. I worked 14 years on a dig in central Sicily and I have been working the last five years on an excavation in central Athens in Greece. While we dig up things there, I have not myself been involved recently in digging up material, because so much has been excavated in the past.
What I have been doing is studying some of the ancient Greek and Roman houses which are excavated at these sites in Sicily and in Athens. I am involved in looking at the remains, the walls which in some cases stand less than a foot high. We try to figure out from what we know about Greek houses, what the houses looked like when they once stood, what the plans of them were, how the people used the individual rooms, how they lived their lives in the houses. So that involves looking at the architecture and also looking at the small finds.
Roman oil lamp. Notice the black residue at
the spout where the flame burned at the wick.
Small finds are the little bits and pieces of people's lives which are left behind in and around the houses: pieces of pottery, pieces of objects that were used for creating cloth, for cooking, for playing with, basically all of those things that we have in life everyday. And so I look at those and try and figure out how those houses were used.
Q: What period of time are you talking about?
Professor T: Right now the material I am working on in Athens spans for what is a fair amount of time for someone in my field, from 700 b.c. to about 700 a.d., so about 1400 years worth of material. When I worked in Sicily I was working on material which belonged primarily to the 3rd, 2nd, and 1st, centuries b.c.
Q: Did you grow up wanting to be a classical archeologist?
Professor T: I decided when I was 11 that I wanted to be a classical archeologist. That probably came from a couple of sources. One is I am Greek by descent and I wanted to find out more about my family and where my family background was in Greece and in ancient Greece. Then when I was 11, I was in the sixth grade and we were studying world history, including Greece, and so I did a report about ancient Greece and it included a discussion about the Parthenon and the statue of Athena is inside. I came to Nashville where we have a Parthenon and where we had in my early years at Vanderbilt a new Athena Parthenos created for it.
So my history in classical archeology goes way back. And I think that is pretty unusual. Many people don't decide what their career is going to be until they're much older. But I suppose I was fairly or still am fairly single-minded.
Q: What was your training? Where did you go to college and where did you study this?
Professor T: I was an undergraduate at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut. I was actually in the fourth class of women to go to Yale, which is something we do not realize anymore, that co-education in some of these schools is quite recent. I studied Greek and Latin, the ancient languages, at Yale. Those were my majors. I also did this with the intention of becoming a classical archeologist. I took other courses in Anthropology and Archeology and Ancient Art. Those are some of the courses I teach here at Vanderbilt. I teach quite a number of ancient art courses for both Classics and the Fine Arts department, Greek, Roman and Egyptian. I have also taught Latin and Greek History.
William Disnmoor's drawing of Athena
Parthenos. Alan LeQuire, a local sculptor
and Vanderbilt graduate, used this drawing
for the statue he created for Nashville's
Parthenon. The drawing was saved after
his studio burnedQ: Then you went on for graduate training?
Professor T: I was a graduate student at Princeton in New Jersey. There I have my masters and my Ph.D. in Classical Archeology because there are special programs for that in graduate school. And so I studied and continued to study Greek and Latin, the languages and the literatures. I also took courses specifically in Classical Archeology and Ancient Art.
Q: What is it like to actually be out in the middle of a field in Sicily? Or in Athens are you in the middle of a busy street? Just describe a little bit what it is like when you do your work.
Professor T: It is really like summer camp. It is great fun. I do not like to admit to some people how much I like what I do. But in excavation, whether it is in the middle of the fields of Sicily or in the central part of Athens which is a very sizable city of 5 million people; we have trenches, as we call them, very regular pits, which we dig down through the soil down into the antiquities below. In central Sicily that means we are out in the middle of a field somewhere. Our excavations there are in what was once an almond and olive orchard and it is quite lovely out in the countryside. It is very quiet, relatively clean in terms of the air quality, and fairly un-crowded.
The van Prof. Tsakirgis used at her
archeology dig in Morgantina, Sicily.
Why is it parked under a tree? The
shade? No. It had no starter and had
to be parked at a precarious angle to
roll-start it.In Athens it is a different story. Athens, because of the 5 million people, is very crowded and very noisy and very smoggy. First the more modern buildings which are up above have to be removed. That is really not part of the excavation. They call in demolition teams to do that. After they take away the modern buildings, then we began excavating below them.
Q: Do you recommend this? What would you say to students who are now in middle school or high school or elementary and are considering careers? Would you recommend this as a career?
Professor T: I would recommend this career in terms of how much fun it is, how interesting the profession is, how much of an insight it gives us not only into past history, but human behavior in general and those patterns and activities of human behavior that repeat themselves over time. Unfortunately, I would not recommend it as a profession for anybody who wants to get rich or find an easy job. The majority of people in my position are professors and that is certainly a very well paying job, but it is not a profession in which someone is going to become rich. Not that I think that is necessarily their goal in life. Unfortunately, there is not a great deal of demand for classical archeologists. So there are not very many positions in the country. When I got my job here at Vanderbilt there were four jobs in the country in this field. So I consider myself very lucky indeed to have gotten this position.
Cup from Pompeii, probably from the 2nd century
B.C. It was possibly used for wine. Since it is
smaller than the ordinary wine cup of that time,
it may have been a gift for a deity.Q: But it still sounds like something people could definitely pursue an interest in.
Professor T: Absolutely, there is no question about that. There are lots of opportunities for travel to see what folks like me have excavated in Greece and in Italy, and around the Mediterranean, and in fact around the world. It is also something that you can pursue as a hobby; to read about, study about on your own. Even to go on some excavations as well. There are many excavations that take volunteers. Even people who are not professionals like me. Of course the volunteers do a lot of the really heavy labor, pushing wheelbarrows and wielding shovels. You can learn a lot about excavating and about the ancients from an experience like that. For a few people, I would recommend going on, but again there are so few positions. It is not a profession I would persuade great numbers of undergraduates to go into.
Q: Is there anything more about students choosing careers that you would like to say to them?
Professor T: I think based on my own experience, one thing that I would recommend is to study what you enjoy. I think that it is always the case, it is my experience, and from what I have seen with my own students, people study best and do the best work in areas that they enjoy. So if there is something that students enjoy, it does not need to be classical archeology. It can be mathematics, it can be history, it can be psychology, it can be any number of different fields. Pursue something that you enjoy and you may just find it turns into a career path.
I would say for any students who are taking my courses that I would not expect that they would necessarily end up as classical archeologists. But I would expect that they would derive from my courses, not only an appreciation for the period, but also, they would have the opportunity to hone skills and develop skills that would serve them in any number of professions, problem solving skills, for example. In some of the cases very sparse remains are found in an excavation and trying to explain what they are and then trying to explain what they looked like when they were complete is difficult. This involves research.
Case of antiquities in the Classics Department.
These are Greek and Roman artifacts from 500 BC
to the Roman Imperial Period.This involves putting together evidence from a number of different sources. It is precisely the sort of skills that one uses in quite a number of different professions, whether it is medicine or really some very far flung fields. Also in their coursework with me or in courses in general in the humanities, students learn a great deal about expressing themselves properly whether it is in spoken reports or in written assignments. These types of classes help folks organize their thoughts and express themselves clearly. The one bit of advice that I can give students that while some of these fields may seem very esoteric and may seem like fields that you would never get a profession in, they can supply a great number of skills which are useful for a great number of potential careers.
I recommend not only my courses, but others too, that might seem not to be professional career paths to students because a proper education in the humanities really does lead people to all of those skills that would be tremendously useful later on, even in some very different professions indeed.
Q: Any last words?
Professor T: It is important to enjoy your work. If you go on an archeological expedition, wear sunscreen.
