Students experience, and excavate, Italy

This summer, a number of Saint Anselm students and professors spent an out of the ordinary five weeks in Italy digging trenches. No, it was not some sort of punishment. In fact, the Classics Department has been running an excavation trip to Italy for a few years now. Students stayed for five weeks, from May into June in a "small hotel in Orvieto. "We spent our working days in a small town nearby by called Monte Rubialgio," explained senior Zachary Fang, a classics major. Alongside students from the University of Oklahoma, the students worked in trenches to excavate artifacts for five days a week. Junior International Relations major Mary Donahue stated that "What we did there was fun. We dug. It was kind of like playing in a giant sandbox, only with more and heavier dirt, digging more systematically, and what we found was much more interesting." Donahue also explained that "the dirt has to be taken down layer by layer, locus by locus. It takes a while, and sometimes it was frustrating. When we found a wall, all we wanted to do was dig to see the whole wall, but we couldn't. Taking it down little by little allows people to determine how the wall came to be covered, and if it was all covered at once."

Students explained how on the weekends they were able to travel to various places all over Italy, including Rome, Florence, Naples and Pompeii. It was hard for senior classics major Molly Gayton to choose a favorite experience. "One my fondest memories from the trip was attending a dinner provided for us by the town of Monterubiaglio. Following the dinner, the Director of the excavation, Claudio Bizarri, gave a presentation in the town square of our findings during the season."

Both Donahue and Fang agreed that some of their best experiences came when someone would discover something. "When we were in our trench working hard and finally any of us would find anything it was a great feeling knowing that we're digging up antiquities and helping the world gain more knowledge about ancient history," stated Fang. All of the students agreed that this experience was an incredible one. Gayton explained that she learned that "Archaeology is not just reading in books and studying. We did some serious manual labor that I did not realize I could do." She, along with Donahue, encourages anyone to have an experience like this because, "unless you're planning on being an archaeologist, you'll never do this again.