Join the ROSETTA summer school in Greece at the Ancient City of Platea and in Athens
Purdue University’s ROSETTA Initiative, will continue offering the archaeological field school. Conducted at Plataea, Greece, at the site of an acient town abandoned in antiquity, the field school uses the latest technologies, including drones, remote sensing, and data analytics to reconstruct key events and situations that followed the height of Hellenistic power, during Alexander the Great and his successors.
In 2024, sixteen undergraduate students were led by two Purdue University faculty, Lynn Parrish and Nicholas Rauh on a trip of exploration, learning, and personal growth. After arriving in Athens, the group traveled to Thebes, home of Oedipus Rex, and our base of operations for an archaeological survey of ancient Plataea, famous as the site where the Persians were defeated in 479 BC, but also as a Macedonian colony established by Phillip and Alexander the Great. For this part of the course, students learned how to conduct a pedestrian survey, including pottery identification and documentation, mapping and documenting Hellenistic fortifications, and assisted with data collection for ground-truthing other non-invasive technologies like LiDAR drones and photogrammetry, to create an AI-generated, 3-dimensional architectural reconstruction of the site.
After field work was completed, the group returned to Athens, Greece, where, based in the historic Plaka district, students participated in faculty-guided site tours of Athens’ most spectacular sites and museums. Although based primarily in Athens and Thebes, day trips to the archaeological sites of Delphi, home of the oracle of Apollo, Mycenae, home of Homer’s Agamemnon and the Lion’s Gate, and Eleusis, cult site of the Eleusinian Mysteries, provided students with more nuanced, fine-grained representations of the trajectory and development of ancient philosophical and religious worldviews.
Professors Parrish and Rauh look forward to welcoming a new group of students to Plataea in May 2025. For additional information, please contact Lynn Parrish at lparrish@purdue.edu.
