Abby Epplett, Historian

My latest online exhibit adventure was visiting A Portrait of Tenochtitlan by Dutch technical artist Thomas Kole . Debuting a few months ago in September 2023, this blend of digital models and modern drone photography taken by Andrés Semo Garcia allows visitors to better understand the early 16 th century layout of what is now Ciudad de México [Mexico City] . Translations of the informational signage into Spanish and Nahuatl provided by Rodrigo Ortega Acoltzi add authenticity to the project. Tenochtitlan was the capital of the Mexica empire, a people also known as the Aztecs. Located inside the salty sea that once flooded the Basin of Mexico, the metropolis merged with its twin city, Tlateloco, to become a major place of trade. At its height, the population of Tenochtilan reached 200,000 people, about the size of the nearest city to me, Worcester, MA . As for the entire Triple Alliance [ Triple Alianza , Excan Tlahtoloyan ] formed with the city-states of Tlacopan and T...

Last night — Wednesday, April 17, 2024 at 8:00 p.m. — I watched the final webinar for this season of AIA Archaeology Hour . This talk was sponsored by the AIA Chicago Society and featured guest speaker Deborah Carlson , who works at Texas A&M teaching about ships and shipwrecks of Ancient Greece and Rome, along with being the president of the non-profit organization Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA) . Her talk “Excavating a Shipwrecked Marble Column Destined for the Temple of Apollo at Claros” described the challenges of working underwater while explaining the history behind what she and her team discovered. Carlson explained that the INA and AIA are “sister organizations”. The INA recently celebrated its 50 th anniversary, as “Father of Underwater Archaeology” Dr. George Bass founded the organization in 1973. The shipwreck was found near Kizilburun in the Aegean Sea off the coast of Turkey, an area with a wide range of wreck dates ranging from the 16 th cen...

While I have often read about the Dead Sea Scrolls and referenced them in my work, I did not know the detailed history of the scrolls. Fortunately, Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) — the current holder of the scrolls — has created The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library to share these artifacts, explain how the scrolls were written, and give a timeline for how they came into the IAA collection. Google assisted in the creation of the website, which is available in English, Modern Hebrew, German, Russian, and Arabic, allowing a wide range of people to study the scrolls. The website contains images of the scrolls themselves, along with opportunity to “Learn about the Scrolls” and “About the Project” of digitization. Featured Scrolls While all scrolls found during “the greatest archaeological event of the twentieth century” (although the website might be biased) are highly important to the understanding of life in Ancient Israel, some scrolls contain more or bett...

On March 27, 2024 at 8:00 p.m., I attended the webinar AIA Archaeology hosted by the Toronto chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America . Kisha Supernant , the director of the Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology , professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta , and a citizen of the Metis Nation of Alberta, led the talk entitled, “Finding the Children: Using Archaeology to Search for Unmarked Graves at Indian Residential School Sites in Canada”. Supernant began this work in 2018 and is dedicated to making sure her work meets the needs of the community. She opened by acknowledging that archaeology is often viewed in a colonial context, where archaeologists extract the belongings and knowledge of Indigenous descendant communities and excluded them from conversations about how their culture will be represented. Supernant collaborated with three other scholars to edit the book Archaeologies of the Heart , which advocates for a diff...

For my birthday, I received the book Greek and Roman Technology by K.D. White , published in 1984 by Thames & Hudson with Cornell University Press . While the author claimed this book was “no more than a survey, and a starting-off point” (173), his work was by far the most extensive information I have found on the subject. The book was divided into two parts. In Part I, White outlined the technologies available in Ancient Greece and Rome while explaining the environment in which these were developed. In Part II, White divided technologies into categories and explains each category in detail. At the back of the book were extensive information on White’s sources, several appendices, tables, a bibliography, endnotes, and an index. White opened his book with his “Introduction” pointing out what he claims to be inaccurate work done by other historians and archaeologists. He had written this book to fill “the need for an up-to-date account of the technical resources of the...

Yesterday — Wednesday, December 6, 2023 — I attended a webinar hosted by Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) featuring author Mike Pitts as he discussed his book Digging Up Britain: Ten Discoveries, a Million Years of History , also known by its British subtitle A New History in Ten Extraordinary Discoveries . The book won the Felicia A. Holton Book Award given by the AIA to a non-fiction book presenting archaeology to the general public. Moderating the conversation was Laura Rich, AIA Vice President for Outreach and Education . Pitts described what sparked his interest in writing a book about such a long timeframe. Publishing was “one of these things that you felt you had to do as an archaeologist”. He knew the field of learning about the human occupation of Britain had grown significantly in the past few years. He decided to focus on recent excavations and projects, limiting his scope to ten. Because of this limitation, he did not discuss the Druids, Iron Age, or...

Yesterday — November 15, 2023 at 8:00 p.m. — I watched the webinar Cuisine and Crisis: An Edible History of the Moche of Ancient Peru presented by Dr. Katherine L. Choiu , a bioarchaeologist from the Ancient People and Plants lab at the University of Alabama , and hosted by the Tallahassee Society branch of the Archaeological Institute of America . The talk focused on Moche society, which existed in the Jequetepeque Valley on the Peruvian coastal desert between the Pacific Ocean and Andes mountains from AD 100 to 800, about the same time as the Classic Maya. Dr. Chiou described how her excavations of Moche sites have revealed the differences in diet between the elite and common people. She believed that study diet is an important but sometimes overlook facet of archaeology, as “food can tell us about where we’ve been and who we are as people”, and differences in diet are “lines drawn between status groups reinforced in daily life”. The elites lived at a site now known ...

On Wednesday, October 18, 2023 at 8:00 p.m. EST, I watched the latest installment of AIA Archaeology Hour, a webinar series hosted by the Archaeological Institute of America . Dr. Anne Austin , who teaches of anthropology and archaeology in the History Department at the University of Missouri—St. Louis and works as a bioarchaeologist at Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale [French Institute of Oriental Archeology], presented her talk Ancient Ink: Discovering the Tattooed Women of Ancient Egypt . Her presentation focused on tattoos on mummies found at Deir el-Medina , a village for workers in Ancient Egypt who built the infamous Valley of the Gods. Dr. Ulrike Krotscheck , who leads the Puget Sound chapter of AIA and works as a professor of archaeology at Evergreen State College , moderated the event. Dr. Austin began the talk by explaining how archaeology is currently in “the golden age for finding evidence of tattooing in archaeological contexts… [with] more pub...

On Wednesday, March 15 at 7:00 p.m., Boston University professor of archeology David Carballo presented Collision of Worlds: An Archaeological Perspective on the Spanish Invasion of Aztec Mexico . The talk was based on Carballo’s similarly titled book , which was published by Oxford University Press in 2020. As part of AIA Archeology Hour , a virtual evening lecture series organized by the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) , this event was moderated by Rabun Taylor, professor of classics at the University of Texas at Austin , and hosted by the Central Texas (Austin) Society, a chapter of the AIA . Carballo began his talk by explaining that his book covers three main perspectives about the Spanish Invasion of Aztec Mexico. The Archaeological Perspective focuses on material culture and the world, like “landscapes, places, and things”. The Transatlantic Perspective , traditionally used to emphasize the technological differences between the Spanish ...

On January 18, I listened to “The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World”, a talk given by Dr. Kara Cooney , a professor of Egyptian Art and Architecture at UCLA , which was hosted by the Northern Alabama chapter of the  Archeological Institute of America (AIA) . Cooney hosted Out of Egypt on the Discovery channel in 2009 and published the book The Good Kings in 2021, which covered the reign of five Egyptian kings. Cooney focused on three of these kings during her talk: Khufu Akhenaten, and Ramesses II. Cooney emphasized a key difference between the Greek and Roman empires versus the Egyptian dynasties. While Greeks and Romans divinized rulers after death, setting up emperors like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Marcus Aurelius to become gods, the Egyptians divinized rulers during their lifetimes. Cooney noted how Americans “divinize” their favorite presidents like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and John Fitzgerald Kenne...