Field School in Tuscany: Abbigail Sproul on Excavating in Cetamura, Italy
I double majored in anthropology and History. Last summer, I still needed some electives to complete my anthropology major. My parents, who are both anthropology graduates from FSU, suggested finding a field school to complete that degree. As I began researching where to go, I saw that FSU International Programs offered a field school in Cetamura del Chianti, Italy. Although the program is run out of the classics department, I was able to count it for my upper-division anthropology credits. Cetamura is an archeological site that houses Etruscan, Roman and medieval Italian remains.
We were quite a large group of students participating in the program, but we had to make our own way there. I had to get from Tallahassee to Montevarchi, a town about an hour south of Florence, from where we got picked up and taken to our accommodation. It was the first time that I travelled alone and that I travelled outside of the United States. I was a bit nervous tackling all of that on my own, but we had been given a lot of information and advice on what to do, which helped me find my way. The hardest thing was staying awake during the travel to not miss my connecting flights! Thankfully, after I got there, we did all the rest of the traveling as a group.
We stayed in a tiny medieval hill town accessible only by car. From there it was a 15 min drive to the Cetamura archeological site. We went on a few field trips to other places, but for most of our time there, we stayed in Radda in Chianti. We were quite a large group, around 40 people. Some of us shared apartments, while others stayed in rented rooms. Radda is small, though, and we all lived very close to each other. We had dinner at a restaurant in town. Breakfast and lunch we made ourselves and took with us to work.
The Cetamura site is on a hilltop. Every morning, we were dropped off at the bottom of the hill and made our way to the site. We were divided into small groups and assigned to different projects. My group was working on excavating a Roman forge. We were tasked with connecting two individual provisional excavations, between which was the forge. The person in charge of our project was a graduate student who specialized in metallurgy. She explained and monitored our work on the forge and also kept the log with our research findings. A lot of what we did involved scraping away dirt and cleaning the site. I looked to others who had been on digs before to see that I was doing it right. We were given all the equipment for digging that we needed, but we had to bring our own steel-toed boots to wear. That was a requirement for working on the site. Wearing those boots on the flight over, I got flagged at every security checkpoint at the airports!
The things we found the most were nails, tacks, clumps of metal, and pottery. We logged them all in bags, usually a bag per day. Unless we found something unusual, then it would be bagged separately and called a special find. The finds went to the lab for further examination. Some of the things ended up in the Cetamura museum, other things were put in storage. The lab was in an old monastery near the excavation site. Occasionally, we had a lab day to learn how to clean and type pottery. I have done lab work before, and I really enjoy it. Whenever there were extra opportunities to work in the lab, I would try to snap those up. I learned how to type the pottery that we were finding on the dig. In the beginning, I did not know whether something was a rock or an actual pottery shard. After my lab day, when we found things, they were more familiar to me.
The digging wasn’t physically hard for me. What was much harder was the 10 min hike to the top of the hill! It was a pretty steep trail, and having to climb it early in the mornings was not that easy. Everything else was fine, because I was either sitting or squatting and just scraping with a trowel. The site itself was under a lot of trees and quite shady. And because it was on top of the hill, it was also cooler than down in the valley where we stayed. We usually worked six days a week from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., but if it rained, we might either leave early or move to the lab to continue there. On the seventh day, we went on a field trip. We went to Siena and Florence and to local museums. We also got days off for Radda’s annual wine festival.
What surprised me the most was learning that I prefer research involving text-based materials more than the hands-on stuff of an archeological dig. I had not expected that. I had also thought that I would be more overwhelmed by being in a foreign country, but that wasn’t the case – maybe because we were a big group living in a small town with a tight work-excursion schedule. We had free time at the end of each day and I got to know Radda and its shops and restaurants really well. But the town is also popular with tourists, so we never dominated the scene.
My advice to others who are thinking about archeology or field work is definitely try it out. Studying abroad is so important, and it can help you figure out what you want to do and what not. I had been thinking of doing a master’s degree in archeology as that was a part of anthropology that I was really interested in. Doing field school made me realize that fieldwork is not what I want to do for the rest of my career. The Cetamura program is short enough that you can try out field work without being burnt out too much at the end, but it is long enough that you understand how field work is done and whether you enjoy it.
On a more practical level, check out what laundry facilities you will have where you stay and let that determine what you pack. If you work all day on the dig, you might not want to do laundry at the end of the day. Think ahead to make your stay more enjoyable.
And lastly, if you are concerned about funding study abroad, there are scholarships available for different trips and offered by different colleges. I received a travel grant from the College of Arts and Sciences which helped me pay for my trip.