ASCSA Alumni Profiles

Chris Motz

Manager of Digital Assets, Kelsey Museum of Archaeology

Chris Motz wanted a career that would not make him stick to a single subject, and Archaeology provided that opportunity. As a graduate student at the University of Cincinnati, Chris focused on Roman Archaeology, but in addition to his academic work, he fostered his digital skills by managing the database for the Pompeii Archaeological Research Project: Porta Stabia (PARP:PS) and designing the recording system for the Tharros Archaeological Research Project, where he is still involved today. He then applied those skills to his own dissertation, which utilizes complex datasets to analyze the archaeological remains of fish-salting and cloth treatment workshops of the Roman period.

Although his graduate research focused primarily on the Roman west, Chris participated in the ASCSA Summer Session led by Lee Brice and Georgia Tsouvala in 2014, which provided a brief but highly beneficial immersion in Greek Archaeology.

“It was extremely valuable for comprehensive exams in grad school and equally, if not more valuable in the years after grad school [for teaching courses in] Greek Art and Archaeology or Greek literature in translation,” Chris says. “Having first-hand experience with those objects, spaces, and buildings was really helpful.”

Chris was quickly drawn to an opportunity to do more with the digital aspects of archaeological research, however. Now working as the Manager of Digital Assets at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, Chris manages the collections database and physical archives there. Although he has no formal training in computer science, Chris had developed IT skills through various jobs, from working at the IT help desk as an undergraduate to doing contract tech support or filling various roles at an Apple store before beginning his PhD, and he finds the contributions that he can make in digital archaeology to be especially gratifying.

“One of the challenges I was starting to realize while in a more traditional academic role was that I wasn’t able to use my skills to their fullest extent,” Chris says. “I can make much more of an impact on the field doing this kind of work.” One of his recent projects involved publishing the raw data for 3D models of objects in the museum and integrating it with their public database, making it more accessible. This will allow future researchers to reprocess the data using different methods and use it to ask new questions, so that the first version of the model is not the final one.

This view to the future carries over into Chris’s interactions with students at the University of Michigan, whom he advises on data management for their research projects and helps them find solutions that are customized to their needs. “One of my other goals is to use this role to raise the overall level of technical ability [in the field] for people who will go on to be project directors and equip them as much as possible to do these things themselves.”