Committee on the Wiener Laboratory
The Wiener Laboratory Committee of the Managing Committee of the ASCSA plays a significant role in generating and discussing policy for the WL. The Committee works to support the programs of the Wiener Laboratory: funding projects for young scholars, sponsoring field and laboratory research, providing resources for scholarly work, and disseminating research results. The Committee comprises experts from different subdisciplines of Archaeological Science, such as Osteoarchaeology, Zooarchaeology, Geoarchaeology, and Archaeobotany, as well as archaeologists who have a strong record of integrating the archaeological sciences into their research.
All seven expert members are distinguished members of their scientific communities and hold key roles within their own institutions as well as within academic associations and disciplinary groups:
Prof. Natalie Munro, Chair of the Committee
Natalie Munro (Ph.D., University of Arizona) is Professor at the Department of Anthropology of the University of Connecticut. Munro has active research projects in Turkey, Israel and Greece and is published widely in peer-reviewed journals such as Science, PNAS, Current Anthropology, and Journal of Human Evolution. Her research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. She has served as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Human Evolution and is a long-term co-chair and member of the board of the Connecticut Museum of Natural History. Her research interests include the Emergence of Agriculture, Zooarchaeology and Taphonomy, Animal domestication, Behavioral Ecology, Human Hunting, Human-Animal Interactions, Animals in Ritual Practice, Epipaleolithic and Neolithic Periods of Southwest Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean Region.
Prof. Megan B. Brickley
Megan B. Brickley (Ph.D., University of London) is Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in the Bioarchaeology of Human Disease at the Department of Anthropology, McMaster University, Canada. She has established herself as a world expert on the paleopathology of metabolic bone disease with particular recognition for her work on vitamin D deficiency. Her work is interdisciplinary and in addition to an ongoing research program on aspects of rickets and osteomalacia, recent work will facilitate exploration of the intimate relationship between maternal and fetal health. She has led work on the first explicit investigation of co-occurrence of metabolic disease and has recently established a framework for consideration of anemia in archaeological human remains. Brickley is also investigating how the health and nutrition of past populations may have been linked to the socio-cultural, economic and environmental conditions they faced in their communities. Brickley’s innovative research is helping build an understanding of human health and nutrition in past societies.
Prof. John M. Marston
John M. Marston (Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles) is Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology in the Department of Archaeology at Boston University. An environmental archaeologist, he studies the long-term sustainability of agriculture and land use, with a focus on ancient societies of the Mediterranean and western and central Asia. His research focuses on how people make decisions about land use within changing economic, social, and environmental settings, and how those decisions affect the environment at local and regional scales. A specialist in paleoethnobotany, the study of archaeological plant remains, Marston’s contributions to the field include novel ways of linking ecological theory with archaeological methods to reconstruct agricultural and land-use strategies from plant and animal remains. Recent interdisciplinary collaborations focus on comparative study of cultural adaptation to environmental and climate change in the past and present; developing new methods to study the spatial distribution of land use from archaeological animal and plant remains; and the ecology of plague. His current research projects include multi-proxy reconstruction of agriculture in Bronze and Iron Age urban centers of Turkey; Hellenistic, Roman, and Early Islamic sites in Israel; and work in both the Aegean (Agora of Athens, Greece) and central Asia (Khorezm Ancient Agriculture Project, Uzbekistan). Marston’s recent research has been funded by the US National Science Foundation, the US-Australia Fulbright Commission, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Loeb Classical Library Foundation, American Research Institute in Turkey, American Philosophical Society, and Boston University.
Prof. Mark Munn
Mark Munn (The Pennsylvania State University; Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) studies the history of classical Greece through its literary and material culture and in its broader Mediterranean context. Classical Athens and its political and intellectual history is one focus of his research and teaching. He is especially interested in the development of historical thought represented by Herodotus and Thucydides and their successors in the fourth century BCE. Archaeological survey and the study of fortifications and territorial defenses, including the excavation of ancient Panakton, inform his approach to exploring the physical context of the ancient Greek past. He is also keenly interested in tracing the influence on the Greeks of the diverse cultures of the eastern Mediterranean from the Bronze Age to the Hellenistic era. He studies the archaeology of elite behavior and the influence of religious beliefs across cultures, with a particular focus on Phrygian and Lydian culture, and how these Anatolian peoples influenced both the Persian rulers of Anatolia and their Greek and Macedonian neighbors. Through his teaching and guiding student research, he is committed to helping students develop new perspectives across traditional boundaries of disciplines and genres in the study of the ancient Greek and Mediterranean world and its relevance to us today.
Prof. Cristiano Nicosia
Cristiano Nicosia (Ph.D., University of Milano) is Professor at the Department of Geosciences of the University of Padova. He is a geoarchaeologist working on the human impact on ancient landscapes, on paleo-environmental reconstruction and on the study of the daily lives of past individuals. He has worked on archaeological projects throughout Europe and as a member of archaeological expeditions in Tanzania, Iran, and Jordan. He co-edited the volume “Archaeological Soil and Sediment Micromorphology” for Wiley & Sons (2017), and the special issue of Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports “Geoarchaeology of Bronze Age Europe” (2019). In 2018 he authored the peer-reviewed monograph “Geoarcheologia delle stratificazioni urbane post-classiche” (Quasar, Rome). In 2020 he has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant for the project “GEODAP: GEoarchaeology of DAily Practices: extracting bronze age lifeways from the domestic stratigraphic record”.
Associate Prof. Alessandro Pierattini
Alessandro Pierattini (Associate Professor, University of Notre Dame; Ph.D. La Sapienza University of Rome) is a scholar of Greek and Roman architecture whose work integrates archaeology with the history of architecture, art, and construction. His research examines the technological, material, functional, and environmental dimensions of the ancient built environment, with particular emphasis on the origins of monumental architecture. More broadly, he investigates the social impact of architecture in Greek and Roman communities, the diffusion of design and construction innovations across the Mediterranean, and the economic, organizational, and labor investments that large-scale building projects required. He is the author of The Origins of Greek Temple Architecture (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and Manuale del Restauro Archeologico di Ercolano (Dedalo, 2009). His scholarship explores how ancient builders developed structural systems, construction techniques, and formal and aesthetic solutions that shaped monumental architecture, combining architectural analysis with the study of materials, building processes, and technological experimentation. Pierattini received his Ph.D. in Architectural History from La Sapienza University of Rome and currently serves as Director of the University of Notre Dame Excavations at Isthmia, where he is preparing a monograph on the Archaic Temple of Poseidon.
Associate Prof. Joseph Rife
Joseph Rife (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is Associate Professor of Classics and Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Vanderbilt College of Arts and Science. Professor Rife combines textual and material sources to study social structure and cultural identity in the eastern Mediterranean during the Roman Empire to the Early Byzantine period (first-ninth centuries A.D). Recently he has investigated funerary rituals and burial space; inscriptions as media for self-presentation and as physical properties; the practice of cremation; Christianity and urbanism; ports as nodes of transitivity in regional landscapes; and the historical setting of Greek literature, especially fiction and biography. Over the past two and a half decades he has conducted research in Cyprus, Italy, Kenya, Ohio, Tunisia, and Turkey, but his main focus has been southern Greece. Since 2002 Professor Rife has directed fieldwork at the archaeological site of Kenchreai, the eastern port of Corinth, under the auspices of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and in conjunction with the Hellenic Ministry of Culture. His award-winning book Isthmia IX: The Roman and Byzantine Graves and Human Remains (2012) examines the transition from Classical Antiquity to the Byzantine Middle Ages in the Greek countryside through the lens of mortuary behavior and skeletal biology. He has published articles and reviews in the areas of ancient Greek literature, epigraphy, archaeology and physical anthropology in, among others, Journal of Hellenic Studies, Hesperia, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, and International Journal of Osteoarchaeology.
Ex Officio Members:
Panagiotis Karkanas, Director, Wiener Laboratory
Kathleen Lynch, Chair, Managing Committee
Bonna Wescoat, Director, ASCSA
Liaison to the ASCSA Board of Trustees, Jane Buikstra