Summer Research Reports: Rebecca Levitan
We were thrilled to support Rebecca Levitan in her work digital documentation of the Grotto of Tiberius! Read more about her experience below!
Thanks to a BCNM Summer Research Award, I was able to travel to complete fieldwork in Sperlonga, Italy, Kimolos, Greece, and embark on a new project in Naxos, Greece, which I will continue in November 2022. My project in Sperlonga involves the digital documentation of thousands of marble sculptural fragments from the so-called “Grotto of Tiberius” – an ancient cave decorated in the Roman period with an elaborate sculptural program depicting scenes from the Iliad. My work in Sperlonga involved the sorting, counting, categorization, and documentation of sculptural fragments including 3-d scanning with LiDAR and photography, both of which were integrated into a bespoke database.
In Greece, I worked on the Small Cycladic Islands Project, which employs cutting edge techniques to the study of uninhabited small islands in the Aegean, tracking their use over more than three millennia.
I also began work on a new project titled “Abandoned Giants: A Digital Recontextualization of the Fragmentary Colossal Kouroi,” along with collaborators Evan Levine and Emlyn Dodd. This project involves a new restudy on ancient quarries and abandoned colossal sculpt Although the fieldwork aspect of this project was delayed until November 2022, I was able to conduct preliminary research and meet with collaborators to begin planning our digital documentation project.