Antioch, one of Late Antiquity's three great cities poised at the crossroads between the Mediterranean Sea and Asia, was the site of a 1930s Princeton-led archaeological expedition that eagerly unearthed an abundance of discoveries but didn’t get around to analyzing or publishing most of them. 

Curator of Numismatics Alan Stahl has established an A&A course devoted to puzzling together the perplexing archaeological evidence—one sector at a time. In spring ’24, Stahl taught the fifth iteration of ART 418 / HLS 418 / CLA 418 / PAW 418 “Antioch through the Ages - Archaeology and History,” this time delving into three cemeteries in the southeastern section of the city. 

The Antioch excavation found over 24,000 coins, over 300 mosaics, thousands of ceramic, glass, or marble artifacts, and produced eight years’ worth of excavation notes. 

As the organizing institution, Princeton still holds the largest share of materials, which includes all of the coins, housed in Princeton University Library’s Special Collections, all of the diaries, field reports, drawings, and photographs in A&A’s Visual Resources (VR), and the Princeton University Art Museum’s extensive collection of artifacts, sculpture, and mosaics, in addition to the selection of Antioch mosaics on view in various buildings around campus.

“The main theme of the course is how various disciplines – history, archaeology, art history, numismatics – can be combined to give insight into the lives of people in the past."— Alan Stahl

By investigating an explicit sector of the excavation course after course, Stahl and his students have made strides in reconstructing a rich picture of the city through time. “The main theme of the course is how various disciplines – history, archaeology, art history, numismatics – can be combined to give insight into the lives of people in the past,” said Stahl. 

“I was surprised by the abundance of material from the Antioch excavations held by the Princeton University Art Museum, and the extensive collection of archival materials in Visual Resources,” said A&A graduate student Hannah Hungerford. “The material is truly impressive - it includes field photographs, excavator notebooks, maps, object find cards, a large amount of correspondence, and lots more."

Julia Gearhart, VR’s director, has seen interest in Antioch growing and welcomed Stahl’s students to research in the archives. “It is always exciting when the history of the Antioch excavation is part of a course,” she said. “Alan’s course has the ability, being on campus, to really reconnect all the objects in the library and museum with the archives in A&A, and that is something he and I have wanted for years. So, each year he has his course we get a little further along in that goal.”

Digging into the excavation

“We were treated as scholars from day one,” said first-year transfer student Susan McLernon, whose participation in the course cemented her intention to minor in archaeology.  “Visiting lecturers from other universities would come and ask us, the students, questions about Antioch and the dig because we were the first ones to look at some of this material in decades,” said McLernon. “I walked in knowing almost nothing about these digs and walked out as essentially the (temporary) expert in one small part of the dig.” 

“Visiting lecturers from other universities would come and ask us, the students, questions about Antioch and the dig because we were the first ones to look at some of this material in decades. I walked in knowing almost nothing about these digs and walked out as essentially the (temporary) expert in one small part of the dig.” —Susan McLernon '26

Elena Baldi, Byzantine Numismatics Cataloger and Linked-Open-Data Coordinator, who audited the course, was thrilled on behalf of Princeton students and scholars who have a treasure trove of unpublished material and archival collections from one of the ancient world’s most important cities at their fingertips. An archaeologist herself, she said, “The course provided our students with the chance to study such a famous site, yet with so much unknown information and potential, offering them the chance to learn core archaeological research techniques related to post-excavation work.”

Professor Sarah F. Porter, who teaches religious studies at Gonzaga University, spoke with the class about her research on Antioch exploring the literature, practices, and material culture that emerged in the wake of Christianity in the second through fifth centuries CE. She contextualized the artifacts found in the cemeteries, noting that the shift to Christianity did not categorically end inhabitants’ practice of previous rituals, which explained the cultural and religious blending evident in the cemetery’s graves.

The over 24,000 bronze coins in Special Collections were of acute interest to students, since the attributions on legible coins clearly define the Terminus post quem (TPQ), Latin for "limit after which,” or earliest possible date a coin could have been deposited, thereby dating the objects and architecture found at the same level. 

“The objects recovered at the cemetery, provide an insight into trade, exchange, religion, that seems to have lasted in the area for several centuries, as witnessed by the evidence of coinage, for example,” said Baldi.  

Students visited the Antioch coin collection and also learned about the Islamic coins found in their sector from Warren Schultz, professor of Islamic history at DePaul University, whose work synthesizes literary, archaeological, numismatic, and material culture sources—and who had just concluded two weeks examining the Islamic coins excavated in Antioch. 

Gearhart familiarized students with the extensive Antioch archives in VR, which include hundreds of maps, sketches, notebooks, inventory lists, find cards, correspondence, and photos. As students familiarized themselves with the sector, they each chose a sub-section to examine for their final projects. 

In addition to diving into VR’s archives, a highlight of the course for Stahl and his students was the visit to the Museum’s offsite classroom. “I really loved going to the art museum's archives to look at the items found at the dig. We each got to see things that hadn't been touched or researched in nearly a hundred years,” said Susan McLernon. “They felt like personal objects that we were already intimately familiar with since we'd been reading diaries and field notes about them for weeks.”

"Professor Stahl’s students brought Antioch to life, offering new and fascinating glimpses of daily life, death and change in the ancient city...Facilitating this kind of engagement with the collections upholds the Museum’s commitment to support object-based teaching and is truly one of the best parts of my job.” —Joelle Collins

Collections Associate Joelle Collins, who facilitated the visit along with Assistant Curator of Ancient Mediterranean Art Carolyn Laferrière, was thrilled to see the Antioch collection in use. “As a Roman archaeologist who works closely with a wide range of the Museum’s holdings, I was delighted to learn that PUAM’s historically under-studied Antioch collection was to play a key role in Professor Stahl’s class,” she said.  “Students taking ART 418 arrived in the study room equipped with an impressive knowledge of both the site and the objects, bringing with them, in addition, a host of questions about those objects—questions which only a careful, in-person examination of the material could answer.”  

“The visit proved to be productive and rewarding not only for the students but for me as well.  Facilitating this kind of engagement with the collections upholds the Museum’s commitment to support object-based teaching and is truly one of the best parts of my job,” said Collins.

Drawing conclusions

Having immersed themselves in the dense collection of archaeological and archival evidence for weeks, students deciphered, contextualized, and presented their areas of focus to classmates along with Gearhart, Collins, A&A Professor Samuel Holzman, and Andrea Di Giorgi (Florida State University) and Asa Eger (University of North Carolina at Greensboro), authors of a book assigned for the class titled Antioch: A History (2021) along with two forthcoming volumes on specific sectors in Antioch.

“The main characteristic of this semester's sectors is that they all represent cemetery areas that seem to have been first used in the first to second centuries CE, show little activity in the third and fourth centuries, and revived activity and building in the fifth through seventh centuries,” said Stahl.  “As the work of the students studying various parts of the site developed, it became clear to us that there was a unified temporal aspect of high-prestige burials in the early Roman period and then re-use involving Christian practice in Late Antiquity. The exact nature of this is yet to be determined.”

“Listening to the student’s presentations of their research projects some weeks after their visit to the study room, I was surprised by the extent to which they were able to synthesize information taken from a variety of sources into coherent and compelling pictures of areas of the Antiochene cemetery,” said Collins. “Not only did I learn a great deal about the history, architecture and layout of the site but I also came to appreciate the powerful impact a unified study of coins, other artifacts and excavation records can have on our understanding of the material.  Rarely have such comprehensive treatments of these three now-separate collections been undertaken. In doing so, Professor Stahl’s students brought Antioch to life, offering new and fascinating glimpses of daily life, death and change in the ancient city.”

An especially exciting discovery

As is so often the reward of close-looking and conscientious analysis, an exciting new discovery emerged from the course. Hungerford researched a critical observation on the central mosaic of the cemeteries, referred to as “the Mnemosyne mosaic” after its central panel. “It was entirely by chance that I discovered that a personification from the Mnemosyne mosaic was likely restored incorrectly back in the 1930s,” she said. “While we were examining an in situ excavation photograph, one of the undergraduate students, Susan McLernon, made the astute observation that the label on one of the border figures appeared to read ‘ΑΙΩΡΑ,’ (Aiora) which is corroborated by excavator Jean Lassus’s 1935 Fieldbook.”  Αiora which means hammock, seemed less intuitive than ‘ΑΓΟΡΑ’ (Agora), or market, which is what the restored mosaic reads, reflected in all later scholarship.  “This disjunction piqued my interest, and I began researching the ancient Aiora festival and the Mnemosyne mosaic generally, and started digging into the archival records to try to understand when and why the identification changed. Moving forward, I am visiting the Worcester Art Museum to view their archival materials and to examine the mosaic in person, which is currently in storage there. I hope to both confirm the identification of this personification, and also to contextualize it with the all-female symposium central scene, hopefully contributing to a new interpretation of the whole mosaic,” she said. 

Seemingly, decades of interpretation have been based on a faulty reading. “Hannah Hungerford's work on this will be of major significance in future considerations of this famous mosaic,” said Stahl.

Looking forward

The excitement of working with immensely important yet largely untouched archaeological evidence clearly resonated with Stahl’s students. “I highly recommend the course to anyone interested in ancient material culture,” said Hungerford. “Professor Stahl’s historical and numismatic expertise combined with the interesting material history of Antioch made for a wonderful semester.”

The course also had a profound impact on McLernon, who is now declaring an archaeology minor. “Princeton is famous for giving undergraduates opportunities to research. When we think about research, most of us think about people doing something more quantitative or innovating in science. I hadn't considered that students were doing new and exciting research in the humanities,” she said. “Princeton has so many untouched archives that are begging to be looked at, and now I know how to get started on research that could rewrite our past.”

“To me, it’s a win-win all around,” said Gearhart. “Students have the opportunity to produce original scholarship from an important resource right here, Visual Resources can utilize the interest and focus to prioritize processing the collection, and Antioch gets the re-investigation it really deserves.”

“Princeton has so many untouched archives that are begging to be looked at, and now I know how to get started on research that could rewrite our past.” —Susan McLernon '26