Graduate Student

Jose L. Marrero-Rosado and Sabrina Agarwal

This research project involved travel to the community of Chiripa, Bolivia for the 2023 field season of the Taraco Archaeological Project. During the season, excavations were conducted at three sites in the Taraco Peninsula. Around 200 samples were processed via flotation, as well as about 60 which were processed via dry screening, yielding macrobotanical remains that were exported for anaysis at the McCown Archaeobotany Laboratory .

During the excavation season at Amheida this year, a reassessment of local scribal practices in the Dakhla Oasis in the Roman era revealed a number of connections and trends through multiple forms of evidence, namely archaeological (small finds), art historical (tomb walls), architectural (buildings), papyrological (paleography), and ceramic (ostraka). The preliminary results of this study show that scribal practices in the Dakhla Oasis adhere to those elsewhere in the Roman Empire despite its extreme geographical remoteness.

In 1855, Puerto Rico was struck by the cholera epidemic, killing 20,000 to 50,000 individuals – 4-10% of the total population at the time. Due to the high volume of corpses piling up and fear of the disease’s further spreading, a cemetery outside of the walls of El Morro was established. This cemetery remained untouched for over a century, due to fears that the disease might resurface. Today, however, this cemetery is in danger of being destroyed, as tourists in Old San Juan have been recently granted access to this section of the fort, uncovering human remains as they walk in the trail.

Oxygen and carbon isotopes extracted from gazelle tooth enamel are used to reconstruct the paleoenvironment during the occupation of Kharaneh IV

The Stahl Research Report is available on eScholarship.

This work is based on my dissertation research which looks at the skeletal, material culture, and ethnographic evidence of structural violence in Latin America, and how this leads to immigration. Structural violence can be seen in these various avenues and used in conjunction with one another in providing a better framework that is not necessarily driven by the researcher’s interpretation but by the individuals who experienced this structural violence firsthand.

 Thanks to the Stahl Award, I was able to travel to complete fieldwork in Sperlonga, Italy in June 2022. The project in Sperlonga involves the digital documentation of thousands of marble 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 and Odyssey. This year, my work in Sperlonga involved the sorting, counting, categorization, and documentation of sculptural fragments related to a sculpture known as the Pasquino Group.