Staff

Professor Joseph C. Carter
Director
(j.carter at mail.utexas.edu)
Professor Carter has been increasingly engaged in recent years in research projects in collaboration with Ukrainian archaeologists and students working at Chersonesos and elsewhere in that country. He assisted the Ukrainian authorities with the development of conservation and management programs and, in particular, always with the support of the Packard Humanities Institute and the collaboration of the National Preserve of Tauric Chersonesos at Sevastopol, with plans for the world's first archaeological park of the ancient Greek countryside.   Professor Carter's current research interests include a major publication, with Dr. Alberto Prieto and others, of the Metaponto field survey, and, with Dr. Richard Posamentir and others, of the polychrome grave monuments of the Hellenistic Necropolis of Chersonesos.  

Professor Carter is a Classics and Astronomy graduate of Amherst College with a Ph.D. from Princeton in Classical Archaeology (1971). He is a former fellow of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the American Academy in Rome. In addition to the study of chorai in the Colonial Greek World, his long-term academic interests include Greek sculpture and painting, particularly of the Early Hellenistic period.   His Jerome lectures (2000-2001) at the University of Michigan and the American Academy in Rome were published in January 2006, as Discovering the Greek Countryside at Metaponto (University of Michigan Press).

Assistant Professor Adam Rabinowitz
Assistant Director
(arabinow at mail.utexas.edu)
Adam (B.A. in Classics and History from Swarthmore College, Ph.D. in Classical Art and Archaeology from the University of Michigan) joined ICA in 2004.   He is a former fellow of the American Academy in Rome ('02), where he spent a year performing research for a dissertation on the social role of communal drinking in the Greek and indigenous communities of Archaic Sicily and South Italy. Adam's academic interests in domestic architecture, food and drink, and the interaction between Greeks and non-Greeks correspond well to ICA's wide-ranging research programs.   Currently, his duties include the co-direction of ongoing excavations in the South Region of the urban zone of Chersonesos and the coordination of several of ICA's other collaborations with the National Preserve of Tauric Chersonesos.   He is a tenure-track faculty member in the Department of Classics, where he teaches courses on Greek and Roman archaeology and culture.

Carol K. Cook
Administrator
(ckcook at mail.utexas.edu)
Carol (M.A. in English, Iowa State University) came to ICA in spring 2001 after a long stint as Executive Director of the Centre for International Understanding in St. Louis and a number of years teaching literature, as well as coordinating Continuing Education seminars at the University of Iowa. Besides her excellent administrative, budgeting, and travel management skills, Carol brings to her position a keen sense of humor and valued abilities as an editor and writer.

Pat Irwin
Office Manager
(pirwin at mail.utexas.edu)
Pat (PSI Certified) comes to ICA with many years experience as a legal secretary and as an insurance adjustment business owner/manager. In addition to our accounts payable, she has taken charge of a multitude of administrative tasks and has provided administrative continuity during a period of rapid growth for ICA. Her skills and adaptability with foreign keyboards are utilized with the numerous versions of various papers and book manuscripts necessary for each publication by ICA.

Chris Williams
Photographer and Editor
(criswill at mail.utexas.edu)
Chris (B.A. in History, UT Austin) has been working with ICA regularly since the excavation campaign of 1979, when he served as photographer. Chris' skills with the camera and the computer, his gift for design and layout, and multiple other talents make him the most versatile person on the ICA staff. Always dependable, Chris is the other half (with the Director) of ICA's collective memory. At the beginning of 2001, Chris became a full-time member of the ICA staff, thanks to generous support from PHI.

 

Deena Berg
Design/Layout/Editing
(dberg at mail.utexas.edu)
Deena (B.A. Architecture, Rice University; M.A., Ph.D. Classics, University of Texas at Austin) first worked at Metaponto in 1981 creating architectural drawings. She returned in 2007 to assist with the editing and layout of research materials and the ICA website. Her current projects include the excavation at Capo Alfiere and Croton survey publications. Her dissertation traced the early development of fountain architecture and she is a published translator of Roman comedy.

 

Dan Davis
Researcher and Ph.D. Student
(dandavis at mail.utexas.edu)
Dan Davis earned his B.A. in Classics from the University of Iowa (1996), his M.A. in Anthropology and Nautical Archaeology from Texas A&M University (2001), and is currently a Ph.D. student in Classical Archaeology at the University of Texas at Austin. Dan joined ICA in 2003 as a remote-sensing specialist and assistant editor as he pursues his doctoral studies. Since 1995, Dan has participated in numerous excavations in Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Black Sea, including Portugal, The Netherlands, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and the Republic of Georgia. His scholarly interests include ancient seafaring and trade in the Mediterranean and Black Seas, the Bronze Age of the eastern Mediterranean, Greek Colonization, and the emerging field of deepwater archaeology.

 

Nayla Muntasser
Researcher and Ceramics Specialist
(nkmuntasser at mail.utexas.edu)
Nayla (B.A. Joint Honors in Philosophy and Economics, University of London; M.A. in Art History, Rice University; Ph.D. in Art History, University of Texas) specializes in Roman Art and Architecture. At present, she is working on the Hellenistic and Roman Fine Wares from the Pantanello Sanctuary located in the chora of Metapontum. Her doctoral dissertation in Art History (UT College of Fine Arts) was on the social context of the houses of late antiquity in Ostia, where she also did some archaeological field work. Her other scholarly interests include the urban development of Roman provincial cities, a subject she teaches and which also which provides her with a Mediterranean-wide outlook that is useful for her research at ICA.

Taissa Bushnell
Pidtrymka Chersonesu Director
CRM Specialist (taissabushnell at hotmail.com)
Taissa has been ICA's representative in Ukraine and director of 'Pidtrymka Chersonesu' (Support for Chersonesos), its non-governmental organization in Sevastopol, since 2001.  She is currently applying her background in art history (M.A., McGill University, 2001) and managing archaeological sites (M.A., Institute of Archaeology, University College London, 2005) in helping to develop a management plan for Chersonesos, a requirement for the site's eventual nomination to the UNESCO World Heritage List.  Taissa is also involved in coordinating an exciting new US-Ukrainian collaborative project to research ancient trade routes on the Black Sea.  This project brings together the Department of Underwater Heritage of Ukraine, the Institute of Archaeological Oceanography of the University of Rhode Island, and ICA.

Alberto Prieto, Ph.D., Editor (aprieto at mail.utexas.edu)
Alberto (B.A. in Classics, Harvard University; MLitt. in Ancient History, University of St. Andrews, Scotland, Ph.D. in Classics, University of Texas) is currently preparing the first of the two final publications on the Metapontum survey.

Jessica Trelogan, GIS Specialist (j.trelogan at mail.utexas.edu)
Jessica (M.A. in Classics, UT Austin) first began working with ICA as a field crew member at Chersonesos in 1996, and in recent years has generously mentored students new to summer site work while running the total station survey for ICA's excavations at Chersonesos. She developed an interest in geographic information science since working with ICA and the UT Center for Space Research on a NASA-funded project investigating remote sensing for the study and protection of the Chersonesan chora. She is currently working on a GIS-based recording system for site conservation and her site-based GIS for ICA's excavations in the city holds much promise for fully integrated excavation recording.

Mariah Wade, Ph.D., Ceramics Specialist (m.wade at mail.utexas.edu)
Mariah (Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Texas) began her work on the pottery from the Pantanello Sanctuary at Metaponto as a student volunteer, along with her husband Don, in the summer of 1991. Mariah and Don continued to devote their summers to the project while she completed her Ph.D. Mariah is a specialist on ancient ceramics, and has combined the study of form and function with the technical aspects of pottery.   She has run several field school seasons in Metaponto, organized teams of colleagues and University of Texas students to assist her in preparing a book on the pottery of Pantanello, and has had the perseverance to supervise the compiling of a ceramics database with 30,000 entries.