The Murlo Foundation is delighted to announce several initiatives designed to advance our immediate goals. 

Sustained Student Scholarship Support

With the inception of excavations at Poggio Civitate in 1966, then Director Kyle Meredith Phillips Jr. sought to create a program that gave students the opportunity to engage with archaeological materials and contribute directly to a fuller understanding of this uniquely preserved Etruscan community. Today, Phillips’ spirit survives in the hundreds of students who have since joined the excavation and learned techniques of field archaeology through practical, applied experience. However, excavation field school programs like Poggio Civitate are expensive. While we remain committed to providing an efficient, low cost opportunity to undergraduates, the realities of housing and board costs, equipment renewal and the investment in new technologies of field archaeology are costly enterprises. All too often, highly qualified students are unable to join the field school for want of funding. One intended feature of The Murlo Foundation is to provide subsidies and scholarships for students lacking the means to otherwise participate.

Publication Support

Another feature of Phillips’ vision for work at Poggio Civitate included the involvement of students in the research and publication of the site. To date, dozens of Doctoral and Masters theses have arisen from the data recovered through the excavation of Poggio Civitate. In addition, undergraduate and graduate students alike have contributed to excavation reports and synthetic treatments of materials they themselves helped to excavate.

One unfortunate effect of a number of trends in academic publishing is the collapse of funding associated with the production and illustration of published research. This is especially challenging for research in a field as inherently visual as archaeology. While there is an essential truth to the cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words, photography and illustration of archaeological materials are often some of the costliest features of publication and can be a considerable challenge for struggling students in the field. The Murlo Foundation intends to provide financial support in the form of publication subventions that will help mitigate these costs, thus helping continue the tradition of student engagement with and publication of the very materials they help to reveal in the field. 

The Murlo Foundation also hopes to contribute to several longer term goals associated with the on-going research at Poggio Civitate and the Museo Civico of the Comune of Murlo.

Digital Archiving and OPEN CONTEXT

One such program builds upon the excavation’s long standing commitment to making the archival materials of the site publicly available to any interested party. This philosophy was first articulated in the creation of the Poggio Civitate Digital Archive, which has been publicly available since 2006 at poggiocivitate.org. This system was among the earliest attempts to draw together the complex resources of a significant archaeological archive into a single, navigable system. Today, many excavations have used the Poggio Civitate system as a model for their own similar efforts, but Poggio Civitate’s remains a critical research tool for scholars and students of the site and is referenced tens of thousands of time every year.

However, as digital technologies evolve, so to do the expectations of the scholarly community that uses them. While the Poggio Civitate Digital Archive is now a feature of the internationally acclaimed OPEN CONTEXT initiative, a burgeoning field of new digital strategies is available to explore.

Digital Representation of Archaeological Space

The history of excavation at Poggio Civitate has resulted in a vast, faceted archive of data. This digital archive represents hundreds of thousands of pages of original data, field notes, photographs and illustrations of the site as our understanding of it has evolved. The creation of the Poggio Civitate Digital Archive was a watershed event in the history of Mediterranean archaeology, creating a resource that can now be marshaled to both recreate and populate a virtual representation of the development and form of the archaeological site itself. The creation of a navigable representation of Poggio Civitate’s various phases of development, populated by representations of that material environment justified by the original excavation data is an achievable goal. Such a system would not only be a powerful teaching tool, it would also be a space that would encourage interdisciplinary scholarship by the representation not only of that which is known but by also showing that which requires speculative reconstruction. Indeed, such a virtual space realized through state of the art gaming technology could even serve as a digital space wherein students and scholars experience and debate the various issues and problems associated with the site – all through a globally accessible, digital portal.

Office Space in Vescovado di Murlo

Ironically, one of the most important features of the Poggio Civitate Digital Archive is our ability to constantly update, confirm and cross-reference it through the site’s physical archive. While ‘born-digital’ data is a goal of many new projects, at Poggio Civitate we recognize the essential contribution of our physical archive to on-going research. Over the many years since its inception, that physical archive has preserved the original observations, notations and commentaries of scholars and excavators. However, this physical archive requires maintenance and controlled storage. Another intended goal of The Murlo Foundation is to purchase office space in the town of Vescovado di Murlo to serve as an excavation headquarters, research center and repository of the materials and documentation central both to our project’s history and its future.

Endowment Development

Finally, The Murlo Foundation hopes to secure this future through the development of an endowment that will support these goals and give the Poggio Civitate Excavation the ability to further our longstanding mission to reveal, to explain and to share this remarkable region with future generations of archaeologists and visitors to the region.