BRYN MAWR ARCHAEOLOGY MAJOR EMILY HAMMER '06
VIRTUALLY RECONSTRUCTS ANCIENT ASSYRIAN PALACE

Emily Hammer '06, a double major in mathematics and archaeology, has a passion for both quantitative analysis and humanistic study. Last summer, with the aid of a Hanna Holborn Gray Undergraduate Research Grant, she was able to develop both interests by creating a computer reconstruction of an Assyrian palace built at Nineveh (in what is now northern Iraq ) over a period of about a decade or more around 700 B.C.E. The model calculates the view a human of average height would have had from each of the palace's known rooms.

"I was raised by two scientists," says Hammer, "and I find computer-based methods very appealing. I love the interdisciplinary nature of archaeology, and I've always been interested in history, but the crystalline lens of mathematics and the scientific method are very attractive and persuasive to me."

Last year, courses in geoarchaeology and spatial analysis "interested me in issues of space and landscape that I had never really thought about before," says Hammer. "I did a project building a computer-aided-design (CAD) model of a temple. The purpose was to learn how to use the software, but also to look at how people might have moved toward and through the spaces surrounding the structure. The following semester, using GIS (geographic information systems) technology, I looked at space on a much larger, regional scale."

Ready for a more ambitious project of her own, Hammer applied for and received research funding from the Hanna Holborn Gray '50 Undergraduate Research Program in the Humanities. The fund, established by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, supports 10 to 15 Bryn Mawr students' independent research each year. Hammer credits her adviser, Instructor in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology Geoffrey Compton, with fostering her interest in spatial analysis, encouraging her to pursue the grant and teaching her to write a research proposal.

Creating a model of Sennacherib's Southwest Palace at Nineveh certainly qualifies as an ambitious project. "The palace is huge," Hammer says. "It hasn't even been fully excavated, and we already know of the existence of more than 70 rooms."

With a freeware CAD program that can be downloaded from the Internet, Hammer used published excavation data to build her model and then used a GIS tool to analyze it and calculate sight lines from various vantage points.

This method is especially helpful, Hammer says, with issues of access and visibility. "You can create a grid of viewpoints throughout the structure and have the computer calculate what and how far you could see from each one of them. In this way, it shows what the dominant sight lines were and what spaces and imagery - the palace's walls were covered with figural reliefs - a visitor to the palace might have been able to see from a particular vantage point. It also provides a look at how mobility within the space might have been controlled by the architecture.

"Using models like this is a really great technique," Hammer says. "It is a quantitative method that ultimately gives us a more humanistic perspective: an insight into how real humans might have perceived the structure."

At the end of the summer, Hammer left her virtual site behind to travel to a real dig: she took part in a field school operated by the University of California, Berkeley, and Hebrew University of Jerusalem at an Israeli site known as Tel Dor. "It was very exciting," she says. "I've been studying Middle Eastern archaeology for three years, and this is the first time I've actually visited the Middle East." She got more Middle Eastern field experience over winter break, when she participated in some survey work in the United Arab Emirates under the direction of Assistant Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology Peter Magee.

Hammer is now working on a senior thesis on spatiality in Neo-Assyrian palaces, of which Sennacherib's southwest palace at Nineveh is one. After completing her degree at Bryn Mawr, Hammer plans to go to England to enter a one-year master's program in GIS and spatial-analysis applications in archaeology before starting a Ph.D. program.

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