Starting a Career in Science: Challenges and Successes
Developing a Corporate R&D Career
Making Chemistry More Accessible
Envisioning Ancient Spaces, Virtually
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Envisioning Ancient Spaces, Virtually
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Emily Hammer '06 |
Emily Hammer '06, a double major in mathematics and archaeology, has a passion for quantitative analysis and humanistic study. Last summer, she was able to develop both interests by creating a computer reconstruction of a Neo-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 approximately 70 known rooms.
During her senior year, Hammer expanded the scope of the project, writing a senior thesis on the Nineveh site and two more Neo-Assyrian palaces at Khorsabad and Nimrud. She plans to continue her study of these structures next year and beyond in Harvard University 's Ph.D. program in archaeology. "I've talked to my future adviser at Harvard, and he's very excited about this quantitatively enhanced approach," she says.
Through a Crystalline Lens
"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 worked on a project building a computer-aided-design [CAD] model of a temple. The purpose was to learn how to use the software for archaeological purposes, but also to look at how people might have moved toward and through the spaces surrounding the structure. The following semester, using geographic-information-science [GIS] 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.
Lines of Sight
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 calculate sight lines from various vantage points.
This method is especially helpful, Hammer says, with issues of access and visibility. "You can create a lattice of viewpoints throughout the structure and have the computer calculate what and how far you could see from each. 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 these built environments."
At the end of last 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. "I've been studying Near Eastern archaeology for three years," she says, "and this is the first time I've actually visited the Middle East." Hammer got more Middle Eastern field experience over winter break, when she participated in survey work in the United Arab Emirates under the direction of Assistant Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology Peter Magee.
Striking Patterns
Hammer's senior thesis, advised by Assistant Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology Mehmet-Ali Ataç, gives descriptions of the palace plans, focusing on visibility and movement patterns that emerge from the structure's spatial configurations.
The thesis also examines the subject matter in wall reliefs in outer, more-public and accessible spaces of the palace versus inner, more-private and secluded rooms. One striking pattern, she says, is the diversity of subject matter in the palace's throne-room suites, the only part of the palace known to have been regularly open to visitors.
"In other places in the palace, for the most part, the walls in each room, suite of rooms or courtyard treat a single narrative — a story of the king's triumph in a particular battle or with a particular civil-engineering project," Hammer says. "In the throne-room suite, there's a sampling of several narratives."
Overall, however, in the inner spaces of the palace, Hammer is finding fewer patterns in the placement of subject matter than she expected. "These are huge structures that were continually being built throughout the course of the king's reign," she explains. "Perhaps a planned iconographic program was less important than current events in determining the exact placement of reliefs with certain subject matters."
Claudia N. Ginanni '86 is the College's Web content manager. She edits its online weekly news publication, Bryn Mawr Now, as well as the monthly Bryn Mawr E-News, which is distributed via e-mail to alumnae/i and parents of current students.