Archaeology Brown Bag Lecture: The Southeast Europe Digital Documentation Project (SEEDD): Roman Archaeology at the Edge of Empire

Anne Hunnel Chen, Brown University, Dept. of the History of Art & Architecture. Abstract: Roman history has long been missing a chapter—a chapter that played out in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia. Clues to that history exist in the remains of five imperial residences, numerous military installations, and an architecturally imposing archbishopric. It is a story of a region that existed as a way-point along a sensitive frontier between East and West. It is a story that includes a critical role in the development of early Christian life and culture. It is a story about the birthplace of no fewer than eighteen emperors. Transcending modern political boundaries that have concealed the region's crucial significance in antiquity, the Southeast Europe Digital Documentation Project (SEEDD) is integrating and expanding access to archaeological information from self-contained sites across the region in an effort to tell that story. Beyond introducing the project and its methodology, this lecture will present for the first time a reconstruction of an unprecedented porphyry imperial statue group as a demonstration of how SEEDD’s data-integration strategy may be used to ask new questions and draw new conclusions from extant data.