Luther College professor is preparing for two international archaeological excavations

Luther College professor Dan Davis is heading to Israel and Greece soon.  Davis will take two different groups of Luther students on archeological excavations: Robert Muller, Anna Luber and Zachary Ziarnik will accompany him to Caesarea, Israel, where they will help launch a new, multi-year excavation, and Collin Carpenter and Alex Aakre will help Davis with artifact processing in Southern Greece.

The Caesarea excavation is an ancient Roman site located on the Mediterranean Sea. Davis will serve as assistant field director under director of classical and Mediterranean studies at Vanderbilt University Joseph Rife. The Luther students will work alongside a contingent of students from Vanderbilt University who are completing a course on Roman to Medieval Near East.

Next Davis will journey to southern Greece, at Kenchreai, where he has collaborated with Rife for the past six years. The students will help them process the archaeological finds that have been excavated over the past several years and prepare them for publication.

Davis has authored numerous articles on ancient seafaring and marine archaeology and is currently working on two major publication projects. One project is a book chapter on the sailing performance of the replica of a 2,300-year-old merchant ship found off Cyprus. His other project involves ancient shipwrecks in the deep sea.