The Etruscan Amber Project
.
The Etruscan Amber Project was a digital humanities project curated by the students enrolled in CLCV 349, Etruscan Archaeology, Fall 2019. The database and exhibits were originally created in Omeka and housed on an independent server, now archived and available in static form on this site.
A modern reconstruction of ancient amber and gold beads. Getty 77.AO.77.3
Why amber? As Nuccia Negroni Catacchio (2011, 56) points out, “the amber roads were also the arteries of civilization.” Amber is fossilized tree resin. Nearly all amber used in the ancient Mediterranean comes from the region of the Baltic sea. As a raw material, therefore, it moved across vast distances, bringing peoples of many places together through trade-based interactions.
Our Goal The goals of the project were: 1) to survey amber finds in the collections of US museums from Italy, dating between 900 BCE and 1 BCE; 2) to learn how to create a searchable database and use a content management system (CMS) to structure the data; 2) to prototype educational exhibits, written for a general audience, to guide users through the material. We thank all museums in whose collections the objects reside.
Our Method To form the archive, the students worked in teams to search museum databases and compiled a list of objects that fit our criteria: made of amber, identified as from Italy or as product of Etruscan manufacture. We structured the data using Extended Dublin Core, and checked each other’s work to ensure uniformity. In all, the students created a database totaling 286 objects. All images used were courtesy the open-access policies of the museums. For those institutions without an open-access policy, we presented only data about the objects, and did not reproduce images.
Data You can find our data here.
Contributors and Exhibits
Professor: Molly Swetnam-Burland
“Ornament and Identity” Nick Carpenter, Matt Forcier, Hana Liebman, Tina Monroe, Sarah Roberts, Georgios Tomadakis
“Depictions of the Family” Andrew Brennan, Carol Oordt, James Psathas, Julie Vu, Jordan Weisberg
“Welcome to the Jungle (of Etruria)” Annie Brown, Madeleine Nelson, Rachael Roth, Josiah Tunstall, Sophia Warnement
“Masterminds of Multimedia” Morgan Blackwelder, Virginia Grace Burns, Sydney Kennedy, Kathryn Whitehead
“Representations of Women in Amber“ Rebecca Gaborek, Kate Newell, Peter Psathas, Ashton Rodgers, Rachel Tomei
Museums surveyed