Phd in PHD SCHOOL OF ARCHAEOLOGY

Thesis title: Gli scavi di Minturnae della Pennsylvania University (1931-1934) alla luce di nuovi dati d’archivio. Ricostruzione del diario di scavo e prospettive topografiche

Revisiting the University of Pennsylvania’s Excavations at Minturnae (1931–1934) through New Archival Evidence: Reconstructing the Field Diary and Reassessing the Site’s Topography. This research makes accessible, through a systematic reorganisation, a substantial and largely unpublished body of documentation concerning the excavations carried out by Jotham Johnson at Minturnae between 1931 and 1933 on behalf of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (Penn Museum).
The rich iconographic corpus—including photographs, drawings, and site plans—thanks to its excellent preservation and technical quality, offers crucial material for complementing what remains visible and measurable in situ, and for advancing further analyses of the archaeological record. The documentation, preserved mainly in the Penn Museum Archives and the Historical Archive of the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, comprises about 300 letters, more than 400 photographs, detailed notes on artefacts, inventories of finds, and general site surveys, most of them unpublished. Additional sources come from the archives of Axel Boëthius, Francesco Pellati, and Ian Richmond, as well as from the Central State Archive in Rome. Despite nearly a century of studies on individual monuments and sectors of the site, a comprehensive and document-based account of the events had not previously been attempted. This study reconstructs that narrative and uses it as a framework for collocating the iconographic material, setting it within the broader context of archaeological activity in Italy and the institutional policies that guided it during the interwar period—a time marked by brief but significant openness to international collaborations. Structured in two volumes, the first presents the factual history of the excavations and the relevant correspondence; the second focuses on the iconographic corpus, tracing the progress of the campaigns and revealing previously unrecorded details, including the correct position of the North-East Tower, the reconstruction of the Western Gate, and the course of the northern walls beyond Towers III and IV.