Penn Arts & Sciences Logo

Summer Research: Tim Warnock

I spent the summer of 2019 attending the Summer Session at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. This six-week, intensive tour of Greece was an inspiring and highly educational experience. We toured sites throughout Crete, the Peloponnese, and the mainland, as far north as Thessaloniki. Having studied the history, archaeology, and art of ancient Greece for many years, it was an invaluable experience to see sites and visit museums in person. There is nothing that can replace the experience of walking the Sacred Way at Delphi, stepping inside the Parthenon, entering the Great Tumulus at Aegae, or getting lost in the maze that is Knossos. The program was also invaluable in the amount of access it gave me to archaeological sites that would have been logistically difficult to reach were I travelling alone, such as the ash altar to Zeus on Mount Lykaion or the Temple of Apollo at Thermon. Another element of the program, and one that I did not expect, was the amount of history I would learn outside of the ancient context. Having learned more about and seen evidence of the Byzantine, Frankish, Ottoman, and independent periods of Greek history has impacted immensely my understanding of how we, as scholars, see Greece, both ancient and modern. Lastly, the opportunity to spend six weeks interacting closely with students and professors of the ancient world who study a myriad of topics was a rare one and has given me new questions to ask and different ways of answering the questions I already had.