|
|||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||
|
Written and Oral Reports |
||||||||||||||
Related TopicsAriadne: Resources for Athenaze |
Greek Archaeology The Written ReportThe written portion of an oral report is meant to provide background and the sources for your oral report. In other words, the written report should focus on the facts: the history of the site, what materials were used, significant details about the monument. It is not meant to be a written version of the oral report. It may be in the form of lecture notes or a fairly detailed outline. It may be no longer than 2 sides of one sheet of paper. The written portion should include:
For excavation history and further bibliography, the best places to look first are the books on course reserves in Cole Library, and on-line resources Perseus Project, Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites, and Prehistoric Archaeology of the Aegean. See the bibliography page for more print resources. See the Trip home page for more web resources. Some common abbreviations of English-language journals (cf. AJA 95 [1991] 1-16 for a more complete list, including foreign periodicals):
The Oral ReportThe oral portion of the report should take about 20-30 minutes. It may in fact take longer since we will be walking around the site and there will be questions. It will include all the relevant information from your written report plus an interpretation of the monument: how does it speak to Greeks who saw it? Here are some questions you will want to discuss: 1. What evidence (archaeological and/or literary) can be used in securing a date and identifying the builder of the monument (coins, pottery, architecture, inscriptions, literary evidence)? 2. With what materials was the monument built? What decoration adorned the monument? What sort of finds (if any) were found at the site that may help identify the monument's function or purpose? 3. What is the plan of the site? What is the internal arrangement of the monument? How does one room or section relate to another? For questions 4-5, think of the monuments you are studying as almost living beings that can speak to other monuments nearby and the people who view them through the language of its architectural style, sculptural decoration, and inscriptions. 4. Why is the monument's location important? How does it relate to other monuments nearby? If the site includes more than one building, how do the different buildings interact and respond to each other? Is there anything (architectural, sculptural, social, political) that unifies the buildings on the site? 5. Why was the monument built? What does the style, architecture, and decoration say about the person/city that commissioned it? What effect did it have on people who saw it? How do people from different social classes or different genders view the monument? Does it make a political, moral, religious, or social statement? For whom does it make this statement? Additional Tips The best reports will put your site within the context of other sites we have seen on the trip, be able to compare the monuments at your site with others, be able to say what is typical and what is unusual about the site. In short the best report will synthesize what is most significant about your site.
|
|
||||||||||||
|