2022 AIA-NYS Research Scholarship Recipient (Cohort II)

Becca Tauscher graduated from Hunter College and received her B.A. in Classical Studies and Classical Archaeology in the spring of 2021. While at Hunter, she was awarded the Solomon Bluhm Scholarship in classics and the Raab Presidential Research Fellowship. She also was accepted as the 2020–2021 Archaeological Institute of America New York Society Scholar. Her undergraduate thesis focused on Seven Against Thebes iconography in Etruscan material culture during the 5th–2nd century BCE and was written under Professor Joanne Spurza. Becca has worked with the Paideia Institute as a Latin teacher and tutor at ThinkPrep Academy in Manhattan, as well as helped to revive the Latin program at the Williamsburg Charter High School in Brooklyn. This past year she was a Senior Paideia Fellow working in Rome on various Paideia projects and running academic tours for high school and college students in Florence, Naples, Rome, and Greece. Over the summer she attended her first field school with the assistance of the AIA-NYS Research Scholarship. In July she worked at the Necropoli del Vallone di San Lorenzo alongside Italian students from the University of Perugia to excavate four 6th c. BCE tombs of either Etruscan or Umbrian origin. The work focused on four areas that have been surveyed earlier in the season: a collapsed chamber tomb, an exposed child’s burial, a Roman road of a later period, and another tomb that revealed a horse burial. At the end of the month, a fourth burial was discovered of a unexpected type: a cassone-type tomb unique to the necropolis. Rebecca spent her time learning and excavating on site, as well as doing catalog work in the museum of finds from the previous season.

☞ Read about Rebecca’s work in the September 2022 issue of the AIA-New York Society Newsletter.