Digging Toward Questions: The University of Portland Pollentia Undergraduate Research Expedition | University of Portland

Digging Toward Questions: The University of Portland Pollentia Undergraduate Research Expedition

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College of Arts and Sciences

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Portland Magazine

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October 24, 2019

For the past five summers a cohort of dedicated UP faculty and students has traveled to an archeological dig in Mallorca hoping to find clues about ancient Rome and early Christianity.

By Jessica Murphy Moo
Photos by Adam Guggenheim

“You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.”

“Or the question it asks you, forcing you to answer…”

—from Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino

THE STUDENT CRADLED the human skull in her hands. With permission from the site’s physical anthropologist, she had pulled the skull from a clear bag, inside a crate with other bones from this individual—one individual among stacks and stacks of crates with meticulously catalogued and carbon-dated human remains ranging from the Roman era to the 13th century.

hands cradling a skull at an archeological dig site

The students and faculty in the room were from University of Portland. Along with the Spanish anthropologist and other archeologists, they were working for the summer on the dig site at the ancient Roman city of Pollentia, located on the island of Mallorca off the coast of Spain. The students had been working in the field, digging up artifacts and human remains at a Roman and early Christian burial ground for several weeks, but this was the first time this student held a skull, and the air seemed to leave the room for the moment.

“Life-altering,” the student said, almost under her breath.

The skull (we thought it was from a male, wide-jawed) was incredibly light—it felt as light as a bar of soap—which seemed at odds with the weight of the moment. Attached to the skull was a jawbone and a full set of teeth.

She turned the skull toward her fellow student, who noted, “He didn’t even need braces.”

The student then placed the skull gently back in the bag and found the individual’s long arm and leg bones. She tied a label to each so they could be promptly and accurately returned after bringing them to the lab with their chemistry professor to run a test to try to determine the composition of the bones and therefore to piece together something of the individual’s diet, some clues about how he lived.

These bones pose many, many questions. Who were these people? Where were their ancestors from? What was their religion? What did they eat? Also among the questions are some that are challenging in a big-picture way: What are the ethics here? Is it ever ethical to dig up human remains for purposes of research, and if so how?

In partnership with Spanish colleagues, the Pollentia Undergraduate Research Expedition—known as UP PURE—leans in to all of these questions and many more.

The Partnership

July 2019 marked the fifth summer that University of Portland has sent a team of students and professors to work at Pollentia. Over the years the team has been interdisciplinary—chemists, a geneticist, engineers, a microbiologist, theologians, education and library science professors, and business, marketing, and English majors have all found points of inquiry from this site and from the bones excavated there. Members of all these disciplines have also gotten out in the field and done the slow, often back-aching, knee-crunching, centimeter-by-centimeter work of excavating artifacts in the blazing Mallorcan sun.

artifacts and pickaxe

University of Portland started coming here because of the scholarship and overall wonderful good-nature of theologian and professor Fr. Richard Rutherford, CSC. He met the co-director of Pollentia, Miguel Ángel Cau Ontiveros, in Sardinia after realizing they had a shared interest in early Christianity. Fr. Rutherford’s scholarship had been in early baptistries. Cau invited him to Pollentia, a Roman city dating from 123 BC, to see if they might partner in the excavation of an area within the site that had yielded some indications of early Christian burials and potentially the wall of a former basilica (this has yet to be confirmed).

“It was something very informal in a way at the beginning, but then it evolved into the program we have with Portland being part of the team in Pollentia,” says Cau. Six years in, University of Portland is listed as a partner on the tourist signage.

A typical day begins onsite at 7:30 am (6 am if anyone needed 3D imagery with the morning light), then the wheelbarrow, pickaxes, Harris tools, and brushes come out, and everybody gets to their assigned grave to dig, standing in the grave if it is big and deep enough or lying on their bellies and reaching down into the graves to scrape and brush. They work until the mid-morning desayuno sandwich break along with the other Spanish archeologists in the shadow of two almond trees and one olive tree. Then back to digging until one o’clock, lunch, break, and then research from 3–6 pm.

This summer research program is not for people who like to sleep late or for academics who don’t like to get dirty.

The Roman City

Before we get too close up to the discoveries, let’s get the big-picture view and bearings on geography. At 30 to 50 acres (depending on if you include the burial grounds), Pollentia is one of two Roman cities on the island of Mallorca, but it’s the only active excavation. The other Roman city on the island is buried underneath the modern city of Palma, the city with the major airport. Because Pollentia is under farmland—and not under highways and high rises—the entire Roman city can be excavated. (To avoid building over ancient Roman cities, sometimes new builds don’t happen in Europe without an archeologist first reviewing the site. It’s very (very) hard to imagine an archeological-survey requirement for the speed-of-light development in say, Seattle, WA, where there seem to be as many cranes as there are cars.)

Pollentia has all the elements of a Roman city. As Romans spread their empire to new places, they were pretty consistent city-blueprint-wise. They always situated their forum at the city’s nerve center, then fanned out with roads and temples, shops, often a market, residential homes, and a theater. Until Christianity became the official religion, the cemetery (also called a necropolis) was typically outside the city walls.

Two students examine ancient bones

Located on a hill between two bays, Pollentia would have made an impressive sight for ships heading in to port. The city, the buildings, and the thousand-seat theater would have conveyed power. Today you won’t see any of those “grand buildings on the hill” when you walk the site. Only 10 percent of Pollentia has been excavated; 90 percent is still underground. Even the things you do see that have to do with buildings are only inches high. You essentially see a true-to-size blueprint—the bases of walls and columns, the base of a pedestal where a sculpture of an emperor probably stood, when the city got a facelift at the end of the 2nd century AD. You have to use your imagination.

“As magnificent as it was—and this was a minor Roman colony—it’s been buried for years, lost,” says UP PURE director Ronda Bard. “The Roman Empire seemed invincible. It fell apart.”

If you feel an eerie moment of self-reflection about another world power that might sometimes act like it’s invincible, all I’ll say here is that you aren’t alone in your thoughts. Cau told me that the work of archeology—really contemplating the vast passage of time, how sophisticated societies end up a layer in the dirt, and the short span of a human life—inspires him to leave behind the best possible record he can for future generations and to make sure he spends enough time with his family.

The Artifacts

There were a surprising number of discoveries in the week I visited, enough to keep everyone digging, enough to keep Indiana Jones references on rotation.

artifacts and a pickaxe on archeological dig

At the necropolis one student found a teeny-tiny coin, encrusted in minerals, which appeared about half the circumference of a dime. (How she found this, I don’t know; it really looked like dirt.) Another student found a coin cut in half. Everyone found many shards of pottery, which they later washed and another group catalogued and puzzle-pieced back together. Everyone also found a startling number of bones, most of which had been jumbled together from a previous dig. Students who had taken anatomy identified the bones. One grave had about five adult skulls; through a crack in one of them we could see the trace of a blood vessel on the interior of the cranium. Kara Breuer (’96, ’06), who teaches the organic chemistry labs at UP, found the minuscule ribs of a baby, which stopped my breath for a moment.

“As a parent, it’s always very moving to find a child,” says Bard. She has found three in the years she has been doing the program. “You can’t help but wonder what happened. Of course there was grief.”

On the final week, they discovered two never-before uncovered graves. Inside one was a complete skeleton of a child, the head tilted to the side; one hand was at the child’s side, one over the body. The body had been buried with an amphora and a glass. What I can’t shake is the image of the child’s tiny knee caps still nestled over the knees.

Scholarly Fireworks

“Archeology nowadays has become a discipline that takes more and more advantage of techniques and methodologies coming from experimental sciences,” says Cau. “UP people—apart from helping in the excavation process—really help us a lot in that analytical work that we do with our materials.”

Pollentia has inspired a wide range of scholarship and makes a strong case for a multi-disciplinary liberal arts education today. Some of that research happens in Alcúdia—the walled city next to Pollentia—and this summer’s research involved X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy scans of bones and of paint pigments in the local church museum. All of the data from this research comes back to University of Portland for further analysis.

UP geneticist and biology professor Ami Ahern-Rindell went to Pollentia in 2016 with the ethics of scientific research fresh on her mind. With support of the Dundon-Berchtold ethics program, she had conducted a study to determine if students would learn ethical standards for scientific research by watching mentors or if students would benefit more from formal training. In partnership with an undergrad researcher she found that ethics cannot transmit “through osmosis.” Now all students and faculty who take part in any research at UP must go through formal ethics training.

She applied these findings to her work in Pollentia.  One project involved another Dundon-Berchtold Scholar—also an alum of UP PURE—on a study that used the example of the Kennewick Man to examine whether and how scientists can ethically study human remains.

“There’s always a context,” says Ahern-Rindell. “What are the ramifications of what we do? What is the buy-in from the people this impacts? It’s not just about science.  You have to be respectful of ethics and of the culture.”

Ahern-Rindell also returned from Mallorca (with permission from the Spanish government) with a plan to use bones to study their ancient DNA and to try to piece together their genetic origins through Y-chromosome analysis.

Another line of research is led by chemistry professor Sr. Angela Hoffman, OSB, who brings back tiny containers of dirt from the graves to see if she can grow ancient bacteria that might help fight modern diseases. (The dirt samples she brought back from the child’s grave this summer are growing like gangbusters.) We’ve all heard about superbugs and drug-resistant bacteria. Hoffman proposes that these ancient bacteria, having been buried in the dirt for centuries, haven’t been exposed to modern microbes. Captured and grown in the right medium today, these ancient bacteria might be useful against modern bacteria or even cancer cells.

An entirely different scientific study is spearheaded by Valerie Walters, who is also on UP’s chemistry faculty.  She and her student collaborators use spectroscopy to test the pigments of a 15th-century altarpiece painting from a chapel on the Pollentia site. They found that the painting, now housed at Alcúdia’s church museum, has ultramarine in the blue paint of Mary’s robes, a pigment that, at the time, was more valuable than gold.

Students as Colleagues

Reina Inlow and Ronda Bard with 3d scanner in PollentiaAll of this research is done with the students. These undergrads get the hands-on research experience and often get to publish and present this work. One UP PURE alum, who is now applying to medical school, told me he valued not only the research experience but also the chance to present and work on his public speaking.

Professors also benefit from taking the student-teacher relationship outside the classroom. “Here, I feel like we’re really colleagues,” says Bard, who is on UP’s chemistry faculty and leads the XRF spectroscopy research on bone and coin composition. “We’re working to ask questions and solve problems together. It’s exciting to bring them into a scientific study as colleagues.”

Enabling students to learn through Pollentia is baked into its roots.

“The formative nature of Pollentia is very important,” Cau says. Both he and one of the other co-directors Esther Chávez Álvarez started as student archaeologists in Pollentia and have been working here since the 1980s. Cau is now the ICREA research professor in archaeology at University of Barcelona; and Chávez is a professor of archaeology at University of La Laguna.

Working closely with her professors has given math major Sam Rivas ’20 more confidence to ask questions. “They’re willing to answer all of our questions and even take our ideas and look into what we’re thinking,” she says. She feels that the experience helped her to “gain the independence and courage to speak up.” 

In 2017 UP PURE alum Jonathan Wiley ’19 wrote a reflection about how digging in Pollentia, the repetitive nature of the work, was a type of “academic liturgy” that opened a space for personal growth. David Turnbloom, assistant professor of theology, elaborated on this idea—crediting its source, of course—with an essay in a Jesuit magazine, arguing that with the right perspective those moments of “going through the motions”—in archeology, in the science lab, in yardwork, in our faith traditions—might also lead to a greater sense of self-awareness, community, and mystery.

More Questions

At the end of the month, Pollentia hosted a big open house for the local people of the city of Alcúdia to visit the site and see the work up close. Pollentia is, after all, their history, their ancestry. They value it.

During the open house, the child’s skeleton was still in the grave for viewing. After the open house, Bard ran an XRF test on the nails of the coffin—the wooden coffin, itself, had decomposed—and they found that the nails were made of iron. With the help of scientific technology, some questions are answerable.

The team then documented and exhumed the child’s skeleton so that it could eventually be carbon dated. When they carefully removed the skull from the dirt, they saw that behind the child’s skull was a small ring. I can’t help but wonder about who placed it there and why?

Some questions remain. How old are these bones? Was this a Christian burial? Next summer, they’ll dig toward these questions and see what they find.

 

JESSICA MURPHY MOO is the editor of Portland magazine.