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February 11, 2003
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

FIFTEEN YEARS OF DIGGING FOR THE TRUTH

Co-Director of the Troy Excavation Project to Speak at Smith

NORTHAMPTON, Mass-For the past 15 years, C. Brian Rose, a professor of classics at the University of Cincinnati, has spent much of his time excavating the legendary city long ago celebrated by Homer as "the strong-walled citadel of Troy."


As co-director of the Troy Excavation Project, a collaboration between the University of Cincinnati and the University of Tuebingen in Germany, Rose has been in charge of phase three of the world's most famous archaeological dig.


Excavations at Troy were initiated in 1871 by the visionary German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann and restarted in the 1930s by Rose's predecessor at the University of Cincinnati, Carl W. Blegen. Rose resumed the dig where Blegen left off.


On Tuesday, Feb. 25, Rose will visit Smith College to speak on "Homer and Troy: The Results of Fifteen Years of Excavations." His talk, an open lecture for the class "Classics 190, The Trojan War," will take place at 9 a.m. in the Neilson Library Browsing Room.


The event is free and open to the public.


At 4 p.m. on the same day, Rose will present a second lecture, "Monumental
Tombs Near Troy: Recent Discoveries," at UMass' Isenberg School of Management, Room 137.


Situated in northwest Turkey a few miles from the Dardanelles at the intersection of important ancient trade routes, Troy was inhabited continuously from about 3500 B.C.E. to 1300 C.E.


As a result of the Troy Excavation Project, Rose and his team-contrary to the opinions of some scholars-posit that Troy, in the late Bronze Age, consisted of an upper citadel and a densely populated lower city surrounded by a strong defensive wall. This configuration, characteristic of other Anatolian capital cities, suggests that, as a center of ancient trade, Troy looked east to Mesopotamia as well as west to Greece.


Some scholars insist, however, that Homer's different descriptions of Troy were accurate, says Justina Gregory, professor of classics at Smith College, who helped coordinate Rose's visit to Smith. Others believe Homer was a "weaver of fictions," she says, "and that archaeology alone holds the key to the past."


"Neither poetry nor archaeology can lay exclusive claim to the 'truth' about the late Bronze Age," says Gregory. "Both are equally subject to interpretation and both are needed if we hope to make sense of the past. Brian Rose's two lectures promise to do just that."


Rose has also served on archaeological digs in the Aphrodisias in Turkey from 1980 to 1984 and as an excavator with the Archaeological Society of Italy at Cerveteri and Filadelfia in 1973. He has published widely on the city of Troy in its various occupations and on Byzantine research.


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