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The paper reflects on taboos against entrance into sacred places, a theme that seizes Plutarch's interest in his two works in the genre of the Question-Literatur, the Quaestiones Romanae (3; 16; 20; 60), regarding sacred places in Rome, and the Quaestiones Graecae (27; 28; 39, 40) for some in Greece.

In the eleventh book of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses Lucius recovers his human form thanks to Isis’ intervention. The first contact between the goddess and the ass takes place in 11.2 when he prays to the moon. Scholars have focused on the prayer and on the relationship between Lucius and Isis but have seldom discussed whether Lucius in ass form pronounces the prayer out loud or not. In this paper I will argue that Lucius does not, in fact, pronounce the prayer.

My paper aims at exploring the multifaceted presence of the terminology of mystery cults in Plutarch’s works. Plutarch is familiar with and quotes Herodotus' warning about mystery rites: εὔστομά μοι κείσθω, “Let me maintain a religious silence!”. Nevertheless, allusions and direct references to the mystery cults abound in his work and help delineate his theology. The most scholarly attention has been devoted to specific aspects of Plutarch’s religious thought which the mystery religions could have contributed to, e.g.

Our goal is to create a VR environment, accessible via computer or headset, where students can explore, manipulate, reconfigure, and annotate large stone slabs bearing hieroglyphic texts and iconography from the Prehispanic capital of Monte Alban. Located in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, Monte Alban is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that is visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists each year. Monte Alban was initially founded around 500 BC and is widely recognized as one of Mesoamerica’s first urban centers.

This project aims to bring the topography and city of Rome alive to students in a Latin classroom. This project was done primarily with students aged 12-13 over a one month period of time. The primary goal is to help students envision and interact with the material aspects of the ancient world. We spend a lot of time reading Latin when in a class focused on language acquisition, but the ACL and ACTFL Joint Standards on Latin include cultural competency as well.

With data from a digital mapping campaign of funerary monuments in Rome we are working on a visualization and multi-person VR environment with integrated tools aimed at remote access and collegial collaborations. The past few years have highlighted for society in general the need to maintain work and continue development during periods where meeting physically for collaboration is not an option. However, for archaeological research conducted on an international scope these issues are not new, and the access to sites, objects, and colleagues has always been hampered by distance and funds.

Animating Antiquity is a classroom-based project where students design their own VR experiences related to Roman art and architecture. Separate groups of students were assigned four different topics--Death, the Roman House, the Roman Forum, and Entertainment Venues--and in a group format devised a VR experience that was meant to be educational, entertaining, immersive, and interactive.

The International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, is aimed at reassembling and recontextualizing archaeological information from the ancient site of Dura-Europos (Syria).

We developed a database system for artifacts from a legacy archaeological project (excavated in the early 1990s) using Caspio, a commercial low-code/no-code cloud-based data management platform. The primary research aim of the project was to allow for pandemic-related cross-platform access to data during data entry and analysis; long term aims include digital data archiving. Pedagogically this project offered students in information systems and archaeology opportunities to collaborate on developing a fully-functional data system.

Considering the importance of Greek figure-decorated pottery for researchers in the fields of Classics, archaeology, art history, and history, there exist a variety of accessible databases within both museum collections and digital archives, among them the Beazley Archive Pottery Database. While the basic ideas underlying the classification of ancient Mediterranean pottery are shared across languages (e.g., shape, production place, painter, potter, iconography, etc.), there are no firm standards for describing, representing, and publishing pottery datasets on the web.