UND professor, students dig their way to historical knowledge on Cyprus UND history professor William Caraher has just returned from another successful season on the Pyla-Koutsopetria archaeological project on the island of Cyprus. See Caraher’s blog at http://www.und.edu/dept/our/cyprus.html. Two UND graduate students, Brandon Olson and David Terry, and UND alumnus, Joe Patrow, an independent documentary filmmaker, and an international team of experts worked on the ancient Roman site to figure out what life was like on this once-vital trading community. The site now is part of British military base. “During the course of the survey, we discovered several prominent architectural features including the complete circuit of a Late Roman fortification walls,” notes Caraher, who also has worked as the team’s chief technology officer. “This fortification is perhaps the best preserved non-urban, Late Roman fortification on the island.” The team also completed its catalogue of diagnostic and notable artifacts collected during the previous three field seasons and continued its study of the painted plaster and molded gypsum excavated from the site of Pyla-Koutsopetria by Cyprus-based archaeologist Maria Hadjicosti. Patrow, a master’s degree graduate of UND’s history program, produced a film about the project last year and collected lots more footage this year that will be incorporated into a longer documentary about the Pyla-Koutsopetria project. You can find more information about Caraher and this project by following these links: http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/ http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/ http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/