Senior staff | Notion Archaeological Survey

Christopher Ratté

Director

Christopher Ratté was educated at Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley. He is currently Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Michigan.

Ratté has extensive archaeological field experience in numerous countries, including the United States, Honduras, England, Greece, Israel, Georgia, and, especially, Turkey. He was a member of the Sardis Expedition from 1980-92, serving as Assistant Director under Crawford Greenewalt from 1989 to 1992. His monograph on Lydian Architecture was published in 2011. From 1993 until 2005, he supervised excavations at Aphrodisias, serving as Co-Director with R.R.R. Smith. Together with Smith, he edited the fourth volume of Aphrodisias Papers, published in 2008. He is now working on a monograph on the Agora at Aphrodisias. From 2005 to 2009, he was Director of the Aphrodisias Regional Survey. The results of that project were published in a volume co-edited with Peter De Staebler in 2012. Together with Ortwin Dally, he also edited a volume on the Cities of Asia Minor in Late Antiquity, which appeared in the Kelsey Museum Publication Series in 2012.

Ratté's research focuses on the role played by the built environment, from individual monuments to entire social landscapes, in the definition and articulation of social and cultural identity, especially in regions on the peripheries of the Greek and Roman worlds – for example, on how masonry techniques served to articulate the cultural identity of the Anatolian kingdom of Lydia, on the role played by city planning and urban development in the "Romanization" of Aphrodisias, or on how the social organization of Colchis is expressed through regional settlement patterns. At Notion, he is particularly interested in the development and spatial organization of the residential areas of the city.

ratte@umich.edu

Felipe Rojas

Assistant Director

Felipe Rojas was initially trained as an architect in his native Colombia and then received a PhD in Classical Archaeology from the University of California at Berkeley. He is currently Assistant Professor of Archaeology and Ancient Western Asian Studies in the Joukowsky Institute and the Department of Egyptology and Assyriology at Brown University. He has conducted fieldwork in Sardis, Aphrodisias, and Labraunda (Turkey) as well as in Petra (Jordan). He is currently finishing a book about Greek and Roman interaction with the Bronze and Iron Age material culture of Anatolia.

felipe_rojas@brown.edu

Angela Commito

Senior Archaeologist

Angela Commito received her PhD in Classical Art and Archaeology from the University of Michigan. She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at Union College. She has carried out archaeological fieldwork in Italy, Turkey, and the Republic of Georgia and is currently working on publications of the results of projects at Labraunda and Aphrodisias in Turkey and at Vani in western Georgia. Her other research focuses on the dramatic changes in Graeco-Roman life that mark the collapse of classical antiquity in the eastern Mediterranean. She is interested in the archaeology of the countryside, urban abandonment, and social resilience in times of crisis – in other words, the archaeology of apprehension. At Notion, she leads the program of surface collection and studies the relationship between water management and the life cycle of the city.

commitoa@union.edu

The names of all our team members can be found on the team lists for 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018.