Nicolle Hirschfeld
Assistant Professor of Classical Studies, Trinity University
Nicolle Hirschfeld
Assistant Professor of Classical Studies
Trinity University
San Antonio, TX
Waitt Expeditions:
Albania: Ancient Shipwreck (Principal Investigator)
Albania Expedition Blog: Underwater Albania
Biography
Dr. Nicolle Hirschfeld has always been fascinated by the ancient world’s relationship with the sea and its role in the political, military, technological, and social histories of the cultures along the shores of the Mediterranean. One of her primary interests is the administration of exchange among the cultures of the Late Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean (Egypt, the Levant, Anatolia, Cyprus, and Greece, 16th-12th centuries BCE). This stems in part from Dr. Hirschfeld’s participation in the excavation and continuing publication of a ship that sank at Uluburun (Turkey) ca. 1300 BCE, carrying a wealth of exotic goods and raw materials. Research on the material from that shipwreck led her to the archaeology of Cyprus, whose resources and location in the midst of sea lanes have made it an important nexus of exchange for most of recorded history. Dr. Hirschfeld further developed an expertise in a kind of ancient barcode - the marks with which Cypriots marked goods circulating through their territory or purview.
Dr. Hirschfeld received diplomas in Classical Archaeology from Bryn Mawr College (BA 1985) and the University of Texas at Austin (PhD 1999) and earned a Master’s Degree in Nautical Archaeology from Texas A&M (MA 1990). Her work has merited, among others, grants awarded by the Fulbright Program, the Archaeological Institute of America, the American Schools of Oriental Research, the Shelby White - Leon Levy Program for Archaeological Publications, and the Mellon Foundation.
“The best witness to the Mediterranean’s age-old past is the sea itself. This has to be said and said again; and the sea has to be seen and seen again. Simply looking at the Mediterranean cannot of course explain everything about a complicated past created by human agents, with varying doses of calculation, caprice and misadventure. But this is a sea that patiently recreates for us scenes from the past, breathing new life into them, locating them under a sky and in a landscape that we can see with our own eyes, a landscape and sky like those of long ago. A moment’s concentration or daydreaming, and that past comes back to life.”
- Fernand Braudel, Memory and the Mediterranean
