Grant Funds Research at Ancient Greek Site

Glen R. Dash Charitable Foundation award provides professor with 21st-century tools to enhance research

Sacred Heart University history professor Anna Kouremenos expanded her work on an archaeological project called the Besa Project thanks to a new grant.

The Besa Project aims to uncover information about an ancient municipality in Attica, Greece. A grant from the Glen R. Dash Charitable Foundation, which supports archeological research around the world, enabled her to combine the latest scientific tools with the quest for history.

Specifically, she used remote sensing, a noninvasive technology more familiarly used in connection with satellites and aerial photography, to map the ancient district of Besa, near Athens this summer. With remote sensing tools, she and her team identified such features as viewsheds (the geographic area visible from a set point), tracked the movement of water and reconstructed the most efficient routes people would have followed across the ancient terrain.

“This is archaeology without a shovel,” said Kouremenos. “We aimed to learn more about how people lived, traveled and saw their world—before we ever broke ground.”

Working closely with the UNESCO Global Geopark of Lavrio and an international team of specialists, Kouremenos positioned Besa as a model for how ancient landscapes can be explored with 21st-century tools. Remote sensing is more than a collection of methods: “It’s the future of archaeology,” she said.

Kouremenos previously received a grant from the Rust Family Foundation of Fairfield to support her project. Her coauthored article “Romans at Besa: New Light on an Athenian Deme in the Imperial Period” was published in 2024 in the journal The Classical Quarterly.

Pictured: from left are Anna Kouremenos, Matthias Kalisch, Hercules Katsaros and David Capps. (Photo by Vyron Antoniadis)