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JJ Lugardo

Department:
Classics
Cohort
2025
Project Title
Visualizing Ancient Carceral Spaces

Project Description

Most of what we know about prisons in the ancient Mediterranean comes from archaeological speculation and passing references in ancient legal and literary evidence. The scarcity of evidence has left understudied the importance of state-enforced imprisonment in civic life in the ancient city. This project will use digital reconstruction techniques and tools to consolidate the material and textual evidence on carceral geographies in ancient Athens into one visual output — a 3D model of the supposed 5th-century BCE State Prison of Athens in the Athenian agora. The student intern can expect to learn SketchUp, an accessible 3D design software, to create this model; if the student has experience with other tools, I am open to exploring. As this project assumes no prior experience, the intern will spend the Winter quarter developing their skills in SketchUp through a training curriculum that includes tutorials, readings, and simulations, accompanied by literature on ancient urban landscapes and punishment systems; the development of this skill set will be in service to the modeling of the prison. During the Spring, the student will begin and complete a model of the Athenian State Prison.