A grant from the M.H. Wiener Foundation is supporting student access to an internationally renowned archeological field school in Scotland.
Scott Pike, who teaches environmental and earth sciences, received the $46,000 award. With the funding, Willamette's Center for Ancient Studies and Archaeology will offer three years' worth of field support and scholarship to students attending the Ness of Brodgar Archaeology Field Research Program.
The grant will also fund travel costs associated with regional and national archeology conferences, where students will present the results of their research.
“I want to make the field school accessible to all our students,” Pike says about the summer program. "This is perhaps one of the most important archeology sites in the world.”
Led by the Orkney Research Center for Archaeology and the University of the Highlands and Islands, the Ness of Brodgar is a large Neolithic complex that predates Stonehenge. The work done there is receiving worldwide attention and was recently featured in National Geographic.
“This site is very rich in archeology and material culture,” Pike says, adding that his students succeed in finding something, almost daily. “It’s helping to shape our understanding of the late Neolithic world by showing us how communities interacted and how societal structures worked. That’s phenomenal.”
