Frank Edward Brown - Fieldwork and Career

Fieldwork and Career

His return to the American Academy in Rome from Syria in 1947 marked the beginning of the Academy's involvement in archaeological fieldwork in Italy with the excavations of the Latin colony of Cosa (Ansedonia) in southwestern Tuscany, a site which has since become a template for the archaeology of Latin colonies and mid-Republican Rome itself. Brown remained at the Academy as Professor in Charge of the Classical School and Director of Excavations from 1947–1952 and then returned to Yale as Professor of Classics where in addition to his teaching responsibilities he continued to be active in the publication of Dura- Europus and in the life of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR), the offices of which were then in New Haven. He was Secretary of ASOR, 1955–1962; Master of Jonathan Edwards College, 1953–1956; and in collaboration with his Yale colleagues, Professors Lawrence Richardson, Jr. and Emeline Richardson, produced the second volume of the Cosa excavation reports, The Temples of the Arx (MAAR 1960). A generation of American Classical archaeologists and historians received their training under Brown at Cosa; notable among them are Lawrence Richardson, Jr., Emeline Hill Richardson, Russell T. Scott, and Stephen L. Dyson.

In the same period he served the Archaeological Institute of America as Trustee and Norton Lecturer. In 1963, however, Brown left Yale to return permanently to the American Academy in Rome, resuming the positions of Professor in Charge and Director of Excavations to which were added the responsibilities of the directorship of the Academy in 1965-1969. Nevertheless these years saw him characteristically active both in Rome and in Ansedonia. In 1963 he made soundings in the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli. At the invitation of the Archaeological Superintendency of Rome, he returned in 1964 to the Regia in the Roman Forum, a building of which he had made an architectural study during his years as a Fellow. The excavation of the Regia was to yield the most substantial evidence for early organization and development of the Forum since the work of Giacomo Boni at the turn of the century. In 1965 he resumed work at Cosa supervising fieldwork and the preparation of additional publications of the Cosa series, and the design, construction, and outfitting of the site museum, since 1981 the National Museum of Cosa.

From Rome he was also able to further the work of other American archaeologists in Italy and Yugoslavia, as well as the corpus of Roman mosaics in North Africa and the international project to safeguard the Punic and Roman antiquities of Carthage. While Director of the Academy, he was also President of the International Union of the Institutes of Archaeology, History, and the History of Art in Rome in 1966-1967, and he was active in the affairs of the International Association for Classical Archaeology throughout his years in Rome.