Emlyn Dodd is former Assistant Director of the British School at Rome, an Associate Fellow of the Institute of Classical Studies at the University of London, and now a lecturer at Adelaide University.
For Emlyn, one of the project’s clearest successes has been its role in strengthening the BSR’s ties with UK institutions and providing new opportunities. At the centre of this has been a formal partnership with the Institute of Classical Studies at the University of London, which has contributed funding and helped build a stronger research and student training relationship with the BSR. The collaboration has meant that over the past five years more than fifty students from 16 UK universities have come through the project, along with others from Italian, Norwegian, Australian and Canadian universities, gaining first-hand experience of the excavation process and building their own fieldwork experience in the process.
Opportunities like this are increasingly rare. Funded hands-on training in Italy for UK archaeology students is not as common or accessible as it was ten or twenty years ago. The Falerii Novi Project has provided students from a range of backgrounds and career stages with a chance they might not otherwise have had. An opportunity to build new skills, networks, and chase dreams of becoming Roman archaeologists.
Many of these students joined the project at undergraduate or graduate level, and several have since gone on to pursue PhDs at UK universities. Some of them, in turn, developed into collaborations with the BSR itself. Others have secured prestigious postdoctoral positions, and former supervisors on the project are now well on their way to establishing academic careers of their own. For Emlyn, this is what makes the project’s legacy stand out: beyond the archaeology it has uncovered, Falerii Novi has become a place where the next generation of archaeological talent in the UK and Europe has had the chance to take shape.
