Yale Ancient Pharmacology Program Summer 2026 Fieldwork Report

Season Summary

The Summer 2026 season of the Yale Ancient Pharmacology Program (YAPP) encompassed fieldwork at four regions across Greece and Italy, each contributing distinctly to YAPP’s ongoing research program. Visits to ancient Corinth in Central Greece and Cetamura in Tuscany were used to assess each region’s short- and long-term potential for offering material suitable for future sampling campaigns. Our return to Falerii Novi in Lazio consisted of a targeted sampling effort conducted during the final season of that active excavation. Visits to Velia, Paestum, and Naples in Campania served a dual purpose of programmatic expansion, through discussions with prospective archaeological and curatorial partners, and material collection, through the acquisition of an ethnographic reference dataset numbering hundreds of ethnobotanical specimes from an erboristeria, or historic herbalist shop, in Naples.

Team

Chris Renton — Program Manager
Andrew Koh — Principal Investigator, Museum Scientist

Ancient Corinth in Central Greece

May 28 – June 3, 2026 · Corinth, Greece

The team met in ancient Corinth with Professor Paul Scotton, Director of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (ASCSA) Lechaion (the ancient port of Corinth) excavation, and Ioulia Tzonou, Associate Director of the 130 year old flagship excavation of ASCSA at Corinth. The purpose of these meetings was to evaluate in detail the degree to which Corinth could provide access to vessels suitable for sampling in coming seasons, and if so, to identify which excavation contexts would be most productive.

Concurrent with these discussions, the team conducted a small-scale pilot sampling of two objects from Lechaion: a Roman glass vessel and the organic remains of an amphora plug. Both samples will be analyzed later this fall. Although results are not yet available, the pilot fulfilled its intended function, establishing a preliminary baseline for evaluating the site’s material before any larger commitment of resources.

On the basis of these initial findings, the team is developing a proposal for a more comprehensive pilot study, to be launched in the spring and continuing through next year, incorporating material not only from Lechaion but also from multiple contexts across the broader Corinthia region, an unusually rich cultural landscape even by Greek standards. Corinth represents a promising direction for YAPP’s continued work as an incredibly long-lived and stable project where Koh did his first formal archaeological excavations and maintains connections; the principal question remaining is the appropriate scale at which to pursue it based on YAPP’s evolving research goals.

Cetamura in Tuscany

June 3 – June 6, 2026 · Cetamura del Chianti, Italy

At Cetamura, the team met with Florida State University Professor Trevor Luke, a research partner who has remained a central collaborator of YAPP and especially its ethnography team, in order to survey the material available at this well-documented Etruscan/Roman site. This visit was intended as an assessment rather than sampling campaign, with the aim of establishing what material the Chianti region holds before determining whether, and in what form, YAPP could pursue further work in Tuscany.

Falerii Novi

June 14 – June 21, 2026 · Falerii Novi, Italy

The team spent a full week at Falerii Novi during the final season of active excavation at the site, sampling freshly excavated material alongside dig directors Seth Bernard (University of Toronto), Margaret Andrews (Harvard University), Stephen Kay (British School at Rome), and Emlyn Dodd (Adelaide University). Sampling efforts were concentrated on amphora bases from across the Mediterranean, a targeted class selected for its potential to yield material relevant for determining their contents and better informing our understanding of the regions that produced them.

Dr. Tommaso Bertoldi joined the team on-site, contributing his rare expertise on the detailed histories of amphora types from across the Mediterranean that are being recovered at Falerii. His knowledge extends beyond the excavation itself and his accurate identification of a vessel’s type and probable contents substantially narrows the field of interpretation once compounds are identified within the samples. Bertoldi’s contributions to this season’s fieldwork will inform the laboratory analyses to follow.

Velia, Paestum, and Naples

June 21 – July 4, 2026 · Velia, Paestum, and Naples, Italy

Koh traveled to Campania to meet with regional staff attached to museums and ancient sites such as Velia and Paestum to discuss the potential for sampling material excavated from the region both recently and over the past two centuries. These ongoing discussions hold great promise for adding important data to YAPP’s efforts to elucidate the complex pharmacopeia of the culturally rich Mediterranean past.

The most notable acquisition of this leg of the trip occurred in historic Naples. Koh located an increasingly rare erboristeria, run by the same family for 310 years, and acquired hundreds of ethnobotanical reference specimens from their multi-generational collection. Finds like these typically exist in other Mediterranean cities as “fossil remains” in the corner of modernized pharmacies. Such ethnographic reference material is essential to YAPP’s broader methodology of providing identifiers from multiple disciplinary angles; an archaeochemical signature from an ancient vessel can be confidently identified only when compared against as many references as possible, including known ethnobotanical references.

Integration and Outlook

The various components of this season’s fieldwork, though distinct in purpose, together indicate a consistent trajectory for the program. Research in the Corinthia is progressing toward a formal proposal for expanded sampling. Tuscany has now been initially assessed and can inform future planning north of Lazio. Falerii Novi has concluded with a full season of sampling and the benefit of expert consultation that will inform the interpretation of that data. Meanwhile, the Naples ethnobotanical reference collection substantially increases the resolution of YAPP’s understanding of ancient compounds and resulting recipes recovered from existing and future samples.

The principal question for the coming fall concerns both scale and scope. Our goal is to determine the extent to which YAPP can undertake expanded research in the Corinthia and other parts of Greece (e.g., Crete) in the seasons ahead, alongside the program’s other ongoing commitments in places such as Italy and Spain.