Professor Aravecchia was awarded a Research Fellowship by Dumbarton Oaks.
Professor Aravecchia will spend the Spring semester of 2021 at Dumbarton Oaks, which is a Harvard University research institute, library, museum, and garden located in Washington, DC. He will continue to work on an archaeological, historical, and art historical study of a fourth-century basilica-church that his team unearthed at Amheida in Dakhla Oasis (Egypt’s Western Desert), in a project entitled "Early Christianity in Egypt’s Western Desert: The Fourth-Century Church at Amheida.” The archaeological evidence from the church sheds light on issues key to our understanding of early Christianity, including the cultural and socio-economic context in which it flourished, the dissemination of distinctive features of Christian art and architecture, and the transformation of the built landscape that occurred with the appearance of Christianity.
