University of Pittsburgh archaeologist and Teaching Assistant Professor Maggie Beeler said she took to studying Greek at New York University, a path that led to her current position and helping excavate an ancient Roman town in Greece.

In 2023, she will take students there to see the site and learn about Greece, taking part in field work and museum work, specializing in looking at how ordinary people in those times lived, not the elite.

“Greece and its interactions with the entire ancient world around it” is Beeler’s focus – the daily lives and cooperation among people as the engine of social change. She chose Pitt, she said, because of the way her department approaches the subject, said the school’s site University Times.

She teaches Marginality in the Ancient Greek World, part of this new direction in Classics, which takes a critical view of the long-held notion that  the Greeks and Romans begat Western Civilization, seemingly at odds with her work in Greece.

“There is more to the studying of the ancient world,” Beeler said, not indicating who besides Greece – and Romans – should get credit.