Featured Projects / Article Pre-Prints
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Online Presentations
Research Statement
My research intersects Roman domestic space (Nevett, 2010) and computational archaeology (Grosman, 2016). Leveraging an interdisciplinary approach which considers ancient texts and contexts, I explore questions surrounding ancient Roman décor, the spatial evolution of domestic architectural forms, and the social function of the ancient house (Wallace-Hadrill, 2018) within the broader context of urban maintenance in the ancient city (Jacobs, 2007). In my Dual-PhD, I explored the impact of computational approaches on Roman domestic space and analysed the history of excavations and archaeological records of the House of Marcus Lucretius in Pompeii (McClinton, 2019) and the Roman Houses on the Caelian Hill in Rome (McClinton, 2024). The outcome of this research has been to create a new state-of-the-art interpretation for both houses, along with a new methodological approach (McClinton, 2025).
Utilising the lens of the archaeological palimpsest, my postdoctoral research builds upon this research programme to integrate an interdisciplinary set of methods from history, sociology, and anthropology to reconstruct missing stratigraphy for Roman houses excavated in central Italy during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, following the Unification of Italy, and the outcome of Vatican I (Raponi, 2014). My primary sources are five early Christian basilicas, and Christian catacombs—and their unpublished excavation manuscripts—across twelve archives in Rome (Gazda, 2021). These primary sources are complemented by oral history and on-site visual analysis of the extant archaeological record (Elsner, 2010). I propose to publish a scholarly monograph on the history of archaeology in Italy, experiment with the development of a custom desktop tool to aid in archival excavation research for Roman domestic spaces with colleagues at CNR and CUDAN, advancing the current state of the field in Roman domestic archaeology and computational archaeology (Ohm et al., 2023; Lombardi et al., 2025).
In preparation for my postdoctoral project, I have completed substantial preliminary research on the intended topic, including a survey of the archives and selecting the case study sites (please see ‘ArchAI’). Networking events related to this proposal are planned for Spring 2025, including a collaborative seminar at Oxford for digital projects based in the UK, interviews with existing researchers, and a one-day conference on ‘archives, archaeology, and AI’ at Merton College. Following the thesis submission by January 2025, I will consolidate my existing publications from the Dual-PhD. As you will see in my publication list, I have published one article in each of my two primary research threads (archaeology and computer science) (McClinton, 2019; 2021), and publication conversations are now in play for articles undertaken during the Dual-PhD.