National photography prize for Southampton archaeologist
Southampton archaeologist Sophie Hay has won a major photography prize for her picture of a mausoleum on the Via Flamina north of Rome.
It won the Photo of the Year award from the magazine Current Archaeology which was judged by archaeologist and professional photographer Adam Stanford. The prize was presented at an awards ceremony at the University of London as part of the Current Archaeology Live! conference.
Sophie is a Geophysical Researcher with the Archaeological Prospection Service of Southampton (APSS) and the British School at Rome and has been based at the BSR for six years. She works with the University’s Kristian Strutt on sites in Italy and North Africa.
“I was showing a group of Italian architecture students around the site, the skies darkened because a storm was coming, then a ray of sunlight illuminated the tomb, it was just stunning,” she explains. Sophie enjoys photography and has earlier won a prize for a picture of archaeologists using geophysical equipment to explore a site.
The mausoleum lies just outside the Roman town of Ocriculum (modern Otricoli), near the River Tiber 50 km north of Rome, where Southampton archaeologist Professor Simon Keay and APSS have a long standing geophysical project in collaboration with Professor Martin Millett of the University of Cambridge.
They are about to publish a BSR monograph detailing their work at Otricoli mapping the history of the settlement through geophysical and topographic surveys. Original excavations in the eighteenth century, under the patronage of Pope Pius VI, revealed monumental structures such as an amphitheatre, theatre, bath complex and a vast arched structure, known as the Grande Sostruzione.
