Margaret M. Andrews

Research

Margaret M. Andrews received an A.B. in Classics from Princeton University in 2005. She received an M.A. (2010) and Ph.D. (2015) in the Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to arriving at Harvard, she served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Classical Archaeology at the Joukowsky Institute for the Archaeology of the Ancient World at Brown University from 2015-2018 and an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Chicago from 2018-2020.

Meg's research combines approaches from the fields of ancient history and archaeology. She is particularly interested in ancient urban environments and their diachronic occupation. She is particularly interested in the relationship between social or cultural ideologies and the built environment and how non-elite/non-monumental spaces come to bear meaning. Her first book, The Subura of Rome: Landscape and Ideology from the Iron Age to the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2026), focused on a neighborhood of ancient Rome known as the Subura. Notorious in ancient literary testimony for its squalid conditions and prostitution, the primarily residential and commercial district of the Subura had never received systematic study. Meg's book covers the Subura's long history of urban development and occupation, combining archaeological material with ancient written sources to demonstrate how the zone became the locus for an ideological discourse on the ideal role of women in both the Roman and Christian mindsets and how the transformations in its built environment reflected these shifting notions.

Meg has carried out archaeological fieldwork in North Carolina, Athens, Rome, and several other sites in Italy. Her fieldwork has focused on generative, bottom-up processes of urban development and diachronic processes of transformation. From 2007-2010, she served as an area supervisor for the excavation of an imperial slave barracks as part of the Villa Magna Project, which examined the occupation of a Roman imperial villa and medieval monastery and village approximately 60 km south of Rome. She also served as well as the project masonry specialist and lead graphical documenter, and she co-edited the final publication: Villa Magna: an Imperial Estate and its Legacies: Excavations 2006-10. Since 2011, she has completed numerous field projects of structures within Rome itself, leading to publications in the American Journal of Archaeology, the Journal of Roman Archaeology, the Papers of the British School of Rome, and many edited volumes. 

She is currently co-directing the international excavations of the Roman town of Falerii Novi in central Italy: https://faleriinoviproject.org/. Falerii Novi was built in the 3rd c. BCE to house an indigenous population driven from their nearby city by a Roman invasion. We focus on sub-elite spaces (houses, markets, shops, productive spaces) to understand the growth of the town during the course of the Roman hegemony in Italy through the high medieval period and how its dynamic relationship to the original settlement shifted within different historical contexts. The project also privileges data about the surrounding natural environment to clarify evolving human-environment relationships between the town's residents and the landscape around them, informing questions about, for example, diet, animal pasturing, arboriculture, and water management. Not least, we are interested in clarifying the town's relationship with Rome, just 60 miles to its south, especially its agency within regional and pan-Mediterranean networks that may have bypassed the imperial capital.