During the 2021-22 academic year, Cole Warlick, a PhD student in Classical Archaeology at UNC, was the Ackland Art Museum Digital Content Fellow. Cole’s fellowship was part of the university’s Humanities for the Public Good Program, which aimed to offer graduate students hands-on professional experience beyond the classroom.
At the Ackland, Cole worked with the education department to develop a video project that would demonstrate the benefits of video production for future museum endeavors. In consultation with the Ackland’s curatorial and educational staff, Cole helped produce a video focusing on historic North Carolina pottery in the museum’s collection. In addition to researching the history and provenance of several nineteenth and early twentieth-century ceramic vessels, Cole also interviewed two leading experts in the study of North Carolina pottery, Dr. Linda Carnes McNaughton (Program Archaeologist and Curator at Fort Bragg’s Cultural Resources Management Program) and Dr. Charles G. (Terry) Zug (Professor Emeritus of Folklore and English at UNC Chapel Hill).
Although the study of North Carolina pottery lies beyond the disciplinary boundaries of Classics, this museum-based project allowed Cole to draw from his experience as a classical archaeologist whose research centers on daily life, ancient Mediterranean ceramics, and cross-cultural connections in the Greco-Roman world.
Here is Cole’s video on the pottery tradition of North Carolina’s Catawba Valley.