Mara De Gregori
Mara De Gregori is a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Riverside. Originally from Luxembourg, she received her B.A. in Anthropology and History from the University of Bonn (Germany) in 2022, and her M.A. in Anthropology from Texas Tech University in 2025. Her master’s thesis examined Maya ball courts in the Three Rivers Region in Belize as components of processional architecture, exploring their role in shaping movement and social interaction within urban landscapes. She has worked on archaeological projects in Belize, Mexico and Texas. Mara is currently part of the El Palmar Archaeological Project, where she examines how the ball court at El Palmar functioned as space where political authority and ritual performance were displayed and negotiated.
Project Summary
Mara’s dissertation project investigates how the ball court at the ancient Maya site of El Palmar functioned as a space for public performance and the display of political power.
Drawing on performance theory, she investigates the ball court not only as the place where ballgames were played but also as a space of broader social interaction and community participation that communicated power and authority. The research combines multiple methods, including targeted excavations, shovel testing, soil geochemical analysis, and regional LiDAR analysis. Excavations and architectural study will reconstruct the construction history of the ball court and its relationship to surrounding plazas and architecture. Soil geochemical analysis will identify activity areas, such as feasting deposits, that indicate large public gatherings and LiDAR data will be used to map ball courts across the wider region to analyse the spatial distribution of ball courts and its relationship to political organization.
Funding from the Archaeological Institute of America–OC Society will enhance this research by supporting laboratory analyses of soil samples. These analyses will be used to directly compare with pXRF results and evaluate the accuracy and reliability of pXRF for identifying activity areas around the ball court.
Luis Rodriguez-Perez
Luis is a graduate student in the Archaeology Interdepartmental Program at UCLA. His research focuses on the architecture of Roman Greece and the development of the Corinthian Order. From the summer of 2023-2026 he has worked as lead photogrammetrist at the Athenian Agora excavations, for the 2026-2027 year he will be a photogrammetry intern at the Getty Research Institute. Luis has worked in several projects in Italy, Greece, and Colombia.
Project Summary
Based on a Fall 2025 graduate seminar titled Wastelands and Waterways, this project reframes the role of water in ancient and modern Athens. A few different factors have shaped the development of this project (1) while working as photogrammetrist at the Athenian Agora, I noticed that water run-off is present even during the dry season in areas of the archaeological site associated with the ancient Eridanos river. This runoff has disproportionately affected those archaeological features closest to the ancient river and associated hydrological infrastructure.(2) During Athens’ wet autumn season, water runoff on the streets of Monasteraki-Thiseio seem to follow the flow of the ancient river; providing hints of the buried topography and the silting of the late-Roman city (4th c. AD and beyond). My project seeks to create a hydrological map of these floodzones and comparative photogrammetric captures of at-risk features to (1) propose feature-specific risk assessment and (2) determine the relationship between the ancient river and its local topography. Although this project falls outside of my architectural research interests, I want to bring attention to the deterioration of already-excavated features of the Athenian Agora and contribute to on-going research on the course of the Eridanos river.
