Delos House of the Masks Poster

Course: ARCH-331 Aegean and Ancient Greek Art and Archaeology (Spring 2025)

Core Literacy:

• Visual

Learning Goals:

• Present orally and in written form an argument supported by primary and secondary sources
• Read critically and analyze closely literary texts and modern scholarship

For the course, Aegean and Ancient Greek Art and Archaeology, which I took during the Spring 2025 semester, I created a poster presentation for my final assignment. We were able to choose any topic that we were interested in, and I chose to focus on a specific neighborhood in Ancient Delos, a prominent religious site on an island in the Cyclades. The House of the Masks, was a house complex that is located in the Theater District in Delos, southeast to the Theater itself. Built during the Hellenistic Period, it was in use until the island was attacked in 88 BC, as a place for actors coming to the island to stay. It is known for its elaborate mosaics, which line the walls and floors of the buildings, depicting masks used in theatre, deities, and other performance related figures.

One of the most challenging aspects of this assignment was the research. Since Delos was excavated by the French School of Athens, the majority of the literature on Delos is written in French, which put my intermediate knowledge of French to use after multiple years, in order to access the information crucial to my research. Since the research aspect was more difficult and took me longer than I expected, if I were to redo this assignment, I potentially choose another topic that didn’t require me to complete most of my research in a foreign language, which also made me aware of the importance of being able to read proficiently in foreign languages for research in graduate school.