With the aid of slides, Nicholas Cahill, field director of the Sardis expedition, showed the group the site, which has stood at the crossroads of Europe and Asia from its time as the capital of an empire through its role as a regional center for the Persians, Greeks, Romans, and Turks.

Cahill, the Simona and Jerome Chazen Distinguished Chair in Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, discussed how new discoveries continue to expand knowledge of Sardis and its role. Officials on previous excavations, for example, have read works by classical writers like Herodotus for clues to where the center of ancient Sardis lay. However, the hard work of excavation — such as looking at the fill used to build terraces for the dramatic acropolis — have led to new directions and revealed even older material than previously known.

“Sardis combines a little bit of everything, or rather a lot of everything,” said Cahill. “From monumental Roman arches, temples, and sculptures to religious transformations, from paganism to monotheism, Greek, and Latin inscriptions,” he said.

While technology has aided the work, including aerial photography by drone, much still must be done by hand. Bahadır Yıldırım, expedition administrator for Sardis at the Harvard Art Museums, and Frances Gallart Marqués, the Frederick Randolph Grace Curatorial Fellow in Ancient Art at the Harvard Art Museums, discussed the painstaking labor of cataloging and archiving finds, much of which is done at the museum’s research facility in Somerville.

“The work is not always glamorous or exciting,” said Cahill. “But it is always important.”

It can also, say student interns from the site, be rewarding.

“I have excavated at Sardis for two seasons now,” said Julia Judge, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in classical archaeology. “I think we all feel really lucky to work at Sardis because it’s very rare that you have a site that is so rich and so interesting at every phase. I had this incredible opportunity to work with a part of the site that’s truly historically significant.”

Calling herself “basically an extra set of hands,” Maria Boyle, a third-year undergraduate studying anthropology and archaeology, described her experience as “a super fun summer.”

“It’s incredible to work in the place and walk among the ruins of the Temple of Artemis,” she said.

Emma Humphrey, a sophomore studying computer science, actually made a discovery. She was helping one of the supervising conservators brush clean and re-assemble fragments, when she noticed a monogram at the back of one of the pieces. She assumed it had already been cataloged, but pointed it out anyway.

“I found out that it was actually news, which was exciting until we realized that nobody knew what it meant,” she said with a laugh. After some discussion, she recalled, the crew decided it was probably a stonemason’s mark, “like a receipt or a personal advertisement,” she said.

“I like this monogram because it feels like a little secret that I found.”