At the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) Annual Meeting in San Francisco (January 7-10, 2026), Katrina Kuxhausen-DeRose, a third year PhD candidate in Archaeology, received the Best Graduate Student Poster Award for her project entitled, “Stone by Stone: The Post-Herulian Wall and the Building Blocks of Lifecycles.” The project formulated a cultural biography of the post-Herulian wall, a monument constructed of reused architectural materials and standing ruins after the Herulian invasion of Athens in 267 CE. To analyze how Athenians reshaped their city in the wake of this crisis, the project foregrounds a processual life-cycle model that traces the roles of the building blocks over time. Through an interactive 3D model of a wall section printed at the Cotsen Institute's Digital Archaeology Lab, Katrina invited visitors to think through the reuse decisions regarding color, material, texture, shape, size, orientation, and visibility. Ultimately, the urban reconfiguration surrounding the wall emerges as a tale of resilience and adaptation, in which Athenians strategically negotiated their heritage to preserve certain aspects of their cultural past.
