From Baseball to Ancient Italy: How Former Philadelphia Phillies Pitcher Brad Lidge Came to Publish Research with Classics Professor Anthony Tuck
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An article in the Philadelphia Inquirer profiles former closing pitcher for the Philadelphia Phillies Brad Lidge in his pursuit of a doctorate in archaeology. Along the way, he met and published research with Anthony Tuck, professor of classics and director of excavations at Poggio Civitate (Murlo), an Etruscan site dating to the 8th to 6th centuries BCE.
Following his retirement from baseball, Lidge took his lifelong passion for history and turned it into a master’s degree in ancient Roman archaeology, which he earned from the University of Leicester in 2017. Now, he’s getting ready to pursue his PhD and he knows exactly what he hopes to pursue.
“Etruscan sigla, and a more generalized archaeology of ancient Italy,” Lidge said in the article. “I’m trying to find a way to sync those two topics together.”
The Etruscans were an indigenous people who lived in the Tuscany region of Italy. Lidge focuses on the period from 800 B.C. to 500 B.C. “Sigla” were the symbols the Etruscan people used to communicate. It's this topic that brought him together with Tuck.
Together, the article notes, Tuck and Lidge examined symbols carved into pottery and roof tiles, and found that while many symbols were carved in tombs, they were also inscribed at an ancient Etruscan workshop in Murlo. They concluded these symbols were likely meant to quantify materials used at the workshop.
“For me, it’s amazing to kind of know that that is something that’s still out there that we don’t really know about,” Lidge said. “And then specifically, these symbols are really mysterious because they’re not really documented at all. It’s been really, really exciting to get to understand something like that in much more depth than really anything I had done in the past.”