Tyler Franconi holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford in classical archaeology, and has held previous academic positions at the University of Oxford, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Alberta. He has excavated at a number of different sites in Türkiye, Italy, Tunisia, and the USA, and currently co-directs the Upper Sabina Tiberina Project, which investigates the long-term development of rural settlement and economy in the Sabine region of Italy, located today in the province of Rieti of the region of Lazio. This project especially focuses on the excavation of the Roman villa at Vacone, first built ca. 125 BC and finally destroyed by an earthquake ca. AD 200. The later Roman and early medieval cemeteries on the site contributed to Tyler's interest in ancient health and disease, and work is ongoing to contextualize these burials within the wider mortuary landscape of the Italian peninsula during the transition from Roman to post-Roman rule.
His fieldwork especially focuses on the study of archaeological small finds, including metalwork, glassware, and ceramics. He is currently working on publishing the finds from the excavations at Vacone, and has recently begun working on glassware and glass production at Antiochia ad Cragum, Türkiye.
Outside of fieldwork, Tyler’s research more generally focuses on the economic and environmental history of the Roman Empire, with particular interests in the frontier regions of Britain and Germany. His research in these zones investigates the changing relationship between Roman economic exploitation and environmental dynamism from the late Iron Age to the early medieval period. Rivers, especially the Rhine, play an important part in this research, and he has written widely about the interactions between Romans and their fluvial landscapes in the Northwestern provinces and beyond. This work can be found, for example, in 2017's edited volume Fluvial Landscapes in the Roman World (Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplement 104), and in 2021's multiauthored volume English Landscapes and Identities: Investigating Landscape Change from 1500 BC to AD 1086 (Oxford University Press).
Tyler teaches classes in Archaeology and Classics that focus on the Roman military, Roman frontier life, and environmental history both within the Roman period and beyond. He is interested in advising undergraduate and graduate work that focuses on these subjects, especially projects that incorporate comparative study of multiple regions of the Roman Empire.
