Kaja Tally-Schumacher

Kaja Tally-Schumacher is an Assistant Professor of Environmental History at the Graduate School of Design. Her primary area of expertise is the archaeology and analysis of designed landscapes and ancient environments in the ancient Roman world from ca. 2^nd c. BCE to 4^th c. CE across Western Eurasia and Northern Africa, ranging from urban plantings to suburban and rural gardens. More broadly, her research interests include ancient Mediterranean gardens and landscapes, digital reconstructions and visualization, comparative environmental history, and issues pertaining to sustainability, resiliency, and climate mitigation in cultural heritage sites.

She currently serves as the Assistant Director of the joint Università di Bologna, Graduate School of Design, and Cornell University Casa della Regina Carolina (CRC) Project at Pompeii, where she and her team are excavating one of the largest urban gardens in the ancient city. Pompeii is central to any account of Roman households and daily life in ancient times. This study focuses on the so-called Casa della Regina Carolina (VIII 3.14 and VIII 3.15), a house and garden that was cleared of volcanic ash in the early 19th century but never excavated with modern scientific methods. While Pompeii is famous for revealing details of daily life, frozen in time by the eruption, those of this house have been largely forgotten, with few records remaining of what the archaeologists first found.

The CRC team is the first to conduct stratigraphic excavation of the garden and house since its discovery in the nineteenth century. In 2018–2023, the team used ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to locate buried remains; documented standing architecture and topography via LiDAR and Total Station; excavated over 130 m2 of the garden and have been able to reconstruct aspects of the ancient environment via various sampling methods. Excavated and documented garden features include multiple planting pots, root cavities, pathways, built architecture (including two shrines and a probable triclinium), and wall paintings. As a result, the team has now recorded and is reconstructing much of the first-century CE garden in CAD, Rhino, and Unity, and has spatially recorded the findspots of all artifacts for GIS analysis.

Her long-term research goals are rooted in investigating human-landscape interactions and in challenging the boundaries of the canon. In “Wet Feet” (2023) she explores changing corporeal perceptions of climate as depicted and described in visual and literary ecological calendars created during the period of the Roman Climate Optimum (roughly 200 BCE to 150 CE), when the climate was unusually stable, moist, and warm, and as well as those constructed in the subsequent climatologically unstable centuries. This analysis articulates the rich archival potential of late Roman and Antique visual and textual material culture as a source of climatological data.

Tally-Schumacher’s research has also focused on the development and conceptualization of ornamental plantings and gardens in the Roman period. She first examined this theme in “Through the Picture Plane” (2016 and 2017), focusing on the creation of a new densely-planted ornamental garden type that arose in the second half of the first century BCE, as exemplified in the Garden Room wall paintings from Livia’s villa at Prima Porta. Utilizing a greenscreen, generating a planting plan based on the painted garden, and populating the painting and room with strollers, viewers, and diners, illustrates the close connection between real and painted gardens, suggesting a close relationship between designers and painters in antiquity. A Cultural History of Plants in Antiquity (2022), which features her subsequent work on the conceptualization of these new ornamental green spaces as widowed, unmarried, and useless, won the Daniel F. Austin Award from The Society for Economic Botany and was a Finalist of the Prose Award in the Humanities Reference Category.

Tally-Schumacher’s current book project, Gardeners, Plants, and Soils of the Roman World, investigates an overlooked group of practitioners: landscape designers and gardeners of various social classes in the period of the “Roman Climate Optimum,” a period characterized by an unusually stable, moist, and warm climate. This period was marked by a rapid blossoming of a new cross-Mediterranean plant trade, burgeoning horticultural innovation, and, as a result, the rise of a new designer and gardener class. The project is interdisciplinary, drawing on traditional archives, such as representations of gardens, textual descriptions of gardeners and gardens, and archaeological evidence from excavated gardens. She also integrates innovative work on plant bio-intelligence, human-object entanglements, diachronic case studies (such as US Antebellum records of similar gardeners in neoclassical plantation gardens), and field interviews with present-day practitioners to reconstruct historical gardener lives. This project thus not only contributes to our understanding of the entanglement between forced labor, cultivation, and climate change in the Roman world, but also engages with comparative discourse on forced labor and landscape studies in the US.

She holds an MA with Distinction in Ancient Art History and completed her doctoral work with leading landscape historians, Claudia Lazzaro and Kathryn L. Gleason, at Cornell University. Dr. Tally-Schumacher’s research has been supported by predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks, at the University of Pennsylvania, and at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. Dr. Tally-Schumacher’s commitment to scholastic excellence in the classroom is exemplified by her two Distinguished Teaching awards, from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (2012), and Cornell University (2017).