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Koloski-Ostrow recalls visiting her Uncle Ted, a plumber in Boston, where she would “climb under these grand houses, and look at the copper piping, and see him fixing these unbelievably elegant toilets.” On visits to her Uncle Nick, a garbage collector in New York City, she’d ride beside him during his night rounds, learning about the well-to-do from what they threw away, and about the poor from what they repurposed. Until her father’s death in 1961 at age 47, Koloski-Ostrow would watch as, once a year, he emptied the cesspit beneath the outhouse.Īnd then there were her uncles. The family used chamber pots at night and a three-seater outhouse during the day. Her parents raised her and her three siblings in Sandisfield - then a town of 400, located on the Connecticut border - in a house with no indoor plumbing. This is an interest at least partly due to what she calls her “19th-century childhood in the 20th century.” Koloski-Ostrow’s scholarship takes particular notice of the ancient world’s public sanitation systems. And while her classical-studies peers were researching epic poets, emperors and similarly lofty figures, she opted to go quotidian and discover everything she could about ordinary Romans’ day-to-day activities.
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She trained as a classical archaeologist at a time when women working on European and Middle Eastern excavation sites were few and far between. Affectionately known by the initials “AOK-O,” she spent nearly 40 years teaching at Brandeis, retiring at the end of June as the Kevy and Hortense Kaiserman Endowed Chair in the Humanities, widely heralded for her scholarship in her field.īut her education began humbly, in a three-room schoolhouse in rural western Massachusetts. In many ways, classical archaeologist Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow has always been an anomaly.