Fr. William Fulco
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LMU Archaology Professor Doesn't Always Teach by the Book
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Students who enroll in Fr. William Fulco’s archaeology course are in for a unique, hands-on learning experience.
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Something remarkable happens when a student is able to hold an object that was held by someone thousands of years earlier.
“When you realize that this bowl you’re holding was used by a woman five thousand years ago, there’s a sense of communion with that woman,” says William Fulco, S.J., professor of classics in LMU’s Department of Classics and Archaeology.
“And you see it in [students’] eyes as they’re holding it; like it’s virtually just been handed to them by a woman five thousand years ago. They find it to be a mind-blowing experience.”
That’s one of the advantages of working hands-on with genuine artifacts. Students in Fulco’s archaeology courses are encouraged to handle relics with their bare hands — a practice is that is not typical among university archaeology programs.
“We are the only undergraduate institution in the United States, to the best of my knowledge, that offers archaeology on a hands-on basis,” Fulco, a Los Angeles native, says. “In every other department of archaeology, it’s just treated as book study.”
Fulco first began acquiring his treasures — through his own digs or via gifts — while completing his doctoral studies in Northwest and Comparative Semitics, Ancient Near Eastern Religions, Archaeology, and Hieroglyphic & Hieratic Egyptian at Yale University in the 1960s. He continued to add to his collection during a 15-year teaching stint at UC Berkeley, and brought everything with him — with permission, of course — when he returned to Los Angeles in the 1980s.
Though he doesn’t do much digging anymore, Fulco continues to explore the world to enhance his already-extensive knowledge base and bring new findings to his students. This past summer, he visited Hittite and Byzantine sites in Turkey.
“It was a gift from [university donors] Jim and Nelly Kilroy,” he says. “They sent me to Turkey this summer to do archaeological work and to visit sites to fill in my teaching. It was a wonderful experience.”
And in case you hadn’t heard, Fulco also knows a thing or two about languages.
The master of multiple languages has made a name for himself in Hollywood. Since doing the tedious Aramaic translations for the “Passion of the Christ” in 2004, he has been recruited to do ancient-language translations for two upcoming films. “The Nativity Story” opens this December, while a film about the historical figure Hannibal, with Vin Diesel, is in the works.
“‘The Nativity,’ a Christmas story, follows very closely the gospels,” Fulco says. “I think it’s a beautiful film. There’s a lot of authenticity in terms of the work they were doing, their lifestyle, the way they talk. There’s a lot of Aramaic, in and out of the background.”
That background banter, Fulco explains, is called “walla,” and is not easy to create.
“Nobody pays attention to it and they’re not supposed to. But it has to be right,” he says.
His work on “Hannibal” may be prove to be an even greater undertaking: Fulco will translate dialogue into several ancient languages, including Punic (a dialect of Phoenician), classical Greek, and classical Latin.
So how does one even go about learning such tongues, let alone become known as an expert in them?
“You fake it,” he jokes. “That’s the advantage [of learning ancient languages], they’re dead. No one’s around to say, ‘hey, that’s not the way you say that!’”
Fulco is modest in his astounding ability to essentially reconstruct lost languages. He’s proud, however, of the work that he and other LMU faculty are doing in developing students. As faculty moderator of Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity — a position he speaks of with great enthusiasm — Fulco sees students grow tremendously after three or four years at LMU.
“When I taught at UC Berkeley, I suppose people wouldn’t deny that they want to turn out normal human beings, but the preoccupation was in imparting ‘this amount’ of knowledge to any given student,” he says.
“[At LMU] we don’t think of it so much as imparting knowledge, as changing people; helping them to grow as persons. And I think virtually every teacher here has that as a preoccupation.”