Browsing by Subject "Archaeology"

This dissertation explores the lives of persons enslaved or formerly enslaved to soldiers and veterans of the Roman imperial armies (27 BCE–284 CE). Previous scholarship on the subject has been sparse and one-sided, mostly mirroring the perspective of the elite literary sources on which they are based. They are mainly concerned with the role of slaves in the overall operation and organization of Rome’s armies. Such approaches fall short of informing us about the social location and lived reality of individual slaves and ex-slaves. We set out to close this knowledge gap here by leveraging epigraphic, papyrological, legal, and archaeological sources.After exposing the elite bias of the literary sources, we turn to the extant stone inscriptions featuring slaves and ex-slaves of soldiers and veterans, a corpus of over 900 texts at present. First, a large-scale quantitative survey of the material uncovers general patterns relevant to this much-neglected population. Then follows an archaeologically and historically contextualized consideration of a smaller selection of data from Britain and Pannonia, including inscriptions and wooden writing-tablets, in an effort to retrieve and recount in as much detail as possible a few of the experiences and circumstances of these individuals. Finally, we discuss testamentary manumission as a characteristic feature of slave life in military communities. The evidence presented here corroborates our argument that the lives and narratives of individual enslaved persons can and should be retrieved. Quantitative analysis underscores the pervasiveness of slaveholding in the Roman military across many dimensions, including space, time, service branch, rank, and service status. In fact, my calculations show that in regions where reliable overall quantifications of the epigraphic material are available roughly 10% of the inscriptions involving active or retired soldiers mention slaves or ex-slaves. Such findings clearly elevate slaves in military contexts above the marginal status that is implied by the limited amount of scholarly attention they have received. Close scrutiny and careful contextualization of several altars, epitaphs, and writing tablets from Britain and Pannonia underscore my conclusion that we are subscribing to a partial and impoverished view of the Roman military by keeping slaves and ex-slaves out of view. They were essential to life in the military and their presence was viewed as normal.

My dissertation elucidates the roles feasts played in constructing the social order for different Jewish communities from approximately the third century B.C.E. to the third century C.E. Feasts - defined in this work as events based on the communal consumption of food and drink conscientiously differentiated from quotidian meals - punctuated the rhythms of the lives of Jews throughout ancient Palestine and the Diaspora. Jews convened feasts before and after the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. to mark seminal moments in Jewish history and to commemorate the roles God and his intermediaries played in these events. Jews also held feasts on a number of other occasions. Individuals and groups of Jews may have held feasts upon the visitation of foreign dignitaries, the completion of a major building project, after the safe return of a family or friend from a journey abroad, or during important life-cycle events. Regardless of the occasion, feasts consisted of a host of practices that provided Jews with the means to establish, maintain, or contest social hierarchies and group cohesion. How individuals and groups of Jews manipulated the constitutive elements of feasts during the period under investigation to actuate the social order within their communities is the focus of this dissertation.

To achieve this dissertation's objective, I will examine the textual and archaeological evidence for the performances of feasts within two domains that were central to the construction of Jewish society: privately owned Jewish domiciles in Palestine and the communal and religious institution of the synagogue located in the Diaspora and Palestine. There have been previous studies that have examined both the textual and archaeological data for the functions of feasts convened within these locations, but they have been temporally limited and have not taken into account recent anthropological and ethnographic studies demonstrating the dynamic functions of feasts. My analysis of the literary and archaeological evidence for feasts held within Jewish domiciles and synagogues shows that these repasts provided Jews with various opportunities to determine their relationships with one another, advance their economic and political agendas, seek power, and establish and/or contest broader tenets of the social order. I hope that my study will lead to further investigations into the social dynamics of Jewish feasts as well as their role as a catalyst for the transformation of economic, political, and religious institutions that shaped Jewish society in antiquity.

“Globalizing the Sculptural Landscape of Isis and Sarapis Cults in Roman Greece,” asks questions of cross-cultural exchange and viewership of sculptural assemblages set up in sanctuaries to the Egyptian gods. Focusing on cognitive dissonance, cultural imagining, and manipulations of time and space, I theorize ancient globalization as a set of loosely related processes that shifted a community's connections with place. My case studies range from the 3rd century BCE to the 2nd century CE, including sanctuaries at Rhodes, Thessaloniki, Dion, Marathon, Gortyna, and Delos. At these sites, devotees combined mainstream Greco-Roman sculptures, Egyptian imports, and locally produced imitations of Egyptian artifacts. In the last case, local sculptors represented Egyptian subjects with Greco-Roman naturalistic styles, creating an exoticized visual ideal that had both local and global resonance. My dissertation argues that the sculptural assemblages set up in Egyptian sanctuaries allowed each community to construct complex narratives about the nature of the Egyptian gods. Further, these images participated in a form of globalization that motivated local communities to adopt foreign gods and reinterpret them to suit local needs.

I begin my dissertation by examining how Isis and Sarapis were represented in Greece. My first chapter focuses on single statues of Egyptian gods, describing their iconographies and stylistic tendencies through examples from Corinth and Gortyna. By comparing Greek examples with images of Sarapis, Isis, and Harpokrates from around the Mediterranean, I demonstrate that Greek communities relied on globally available visual tropes rather than creating site or region-specific interpretations. In the next section, I examine what other sources viewers drew upon to inform their experiences of Egyptian sculpture. In Chapter 3, I survey the textual evidence for Isiac cult practice in Greece as a way to reconstruct devotees’ expectations of sculptures in sanctuary contexts. At the core of this analysis are Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride, which offer a Greek perspective on the cult’s theology. These literary works rely on a tradition of aretalogical inscriptions—long hymns produced from roughly the late 4th century B.C.E. into the 4th century C.E. that describe the expansive syncretistic powers of Isis, Sarapis, and Harpokrates. This chapter argues that the textual evidence suggests that devotees may have expected their images to be especially miraculous and likely to intervene on their behalf, particularly when involved in ritual activity inside the sanctuary.

In the final two chapters, I consider sculptural programs and ritual activity in concert with sanctuary architecture. My fourth chapter focuses on sanctuaries where large amounts of sculpture were found in underground water crypts: Thessaloniki and Rhodes. These groups of statues can be connected to a particular sanctuary space, but their precise display contexts are not known. By reading these images together, I argue that local communities used these globally available images to construct new interpretations of these gods, ones that explored the complex intersections of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman identities in a globalized Mediterranean. My final chapter explores the Egyptian sanctuary at Marathon, a site where exceptional preservation allows us to study how viewers would have experienced images in architectural space. Using the Isiac visuality established in Chapter 3, I reconstruct the viewer's experience, arguing that the patron, Herodes Atticus, intended his viewer to inform his experience with the complex theology of Middle Platonism and prevailing elite attitudes about Roman imperialism.

Throughout my dissertation, I diverge from traditional approaches to culture change that center on the concepts of Romanization and identity. In order to access local experiences of globalization, I examine viewership on a micro-scale. I argue that viewers brought their concerns about culture change into dialogue with elements of cult, social status, art, and text to create new interpretations of Roman sculpture sensitive to the challenges of a highly connected Mediterranean world. In turn, these transcultural perspectives motivated Isiac devotees to create assemblages that combined elements from multiple cultures. These expansive attitudes also inspired Isiac devotees to commission exoticized images that brought together disparate cultures and styles in an eclectic manner that mirrored the haphazard way that travel brought change to the Mediterranean world. My dissertation thus offers a more theoretically rigorous way of modeling culture change in antiquity that recognizes local communities’ agency in producing their cultural landscapes, reconciling some of the problems of scale that have plagued earlier approaches to provincial Roman art.

These case studies demonstrate that cultural anxieties played a key role in how viewers experienced artistic imagery in the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean. This dissertation thus offers a new component in our understanding of ancient visuality, and, in turn, a better way to analyze how local communities dealt with the rise of connectivity and globalization.

This dissertation investigates Iron II Judean pillar figurines and their place in Judean ritual. First, the project identifies major trends in the interpretation of figurines and evaluates them using ancient Near Easter texts, archaeological context, the Hebrew Bible, and iconography. Second, it focuses on the significance of major iconographic shifts in figurine production, using the various types of data to understand these shifts and their implications for figurine function.

The dissertation first analyzes four major trends in the study of these statuettes, showing that interpreters begin with assumptions based upon figurine iconography and only then take into account Israelite religion, biblical texts, and archaeology (Chapter 2). The study then explores textual descriptions of figurine rituals from the Neo-Assyrian Empire. These suggest that figurine rituals were highly complex and that the absence of accompanying ritual texts is a barrier to interpretation (Chapter 3).

Chapters 4-7 examine the archaeological contexts and technological characteristics of the figurines. Chapter 4 focuses on Kathleen Kenyon's excavations in Jerusalem, Chapter 5 focuses on Yigal Shiloh's excavations in the same area, Chapter 6 describes the results of a new petrographic study of Jerusalem figurines, and Chapter 7 summarizes the data and compares them with the archaeological contexts of figurines found in other areas of Judah. The analysis demonstrates that the majority of figurines were found as random trash in domestic structures, that figurines were used by people from various socio-economic levels, that most figurines were not associated with domestic shrines, and that figurines have no significant correlation with artifacts associated with women's activity areas. The data also have important implications for the understanding of iconography in Jerusalem and surrounding areas.

Turning to the Hebrew Bible, Chapter 8 explores the descriptions of clay objects and idol production in biblical texts. This survey of passages shows that production from clay was never prohibited in the biblical text and that concerns over the production of idols focus on images from stone, wood, and metal. It also demonstrates that clay, as a production material, had a unique ability to bridge the gap between sacred and profane realms.

Chapter 9 investigates the various components of the figurines through stylistic analysis and comparative iconography. The chapter argues that the figurines were probably associated with protection and healing. It also discusses the rise of the pillar figurine style in Judah and Jerusalem, the significance of its regional adaptation, and the importance of the image's ambiguity for its function and dissemination.

Finally, Chapter 10 locates the figurines in their socio-historic context within Iron II Judah, as a part of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. The chapter evaluates the likelihood that the Neo-Assyrian Empire provided the cultural context for the spread of figurine rituals associated with healing and protection in the Iron II. It also summarizes biblical depictions of healing rituals and the role of divine intermediaries, closing with a final evaluation of the dominant interpretive paradigms and a summary of figurine development and function.

This dissertation demonstrates that the development of monumental public architecture occurred contemporaneously in urban centers of both Latium and Etruria in the late 6th century BC and argues that its catalyst was a profound shift in socio-political organization that took place throughout Central Italy. It analyses these developments through a lens of spatial theory, especially that of environment behavior studies, to understand how they impacted urban societies of Central Italy. The link between the construction of novel public structures in the Roman Forum and the political upheaval of the late 6th century BC has been well established in previous scholarship. New architectural forms lent shape to the Forum, providing the built environment of Rome with an explicitly public space reflective of its new Republican organization. Yet it was not an isolated phenomenon. It can be detected in the urban form of several contemporaneous Latin and Etruscan cities. While the historical record of these cities is far less robust than that of Rome, their archaeological record supports the conclusion that a similar political shift transpired across the larger region of Central Italy during the late 6th and early 5th centuries. In addition to Rome, cities such as Satricum, Caere, and Vulci constructed monumental tripartite temples, public squares, and assembly halls for the first time. These structures appear as a linked assembly and are innovative in their architectural form, but more importantly in their conceptual configuration as explicitly public structures. They not only facilitated the habitual behaviors of the offices of state and citizen bodies that were gradually introduced during this period but also symbolically represented the authority of the state itself. Previously, the regiae and domestic courtyard complexes of local rulers had served as loci for both private and public activity in early archaic cities. The newfound spatial delineation between public and private is reflective of the elaboration of state level organization that saw individual identity and political authority formally separated through the institution of official offices.

My dissertation, “Mapping Immigrant Communities through Their Tombstones in Classical Athens,” seeks to rescue the history of these foreigner residents by studying how they represented themselves on grave markers and how they integrated themselves into the city and its cemeteries. By analyzing the findspots of tombstones of foreign residents, I reconstruct where in the city and alongside whom foreigners were buried.

My dissertation has two main objectives. The first is to show that foreigners were among the few individuals in the mid-5th century whose burials were marked by permanent tombstones. Second, I argue that immigrant communities buried their dead in groups, with immigrants coming from the same place burying together. Moreover, people from different regions of the Aegean tended to bury in different cemeteries in Athens. Though egalitarian on its face, the Athenian democracy was still extremely exclusive, and immigrant communities residing in Athens responded by preserving traditions and promoting their citizenship in other poleis within cemeteries.

Given the growing digitization of cultural heritage, there is an opportunity to leverage digital technologies in order to better serve visitors, against the limitations of people’s traditional approaches to heritage in museums and sites. Digitalizing heritage has become part of the national agenda of many countries, including China. This thesis aims to improve the experience of Chinese heritage for online visitors, by investigating how online three-dimensional representations can support and enhance the experience of viewing heritage for a wider audience. The thesis is comprised of a paper and a digital project. It focuses on Qilou, a kind of Chinese architectural heritage distributed in southeast Asia and southeast China, as a case study practice and develops a prototype for its online 3D presentation, in an effort to develop a real-life application as well as to seek ideas for a future exhibition possibilities. With an emphasis of expressing the historical context of Qilou’s distribution, the digital project used the methodology of online 3D models with virtual reality space as well as story map to assemble and visualize Qilou’s spread from different regions. Through the design of interactivity, ambience, and navigation, the online 3D models can generate an immersive and compelling experience for visitors.

My dissertation “The Afterlives of Archaic Greek Kouroi: An Archaeology of a Greek Sculptural Type” examines the reuses of several kouros fragments after the discard of their initial setting. The focus is centered on their uses at their find spots. I present the reuses chronologically and by type of reuse and find spot. Also, I discuss the find spot context of four fragments found reused in walls on Despotiko and several others found built into walls or deposited in terraces.My thesis has three main objectives. First, I try to classify the reuses of the fragments. This task currently remains a gap in the scholarship. Second, I intend to enrich and broaden the discussion on kouroi beyond their initial display context and their creation phase. Third, I highlight the importance of archaeological context for such study. I argue that the reuse of the four fragments from Despotiko at doors is a structured, deliberate, and conscious event which attributes meaning to the fragments that extends beyond their practical function. Beyond Despotiko, I show that all reuses have a meaningful setting through analysis of other reused fragments at other sites. However, the type and quality of the human engagement in each case varies.

This dissertation answers the question, “How were scribes in the ancient world trained?” The following social history elevates the marginalized voices of ancient scribes, emphasizing their personhood and their agency as human individuals. Chapter 1 establishes the scope of the thesis along with the evidence used and the methodologies employed to approach this evidence. Chapter 2 examines the social backgrounds of ancient Mediterranean scribes, using documentary archives, apprenticeship contracts, and funerary inscriptions to glimpse into their lives and their training. Chapter 3 draws from papyrological evidence to reconstruct the “curriculum” scribes used to develop professional scripts for copying books and writing documents. Chapter 4 details how scribes mastered scribal tools and techniques, balancing ancient archaeological evidence alongside the specialized artisan knowledge preserved by well-attested scribal traditions. This synthesis of evidence focuses on the lived experiences of the creators of our physical texts, thereby uncovering previously unexplored realities about how these texts were written and read.

The Etruscan-Roman city of Vulci is one of many Etruscan cities which lacks a detailed and holistic understanding of its urban development. Vulci represents a rare site that was not covered by modern structures and thus presents a unique opportunity for a city-scale examination of the transformation of urban space over a millennium of occupation. In order to address this query while most of the site is still unexcavated, an innovative method was created for this project. This ‘n’-dimensional approach layers a series of geospatial and historical data, largely relying on new, non-invasive remote sensing surveys. The main sensors and data sets include a series of older aerial photographs (1954, 1975, 1986), a geological and landscape survey from 2014, multi-spectral aerial images from surveys between 2015 and 2017 ranging from normal-colored to red edge to near infrared bands, and two ground penetrating radar (GPR) surveys from 2015 and 2018. The analyses and interpretations from this multi-modal method builds a more holistic and nuanced understanding of the urbanization and transformation of Vulci. Conclusions from spatial analysis suggest a relative order for the development of the Etruscan-Roman street-grid, offering a new framework for the contextualization of other urban features. Further, evidence points to the northeast area with its unique structure orientation and connection to Northeastern Acropolis as the first settled space on the plateau during the 8th century BCE after shifting away from the Villanovan era settlement on La Pozzatella. Analysis also indicates numerous new features, including multiple public buildings in the Western Forum with major phases of transformation first in the 6th-5th century BCE while under Etruscan control and then again during the early Imperial period while under Roman control. Other features include a ‘basilica’-like/Augusteum structure, at least one additional temple, several administrative buildings, and multiple residential structures with atriums and impluviums. The urban development of Vulci implies a revitalization of the city and re-emergence of power during the Roman Imperial period, contradicting the previous notion that Vulci slowly but steadily declined post-conquest. These conclusions situate Vulci in a new place in not only in Etruscan urbanization but also in period the cultural transformation during Rome’s expansion into Etruria. Furthermore, the success of the multi-perspective, layered approach allows for its use in other studies as well as further refinement and advancement of the methodology.