Classical Archaeology

The letters of the kingss of the Hellenistic period are interesting for
their content and for their language. In both fields they are primary
historical sources. They show the Hellenistic states as they actually
functioned, their administrative and diplomatic dealings wim subjects
and with officials and occasionally with neighbors. They are not the
products of historians writing for posterity and interested according to
their bent in suppressing either the favorable or the unfavorable aspects
of their subject. Their authors were the principals themselves, concerned
of course with presenting thieir actions in a favorable  light but occupied
only with the execution of a particular design. They deal with details
and they are avowedly biased, but their bias cannot extend to obscuration
of the transaction. By showing the administration of details, they
make it possible to see behind the generalities of political historians and
to form a conception of the Hvins conditions wimin the Greco-oriental
kingdoms of the heirs of Alexander.

Witcher, R.E. (2006). Broken Pots and Meaningless Dots? Surveying the Rural Landscapes of Roman Italy. Papers of the British School at Rome 74: 39-72.

This article questions why the popularity of field survey as a method for the study of rural Roman Italy, and its rapid methodological development, have not been accompanied by parallel developments in theoretical and interpretative frameworks. Field survey remains wedded to a limited range of historical and ‘processual’ questions and isolated from wider archaeological developments in relation to the interpretation of material culture and, in particular, theories of landscape. It is argued that the current attention towards methodology has allowed theory and interpretation to be ignored for too long. The suggestion that survey is incapable of responding to such issues as social identity is dismissed through a deconstruction of how archaeological knowledge is constructed on a hypothetical survey. A variety of assumptions are exposed and critiqued in the light of the wider archaeological literature, and alternative avenues of research suggested. The overall aim is not to lay down a series of prescriptive steps for all future research, but to present a broad agenda for the reintegration of such work with the wider discipline and an appeal for greater diversity in theoretical and interpretative approaches to the archaeology of Roman rural Italy.

In questo articolo mi domando come mai il rapido sviluppo metodologico delle indagini di superficie come tecnica per lo studio dell'Italia romana rurale non e stato accompagnato da sviluppi paralleli nelle branche teoretiche e interpretative. L'indagine di superficie rimane legata ad un limitato range di domande guidate da testi e domande 'processuali', ed e isolata da un piu ampio pensiero archeologico circa la cultura materiale e il paesaggio. In forte contrasto con altre regioni e periodi, lo studio del paesaggio romano d'Italia continua a focalizzarsi sui siti, sulla ceramica e sui processi, piuttosto che sui luoghi, la gente e le idee. lo auspico un cambiamento epistemologico per portare gli studi verso un dialogo con la piu ampia disciplina. A questo scopo vengono sottoposte a critica pratiche teoretiche e metodologiche. La convinzione che la ricognizione e incapace di rispondere a questioni come l'identita sociale viene abbandonata attraverso una 'decostruzione' di come la conoscenza archeo-logica viene costruita. Una serie di potenziali soggetti di ricerca vengono discusse al fine di delineare una nuova agenda per le ricognizioni in Italia. II fine e quello di stimolare una diversificazione degli approcci che realizzino pienamente il potenziale informativo della ricognizione come contributo alia studio dei paesaggi romani.

A total of 1496 investigated colourless glass analyses have been collected with the aim of achieving a clear geographical, typological, chronological and compositional overview on this particular type of glass. Based on manganese and antimony contents, four main groups were characterised: naturally colourless, Mn-decoloured, Sb-decoloured and Mn/Sb-decoloured. Main achievements relates to the chronological distribution of manganese and antimony technologies, the former being associated to a long lasting technology which culminated during the Late Antique period while the latter being practically absent after the 8 th century AD, being at its acme during the Roman imperial period. Except for naturally colourless glass, glass-making technology mostly implied the use of impure sands and na-tron, relegating the other components to a virtually irrelevant presence, except during the Late Antique and Medieval periods.

Since Maria Teresa Cipriano's and Marie‐Brigitte Carre's seminal 1989 paper ‘Production et typologie des amphores sur la côte adriatique de l'Italie’ in the volume ‘Amphores romaines et histoire économique’, our knowledge of Adriatic Italian wine amphorae has much improved. Most of these ‘new data’, however, remain poorly known among the wider scholarly community and no real update regarding their production loci and distribution patterns has as yet been attempted. This paper fills the void for the central part of the eastern coastline between Rimini and Pescara and reviews the latest evidence regarding the manufacture and circulation of these amphorae. In the process, the central Adriatic area of Italy emerges as a key player in the Late Republican and Early Imperial wine trade. This reassessment provides a new starting point for the diachronic exploration of the Adriatic wine commerce between c.250 BC and AD 150.

Discusses the Athenian treasury at Delphi in the context of contemporary Athenian politics, with special reference to sculptural iconography, the meaning of materials (Parian marble) and the relation of the building to architectural imagery in Pindar's 6th Pythian ode, for Megakles of Athens.

This article examines a red-figure pelike made by a previously unknown local workshop that was very likely located in Pella, the capital of the Kingdom of Macedonia. This vessel was in storage in the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki and is one of the best preserved examples from that Macedonian workshop. In shape and decoration it recalls Attic vases of the second half of the fourth century BC, and particularly the work of Group G and the Amazon Painter. The pelike dates from c.320 BC and is attributed to the Pella B Painter.

Excavations at Lefkandi have dispelled much of the gloom enshrouding the Early Iron Age, revealing a community with significant disposable wealth and with connections throughout the Mediterranean. The eastern imports in particular have drawn scholarly attention, with discussion moving from questions of production and transportation to issues surrounding consumption. This article draws attention to some limitations in prevalent socio-political explanations of consumption at Lefkandi, arguing that models relying on gift-exchange, prestige-goods and elite display cannot adequately account for the distribution, chronology, find context and function of imports at Lefkandi. A study of trinkets – small but manifestly foreign imports of cheap material – offers a new perspective. An analysis of their form, context, use and meaning demonstrates that trinkets were meaningfully and deliberately deposited with children as talismans or amulets. Talismanic practice had Late Bronze Age precedents, and in the Early Iron Age was stimulated from personal contact with the Near East or Cyprus and nurtured by the unique mortuary landscape at Lefkandi. This article demonstrates the need for archaeologists to treat mortuary beliefs as a meaningful explanatory variable. Moreover, the ability of non-elite objects to convey powerful ideas has important implications for the nature and dynamics of artistic and cultural exchanges between Greece and the East in the Iron Age.

This paper examines the relationship between the design and use of mechanical technology, patronage and investment, and economic return, using three main case studies: water-lifting devices, the water-powered grain mill, and the diverse uses of water-power in mining. Water-power was used on a wide scale and in diversified forms at an early date (by the first century A.D.), and the use of mechanical technology to perform economically critical work had an important impact on economic performance and the potential for per capita growth, especially in the latter centuries B.C. and the first two centuries A.D. Conversely, in the third century A.D. the cessation of the employment of hydraulic mining techniques enabling large-scale extraction of gold and other metals may have had an adverse impact on the economy as a whole. Growth and progress do not necessarily follow a linear pattern of advance; technologies are lost as well as adopted.

In the literature dealing with the development of ceramic specialization, paste uniformity has been suggested as a surrogate index of product standardization and the result of a more intensive level of specialization. More recently, the amount of paste variability has been seen as an indicator of different types of production organization. Ethnoarchaeological data from Mexico, Peru, and Guatemala suggest that a variety of environmental, technological, and social factors influence paste variability. These factors are important in all production contexts and complicate inferences drawn about production organization in antiquity. As a consequence, social and economic inferences derived from ancient ceramic pastes need to be understood in relation to numerous other factors such as natural variability of the ceramic raw materials, their procurement, and their use in paste preparation. Furthermore, changes in resource use and paste preparation over time can obscure intracommunity and other fine-scale patterns. As a consequence, it is argued that little, if anything, can be learned about the organization of production below the level of the local production community. Rather, the primary usefulness of paste compositional analyses lies in the identification, in geographic and geological spaces (“community signature units”), of source communities that exploit raw materials within a limited range of probably no more than 3 to 4 km. Paste analyses thus provide important information about the organization of ceramic distribution, revealing the emergence and demise of source communities and the movement of their ceramic products.

While archaeological sciences have made great advances over the last decades through combining archaeological evidence and natural sciences in order to push borders for the understanding of archaeological contexts, traditional archaeology still holds an immense latent potential. Such potential can be realized through baseline projects that pull together unexplored bodies of material culture and study these in detail in order to investigate their significance for the understanding of the human past. This paper presents such a largescale baseline study and focuses on the presentation of the results emerging from the recently compiled corpus of more than 3700 funerary portraits stemming from one location in the ancient world, Roman Palmyra, an oasis city in the Syrian Desert. The analysis of the chronological development of the numerous portraits allows us to follow the fluctuations in the production of these portraits over approximately 300 years. Here we discuss and review the developments in connection with historical sources and discuss until now unknown events, which have emerged through the data analysis. The paper brings to the forefront the significance of social science baseline projects, which often do not receive enough attention or funding, but which in fact are fundamental for furthering our understanding of the human past and push borders for the directions in which we can take such studies in the future.

... survive, but they were certainly not the norm (Barr-Sharrar 1998, 82. Higgins 9ig61, 171 lists only silver fibulae, popular in Early Hellenistic Campania. Cf. Treister 1996, 301-2). Silver craftsmanship also throve in Thrace: Archibald ...

Did climatic events help give rise to the Antonine Plague? This paper examines the climate of Eurasia and Northeast Africa in the latter half of the second century CE, possible connections between observed climatic changes and the second-century pandemic (165–190 CE), and societal downturn that followed the pestilence. By exploring potential explanations for apparent connections between a changing climate and the Antonine Plague, a link between climatic events and the pandemic’s arrival to the Empire emerges. The chapter then considers the ongoing debates concerning the impact of the Antonine Plague. Both exaggerated and understated interpretations of the pandemic’s effects dominate the histories, in spite of the evidence. This chapter approaches the question of impact with caution by avoiding Empire-wide generalisations and focusing on the effects of the “plague” from a regional perspective.

This article examines the evidence for production activities in the cities of Roman North Africa and shows how the importance of urban craft production has been largely overlooked in many discussions of the ancient economy. It is usually difficult to determine the true scale of urban production activities without extensive excavation, since workshops were often quite small; they may, however, have been numerous and scattered throughout a city. Excavations of the scale required are rarely achievable with today's techniques; two sites excavated in the first half of the twentieth century, however, reveal a situation characterized by a number of workshops: 22 fulleries at Timgad and 18 establishments for salting fish in Sabratha. Urban surface survey is suggested here as the best method to investigate sites where it is feasible, in order to identify the extent of the deposits of waste production, with the help of geophysical surveys to locate ovens and furnaces, and excavation to investigage specific areas. This combination of techniques has been successfully tested at Leptiminus, Meninx and Thamusida, and has allowed us to identify the presence of production activities for ceramics, metal working, and the extraction of purple dye. The evidence emerging from recent archaeological investigations suggests that the contribution of craft manufacture to the economy of Roman cities was potentially significant, while the aggregate scale of production in the sites discussed indicates a much larger role for craft activities than has usually been considered. The model of the 'consumer city' does not seem suitable for many Roman cities, and attempts to describe the economy of Roman urbanism should pay more attention to the role of cities in networks of local, regional, and long-distance trade.

Questo articolo esamina l'evidenza per le attività industriali nelle città del nord Africa romano e dimostra come l'importanza della produzione artigianale urbana sia stata largamente sottovalutata in molte discussioni di economia antica. Di solito è difficile stabilire la giusta scala delle attività produttive urbane senza effettuare degli scavi estensivi, visto che i laboratori erano molto spesso piuttosto piccoli; ciò non toglie che essi potrebbero essere stati comunque numerosi e distribuiti all'interno della città. Scavi della estensione necessaria non sono irrealizzabili con le tecniche odierne; due siti scavati nella prima metà del ventesimo secolo hanno infatti portato alla luce un quadro caratterizzato da numerosi laboratori: 22 fulloniche a Timgad e 18 stabilimenti per la salatura del pesce a Sabratha. La ricognizione di superficie viene qui indicata come il metodo migliore per effettuare ricerche nei siti che lo consentono, al fine di identificare l'ampiezza dei depositi di rifiuti di fabbricazione, con l'aiuto di indagini geofisiche per trovare forni e fornaci, e scavi di alcune aree specifiche. Questo tipo di tecniche è stato sperimentato con successo a Leptiminus, Meninx e Thamusida, e ha permesso di identificare la presenza di attività di produzione ceramica, lavoro dei metalli e dell'industria per l'estrazione della porpora per la tintura. L'evidenza che emerge dalle recenti indagini archeologiche suggerisce che il contributo dell'industria cittadina all'economia delle città antiche fosse potenzialmente significativo, mentre la scala di produzione nei siti discussi indica un carattere artigianale della vita di queste città molto più consistente di quanto non sia stato di solito ritenuto. Il modello della 'città di consumo' non sembra adattarsi completamente a molte delle città romane, e i tentativi di descrizione dell'economia dell'urbanismo romano dovrebbero prestare più attenzione al ruolo delle città nelle reti di commercio locale, regionale e su lunga distanza.

In this study, we present a transparent and reproducible approach to model agricultural production with respect to environmental characteristics and available labour. Our research focuses on the city of Pergamon and its surroundings, with an emphasis on the transition between the Hellenistic and Roman Imperial Period, where widespread demographic changes took place. We investigated the degree of local self-sufficiency using different concepts of a city’s complementary region. Using simple topographic derivatives, we derive a measure of environmental suitability that we translate into a carrying capacity index. Our results show that workforce was not a limiting factor for local self-sufficiency. However, environmental carrying capacity may have been limiting in a scenario with a large population. An active investment into the environment, e.g., by the construction of terraces, could have helped to increase the degree of self-sufficiency. Future research should investigate the level of resilience of such a coupled socio-ecological system in relation to environmental and socio-cultural dynamics.

This article has two objectives. First, and in particular, it seeks to reinterpret the ostracism procedure of early democratic Athens. Since Aristotle, this has been understood as a rational, political weapon of collective defense, intended to expel from Athens a disproportionately powerful individual. In this article, by putting emphasis on the materiality, gestures, and location of ostraka-casting, I propose instead that the institution can more fruitfully be understood as a ritual enactment of civic unity. Second, and more generally, I hope to explore the frames within which early Athenian democracy is placed: while Greek kingship and tyranny (i.e.“primitive” polities) have been very successfully explored through anthropological and cross-cultural comparison, Greek democracy for the most part has remained in the domains of
the institutional historian and political theorist. Taking a phenomenological and comparative approach, this article asks how the citizens of early democratic Athens experienced and
comprehended their new sovereignty and the invented procedures of mass decision-making through which it was expressed.

In the Roman Eastern provinces, the concept and rituals of a province-wide imperial cult were based on a pre-existing tradition of Hellenistic ruler’s divinization and worship. But its formal mise en place was conformed to the new territorial framework of Roman administration: a gubernatorial provincia/ἐπαρχεία appears subdivided into several administrative sub-provinces that were likewise called provinciae/ἐπαρχεῖαι. The cities of almost all known eparchies in terms of sub-provinces formed koina responsible for the provincial imperial cult and the political representation of the provincials headed by priestly officials, such as bithyniarchai or ‘(high-)priests of the eparchy/-ies’, whose titles refer explicitly to the represented sub-province. The correlation between these koina and Roman territorial administration from almost all Eastern provinces demands more political functions of the koinon-officials than only priestly ones, as shown by the frequently combined titulatures.

The Hellenistic, Parthian, and Roman site of Dura–Europos (or simply “Dura”), dubbed the “Pompeii of the Syrian Desert” by Yale historian and archaeologist Michael Rostovtzeff, was jointly excavated by Yale University and the French Academy of Inscriptions and Letters from 1928 to 1937. Given the outstanding preservation of art and architecture at Dura, it is not surprising that four obsidian artifacts have escaped attention, despite evidence that stone tools – including obsidian ones – continued to be used into and after the Iron Age in the Eastern Mediterranean. After more than eight decades, the character of Dura's connections to the Classical world remains a matter of debate. Pottery includes not only local ceramic wares but also North African and Aegean ones. Our nondestructive pXRF testing establish that the Dura artifacts match the three most widely used Eastern Anatolian obsidian sources: Nemrut Dağ volcano as well as the Bingöl A and B sources. If indeed obsidian arrived at Dura via long-standing mechanisms of Mesopotamian exchange, these Eastern Anatolian obsidians would be expected. Unfortunately, the artifacts' precise locations at Dura are unclear, the excavations lacked stratigraphic con- straints, and Near Eastern obsidian distribution patterns have been rarely studied beyond the Early Bronze Age. Keeping in mind these limitations, our findings are most consistent with past suggestions regarding the im- portance of local Mesopotamian influences and resources at the site.

In order to improve archaeological classifications of Late Republican Black Gloss pottery, an assemblage from two consumption sites in northeastern Hispania has been physicochemically characterized to identify its provenance and to gain an idea of its manufacture process. The study has been organized according to a multiphase sampling (Buxeda i Garrigós and Madrid i Fernández 2016, 20). In the first phase, chemical characterization by means of wavelength-dispersive X-ray fluorescence (WDXRF) and mineralogical characterization by means of X-ray diffraction (XRD) were performed. In the next phase, a subsample was microstructurally characterized by means of scanning electron microscopy (SEM), thanks to which the sintering/vitrification stage of the matrix and the gloss was determined. The combination of both disciplines, archaeology and archaeometry, enables us to identify four meaningful ceramic groups: Campanian A, Cales 1, 2 and 3. The study also allowed us to infer that all of them must be related to the Campanian region and assignable to three different chronological periods. The Campanian region thus seems to have been the primary source that supplied the settlements considered. The study also allows us to appreciate that the classification criteria used by the archaeologists working at those sites reflect the technical choices made by the potters and that, in many cases, they can only be detected and therefore interpreted by means of archaeometry.

This contribution offers a new reading of the ancient landscape of the periphery of Lepcis Magna thanks mainly to the data from the survey campaigns carried out by the Archaeological Mission of Roma Tre University (2007– 13) together with new archival research and GIS analysis. The new data are related to the road network of the Lepcitanian territory and its inner suburban areas. They include both the already known routes (essentially the coastal via publica and the via in mediterraneum) and new roads here presented merging the new information with the already published archaeological evidence. Beside the road network, a new topographic reading of the southeast suburb shows also traces of an ancient land partition based on Roman measurements. This latter discovery would represent, up to now, the first evidence of a cadastrian land partition in Tripolitania.

The relationship between Rome and its surrounding territory has long been a focus of historical and archaeological study and debate. This paper aims to add to this discussion in two specific ways. First, it questions and dismisses the pervasive dichotomy between metropolis and hinterland. Second, it uses regional field survey data to quantify the population of the early imperial suburbium. The paper explores the nexus of social, political and economic flows in order to assess the interaction and integration of metropolis and suburbium. The chronological focus is the early imperial period (c.27BC-AD100). Particular attention is placed upon the degree to which rural populations can be considered not simply as 'rustici' but as a sizeable and integral part of the population of Rome itself. The conclusions suggest that considering metropolis and suburbium as a single unit has important implications for the study not only of rural areas, but also for the city of Rome itself, and for studies of the Roman Italy in general.

Our understanding of the Roman presence in Scotland during the second century has traditionally been viewed through a Roman lens, influenced by the fragmentary, non-contemporaneous and heavily biased accounts of Roman historiographers. Perceived wisdom has perpetuated this through embedded colonial language referring to indigenous occupants of the region and in the way that colonial objects are presented in museums. The welcome paradigm shift from Romanisation to Postcolonial discourses provides fertile ground for challenging Romanocentric narratives when (re)considering the materiality of Empire, particularly from frontier contexts. Replicas are an integral component of this narrative with power to express multiplicities of meanings and engage audiences in new and creative ways. These aspects are explored through newly carved sandstone replicas of Antonine Wall Distance Sculptures, including one inspired by the originals but presenting an alternative, provocative narrative from the perspective of Iron Age occupants of the region who came into conflict with Rome.

In the Augustan Age, a new aesthetic preference was propagated in the Roman Empire – the surface of white marble was valued as it symbolised the strength and superiority of the ‘new age’. Soon, an immense trade in high quality marble over land and sea developed to meet the emergent demand. While the development and scale of this trade is well studied, the repercussions that the new aesthetic preference had on the local architectural traditions in areas where no marble was close at hand is not commonly considered. In this contribution, two developments are traced, taking the Corinthian capital as the leitmotif. First, in the short period between c. 40 and 10 BC, patrons would choose imitation of marble in plaster to meet up with the demands of the new standard and to demonstrate their adherence to the Empire. In the second line of development, a different path was taken – a conscious use of local materials which went hand in hand with the development of a new type of capital, the so-called ‘Nabataean blocked-out’ capital. This combination turned into a new vernacular tradition across large parts of the eastern Mediterranean. Both developments were local responses to a new ‘global’ trend and can therefore be viewed as a phenomenon of glocalisation in the Roman Period.