Classical Tradition | American Journal of Archaeology

All’s Well That Ends Well: Sardis at the Victoria and Albert Museum

website — Fri, 01 Apr 2022 04:00:00 +0000

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London owns two watercolors that depict the Temple of Artemis at Sardis with its two fully standing columns as they appeared in the early 19th century. The museum catalogue stated that the finer of the two, showing a dramatic stormy view by Clarkson Stanfield (1834–35), a prominent artist who had never been to Sardis, was based on the second, a crude sketch allegedly made on the spot by one “Mr. Maude,” otherwise unknown. Stanfield’s picture shows construction and ornamental details unique to the Sardis columns and capitals, while the “Maude” shows none of these nor does it present a correct view of the landscape. Since it became clear that the Maude watercolor could not have served as a model for Stanfield, our findings were presented to the museum, whose Prints and Drawings Department specialists, after some scholarly communication, graciously acknowledged the mistake and proceeded to amend the catalogue. This is gratifying. Nevertheless, this incident offers an opportunity to underscore the benefits of multidisciplinary cooperation. In the larger picture, we specialists of kindred disciplines—archaeologists, art and architectural historians, and museum curators—share the same goals and possess knowledge and values worth sharing.

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Beyond Spolia: A New Approach to Old Inscriptions in Late Antique Anatolia

website — Wed, 07 Aug 2019 16:12:52 +0000

Recent epigraphic studies have contextualized inscriptions within their archaeological settings, bringing these stones into the field of material culture studies. The time is now ripe to consider the full life-span of inscriptions and the cumulative assemblage of inscribed material on display at any one time. Although inscriptions appear to be “set in stone” at the moment of their carving, they are actually a dynamic medium capable of communicating with viewers centuries later. By examining textual and archaeological sources in Asia Minor, I argue that individuals in late antiquity (fourth–sixth centuries C.E.) read and reinterpreted older epigraphic material to suit present needs. Spoliated inscriptions built into a baptistery now in the museum in Burdur, Turkey, show evidence of sophisticated manipulation aimed at hiding the pagan identity of the original dedicator. At Ankara, I argue, the reuse of the Temple of Augustus and Roma as a church should be dated to late antiquity, and I consider potential modes of reading the Res Gestae Divi Augusti and a list of Galatian priests on its walls from an Early Christian perspective. Although the inscribed words remained the same, the messages communicated were transfigured by the profound shifts in cultural viewpoints that accumulated in the Late Imperial period.

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Assessing a Roman Copy: The Story of the Syon Aphrodite

website — Tue, 01 Jan 2019 05:00:00 +0000

The statue of Aphrodite formerly in Syon House in London is an important instance of the Roman copying tradition, a phenomenon crucial to the understanding of Roman and Greek sculpture production. The statue is a high-quality product of the early first century C.E. from metropolitan Rome; it was esteemed as such in the Italian Renaissance, appreciated as such in 18th-century England, and to some extent scorned as such in the first decade of the 21st century. But after another marble version of the same statue type was excavated in Pozzuoli, the Syon statue regained attention and value. This paper reviews the history of the statue; discusses the statue in the context of its ancient type by presenting its details of manufacture and comparing them to other examples of the type; considers the distinctive use of such statues in the Roman period; explores possible interpretations; and concludes by applying traditional methodology to trace the date, subject, and maker of the model. This methodology suggests that the model of the Syon-Munich-Pozzuoli type was a statue of Aphrodite in Athens of ca. 420 B.C.E., attributable perhaps to the sculptor Alkamenes. The paper demonstrates the processes involved in the historical and aesthetic assessment of a Roman copy.

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Tortoise-Shell Lyres from Phrygian Gordion

aja — Sat, 01 Oct 2016 12:53:51 +0000

Contrary to the prevalent assumption that stringed instruments were absent from Phrygian music, tortoise-shell lyres excavated at Gordion show that such instruments were played in Phrygia during its heyday. Since the shells—or carapaces—are early and potentially the first from outside the Greek world, their identification is based on cautious analysis of worked edges, scrape marks, and a symmetrical pattern of drill holes that reveal details of the lyres’ construction and zoomorphic aesthetic. Two well-preserved examples from an abandonment deposit in the cellar of an extramural house on Gordion’s Northeast Ridge beneath Tumulus E can be dated stratigraphically to the first quarter of the seventh century B.C.E. This context of instruments and domestic artifacts preserves string music as the accompaniment to weaving, dining, and the worship of Matar (Cybele) in a prosperous household. These lyres clarify the musical culture of Anatolia, which is otherwise heavily abstracted in Greek myths and theoretical writings. Those instruments that Phrygia was best known for, the aulos and cymbals, are also materially and pictorially attested at Gordion, but the lyres expand the Phrygian soundscape to include a largely unknown polyphony.

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Photographing Dura-Europos, 1928–1937: An Archaeology of the Archive

aja — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 14:59:48 +0000

Recent years have seen the emergence of scholarship on the history of archaeology and receptions of the classical past. Neither of these trends has fully engaged with the visual evidence, particularly that of photography, or with the material form of the archive itself. Using archival photographs taken at the site of Dura-Europos from 1928 to 1937, this article explores how the study of archaeological photographs and archaeological archives can contribute to our understanding of the history and epistemology of archaeology.

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Archaeology and the Anxiety of Loss: Effacing Preservation from the History of Renaissance Rome

aja — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 15:02:56 +0000

It is a famous paradox that Renaissance builders, despite their avowed reverence for classical antiquity, caused widespread archaeological destruction in Rome. As early as the 14th century, humanists criticized the devastation caused by new construction in the papal capital, and later archaeologists applied the scientific techniques of their new discipline to substantiate these claims. But the blanket condemnation of Renaissance destruction is both unfair and misleading. This article investigates how fear for the survival of archaeological artifacts, or the anxiety of loss, has distorted our understanding of early modern interventions on ancient sites. By drawing on new evidence for preservation practices, it explores why these were effaced from the historical record and invites us to rethink the history of archaeology in Renaissance Rome.

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A Hall for Hercules at Ostia and a Farewell to the Late Antique “Pagan Revival”

website — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 14:00:00 +0000

In 1945, Herbert Bloch published an inscription from Ostia recording the restoration of a cellam Herc[ulis] in the late fourth century and suggested that it heralded the last pagan revival in the western Roman empire. Social historians now largely dispute this thesis, yet the details of the Ostian evidence remain unchallenged. This article demonstrates that the Hercules inscription, which Bloch attributed to the so-called Temple of Hercules (1.15.5) at Ostia, more probably records the restoration of a bath complex once decorated with the labors of Hercules. Given the persistence of traditional religious practices now known to have characterized the Late Antique city, neither the restoration of the baths nor the temple need bear the weight of religious revivalism. Evidence suggests that the urban image of fourth-century Ostia remained inconspicuously traditional, even as Christianity gained a more visible presence in the town.

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The Persian and Carthaginian Invasions of 480 B.C.E. and the Beginning of the Classical Style: Part 1, The Stratigraphy, Chronology, and Significance of the Acropolis Deposits

website — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 12:00:00 +0000

This study, in three parts, addresses the problem of the beginning of the classical style—the so-called Severe Style—from an archaeological perspective, focusing on those sculptures found or allegedly found in Persian destruction contexts or directly associated with the Persian and Carthaginian invasions. Part 1, the present article, reexamines the 19th-century excavations of the Acropolis and argues that the style almost certainly did not predate the Persian invasion of 480–479 B.C.E. The only deposit that appears to be pure Perserschutt (uncontaminated destruction debris from the Persian sack) contained only archaic material. The remaining deposits are all later construction fills for the Kimonian/Periklean fortification project of ca. 467–430. The 15 Severe Style sculptures found in them can be shown to postdate the Athenian reoccupation of the citadel by as much as 40 years. Parts 2 and 3 will appear in forthcoming issues of the AJA. Part 2 reexamines deposits from elsewhere in Athens and Attica, in the Aphaia sanctuary at Aigina, and on Sicily, with similar results. Part 3 summarizes current theories about the origins and meaning of the Severe Style; examines the trend toward austerity in Late Archaic Greece, suggesting that the Tyrannicides of Kritios and Nesiotes (477/6) indeed inaugurated the Severe Style; and proposes that the theory that it was somehow occasioned by the Greek victories of 480–479 is worth reconsidering.

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Making Nations from the Ground Up: Traditions of Classical Archaeology in the South Caucasus

website — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 13:42:00 +0000

Building on the incipient institutions of the Russian empire, the Soviet Union produced the largest school of classical archaeology beyond the Euro-American academy. This article presents the intellectual history of classical archaeology in one part of this vast Russo-Soviet sphere, the South Caucasus. Although sharing a common historical framework with the discipline as practiced in the West, classical archaeology in the South Caucasus was founded and developed on rather different grounds. This paper probes the beginnings, and subsequent institutionalization, of antichnaia arkheologiia, or ancient archaeology, from the 19th century until the present, providing a regional account in the decades before World War II, followed by a more focused analysis of developments in the Republic of Armenia in the subsequent decades. The purpose of this historical anthropology of the discipline is twofold: to detail the workings of an archaeological tradition in a part of the world that, since the collapse of the Iron Curtain, increasingly has become an area of interest to Western scholars; and to denormalize our own disciplinary culture and consider what (if any) lessons might be learned from a classical tradition alternative to the one in which Western scholars have been enculturated.

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The Emperor’s New Clothes? The Utility of Identity in Roman Archaeology

website — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 15:00:00 +0000

This paper discusses the concept of identity as an increasingly central research theme in Anglo-American Roman archaeology. The first part provides an overview and critique of the issue in recent academic discourse, highlighting some potential theoretical and methodological problems. I argue that, if pursued uncritically, there is a danger that approaches to identity are reducible to the search for diversity for diversity’s sake, and even worse, that identity is simply read off from archaeological remains in a culture-historical fashion. In the second part, I use two case studies to outline a new approach to the construction of narratives of identity that emphasizes the constitution of identity through dynamic social practices instead of a direct one-to-one relationship between identity and static material culture. I contend that identity is best investigated through methodologies specifically designed to elucidate aspects of social practice through archaeological evidence rather than simply identify variability in material culture.

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