Cultural Interaction | American Journal of Archaeology

Plaster Casts of the Portico from Aphrodisias: Archaeology, Politics, Museology

website — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 22:12:35 +0000

This article presents a case study that demonstrates three essential uses—archaeological, political, and museological—of plaster casts in Graeco-Roman studies. The case is the Portico of Tiberius at Aphrodisias, which the Italian archaeological mission in Anatolia excavated in 1937. Casts of the architectural elements of the portico (entablature, capital, and column) were made immediately, shipped to Rome, and employed to create a one-to-one plaster reconstruction (7.5 m tall, 5.8 m wide, and 1.6 m deep) for a Fascist-period exhibition in Rome, the Mostra Augustea della Romanita. Notwithstanding its Tiberian-period inscription, there the portico was deliberately interpreted as an Augustan monument, with a clear political intent. Both the plaster fragments and the reconstruction today belong to the collection of the Museo della Civiltà Romana in Rome. These objects are extraordinary in their versatile functions—as three-dimensional documentary replicas, propagandistic tools, and a decontextualized museum exhibit—and in their capacity to represent and misrepresent their sources.

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Syncretic Religious Practice at Dedoplis Gora (Caucasian Iberia) in the First Century CE

website — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 22:12:33 +0000

Monuments discovered through archaeological excavations provide information about the pre-Christian religion in Kartli (Caucasian Iberia, modern Georgia). Particularly remarkable is a grandiose temple complex discovered in central Georgia, where the kings of Kartli worshiped Iranian (Zoroastrian) gods merged with local Georgian astral deities. In the Dedoplis Gora palace, which is located 3 km south of the temple complex, three rooms (N10, N20, N26) yielded sanctuaries. The presence of three household sanctuaries in one building suggests that they had different users. In this article, I suggest that room N10 with an altar was a Zoroastrian-type domestic shrine where permanent residents of the palace of Dedoplis Gora offered daily sacrifices and prayed. Meanwhile, the noble owners of the palace prayed in room N20, based on the luxurious items found on the altar. It is likely that the Zoroastrian altar in room N20 was used to worship the Greek cult of Apollo, based on the statuettes found there. Room N26 may have been used for a ritual related to a local cult of fertility, agriculture, and harvest. Coexistence of different religions in the same household is not surprising in the kingdom of Kartli in the first century.

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The Myth of Hellenization: The Early to Middle Hellenistic Period (ca. 300–150 BCE) in Sagalassos and Pisidia (Southwest Anatolia)

website — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 20:27:15 +0000

The spread of Hellenic ideas, practices, and material culture has long been considered a major factor in the urbanization of Hellenistic Anatolia. While this assertion has been criticized and nuanced in recent decades, the importance of Hellenization in the urbanization of some regions remains an ongoing discussion. An example is Pisidia (southwest Anatolia), including the ancient city of Sagalassos. Mainly on the basis of architectural evidence, the Hellenization of Sagalassos began in the late third–early second century BCE. By the late second–early first century BCE, the process had resulted in a Greek-type polis comparable to those along the southern and western coasts of Anatolia. This article aims to reassess the Hellenization model of Sagalassos by comparing the stylistic architectural cross-dating underpinning its theoretical and methodological framework with recent stratigraphic datasets of Late Achaemenid and Early and Middle Hellenistic Sagalassos. Through this exercise, we look into the implications of this reassessment for the urbanization of Sagalassos and its potential impact on our understanding of Hellenistic Pisidia.

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Klazomenian Sarcophagi in the Borderlands: An Ionian (Re)Vision

website — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 15:22:09 +0000

The painted terracotta sarcophagi of Klazomenai (ca. 650–450 BCE) are monuments that speak to a confluence of cultural and artistic interactions in Ionia and western Anatolia, yet the history of scholarship of these funerary objects has often been limited to connoisseurship studies that narrowly situate the sarcophagi within a tradition of mainland Greek vase painting. Borderlands theory views borderlands as sites of overlap between multiple cultures and accommodates more fluid and multivalent notions of identity; the theory constitutes the methodological framework of my analysis of Klazomenian sarcophagi, and informs how I explore their visual programs, forms, and associated Ionian identities. Through the lens of the borderland and Anzaldúa’s concept of lenguaje, I consider thematic motifs, production, and visual replication to resituate the sarcophagi within the context of contemporary elite burial practices in Achaemenid western Anatolia. I argue that using this approach we can better understand how these works negotiated and participated in a plurality of local and regional visual vocabularies, creating their own unique, symbolic, borderland mode of expression.

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Byzantium in “Africa”

website — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 19:54:35 +0000

A major exhibition displacing Europe as the engine that shaped global Christianity is a moment to savor. Africa and Byzantium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York presented northern Africa as a sophisticated and equal partner in the fabrication of visual status in late antiquity instead of as it has customarily been seen, as a derivative province in the Roman world. It drew a general public’s attention to the constitutive role played by lands south of the Mediterranean in the production and circulation of luxury goods, and, through them, in the promulgation of early Christianity.

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Shipwreck Assemblages and Network Analysis: Reconstructing the Furniture Trade in the Mediterranean Using First-Century BCE Shipwrecks

website — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 19:54:34 +0000

Elite Romans residing in opulent villas in central Italy during the first century BCE are generally viewed as the main consumers driving the trade in luxury goods. However, evidence from shipwrecks shows this is not the full picture. This article utilizes assemblage theory and network analysis to examine relationships between luxury furniture and shipwreck assemblages in the Mediterranean in the first century BCE. It starts first with discussion of couches (klinai) and tables from five shipwrecks during this period and one from the first century CE to draw comparisons in furniture types and distribution networks. Then it examines the shared presence of objects and assemblages from other first-century BCE shipwrecks using network analysis. Viewing shipwrecks as nested sets of assemblages combines close analysis of singular wrecks with aggregate data from multiple shipwrecks in an interconnected interpretive framework. The resulting network serves as a starting point for understanding the circulation of objects and facilitating interpretation of shipwrecks, ultimately refining our view of the acquisition of luxury objects in the western Mediterranean during the first century BCE. Finding that luxury objects, such as klinai, were being shipped not only to Italy but also around the same time to the western Mediterranean shifts the focus of study from Italic consumers to wider integrated transportation networks.

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The Extramural Settlement at Vindolanda in the Early Second Century CE: Defining a Glocalized Environment on the Romano-British Frontier

website — Mon, 01 Jan 2024 05:00:00 +0000

Examining the Roman military settlement at Vindolanda, this article explores the archaeology of the northern frontier of the Roman empire in a glocalization framework, investigating the site during a specific occupation period to understand how the material culture found there operated within its particular local context. The soldiers and the extended military communities of auxiliary settlements that dominated the imperial frontiers make a complicated and intriguing case study because of their origins as subaltern and conquered subjects of imperial rule, followed by incorporation into the Roman army. A close examination of the extramural settlement outside the fort at Vindolanda in the site’s Period 4 (ca. 105–120 CE) allows the opportunity to apply a glocal lens to the architecture, foodways, literacy, and dress preserved in the material record. We are presented with a picture of adoption, adaptation, and retention that ultimately can be understood only as the result of ongoing change and creation in a multilayered imperial context. These spaces and their material culture are fully analyzed here, with careful consideration of the community present at Vindolanda, in order to tease out the unique and novel outcomes that this population created in their local context.

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Roman Clavus Decoration on Gallic Dress: A Reevaluation Based on New Discoveries

website — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 04:00:00 +0000

New evidence for color decoration on garments calls into question previously held assumptions about the nature of local dress styles in Roman Gaul. So-called Gallic dress, consisting of a sleeved, unbelted tunic for both men and women, accompanied by a hooded cape for men and a rectangular mantle for women, was especially popular in the northwestern provinces from the late first to the late third century CE. Most recent research on the subject has seen it as entirely local in origin and the result of the development of a Gallic/northwestern regional identity. However, recently published evidence, including a detailed study of paint remains on a corpus of funerary reliefs in eastern Gaul, a reconstructed second tunic from the textile find site at Les Martres-de-Veyre (France), and wall painting fragments from Maasbracht (Netherlands) have revealed that the sleeved Gallic tunics could in fact be decorated with two vertical parallel bands, clavi—a typically Roman tunic decoration. As a result, it is necessary to reevaluate our understanding of how Gallic dress developed, what it signified, and ultimately the extent to which we can reconstruct local dress styles in the Roman provinces when so little of the original paintwork on stone monuments survives.

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The Presentation Scene on the Ivory Pyxis Lid from Mochlos: A Reconstruction and Reinterpretation

website — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 04:00:00 +0000

This article presents evidence for a new reconstruction of the presentation scene portrayed on the Late Bronze Age ivory pyxis excavated at Mochlos. Previously undetected locks of hair, anatomical parts, dress, and attributes facilitate a recreation of the figures. It argues against Soles’ assertion that the goddess holds a lily to crown the shorter male as king and that the leading male is a hero or god based on imagery on the Ur III cylinder of Gudea. It finds instead that the goddess holds an olive branch, and the composition echoes the iconography in Old Syrian paintings and glyptic, including on one seal that was actually found at Mochlos. Supported by iconographic and textual evidence, this study proposes that the ritual, adopted and adapted from the Near East, depicts a Minoan ruler offering a vessel to the goddess for her blessing over the couple, possibly marking a dynastic marriage, and that the pyxis and jewelry found within it were bridal gifts.

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Telling a Story of Two Lands: Perspectives on Ancient Kush, Egypt, and Africa

website — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 04:00:00 +0000

An ambitious exhibition at the Musée du Louvre, Pharaon des Deux Terres: L’épopée africaine des rois de Napata, presented a history of the kings of Napata who conquered Egypt and ruled there as its 25th Dynasty (ca. 720-664 BCE). This dynasty ruled over an empire properly known as Kush, centered in northern Sudan. While acknowledging the challenging circumstances through which the exhibit was developed, this review questions the vestiges of colonialism that shaped it. In particular, it criticizes the presentation of Kushites as important only insofar as they interacted with Egypt. It also questions absences in the exhibit: perspectives from heritage communities on the significance of Kush, or engagement (beyond the title) with its African setting.

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