Cultural Heritage | 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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Fieldwork at Phrygian Gordion, 2016–2023

website — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 22:46:53 +0000

This article presents the results of the last eight seasons of work at Gordion in west central Türkiye, focusing primarily on architectural conservation, excavation, and remote sensing on the Citadel Mound. The recently discovered South Gate appears to have been in use for over 1,200 years, from the ninth century BCE to the fourth century CE, and with an approach road nearly 100 m long. New excavations in the Mosaic Building Complex, first unearthed in the 1950s and dated at that time to the late fifth century BCE (Persian period), have demonstrated that it was actually constructed a century and a half earlier (ca. 575 BCE) and reconstructed after Gordion came under Persian control. The discoveries within the complex include a stone omphalos and two gilded ivory sphinxes that probably adorned a throne. The Mosaic Building may also have housed the cart with the Gordian Knot cut by Alexander in 333 BCE. The eighth-century Tumulus 52 included more than 3,000 amber beads imported from the Baltic, and the decedent may have been a member of Midas’ family. Gordion was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage Site List in 2023, the 20th site in Türkiye to be so honored.

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