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People of Ancient Daunia
The statue-stelae of Early Iron Age Daunia (north Apulia, Italy), a group of stone slabs, are each incised to represent the garb and accoutrements of a person. They detail the clothing and adornment worn by men and women in full regalia, plus, through additional figurative images drawn on the robes, show ritual practices, everyday activities, and scenes of local legend. As such, they offer an unparalleled window into the lives of a proto-historic people, providing a rich source of self-representation for what is otherwise a fairly poorly understood society. Grounded in the scholarship of post-colonial and gender archaeology, this book pays full respect to the agency of indigenous communities and the important role of women. It considers the stelae not through a Hellenic lens, but in the Italo-Adriatic context to which they belong. This is the first time an in-depth, holistic study of the Daunian stelae has been undertaken, and the first presentation of the material in English.
Baalbek-Heliopolis, the Bekaa, and Berytus from 100 BCE to 400 CE
The aim of this monograph is to understand the extent to which the landscape of Roman Berytus and the Bekaa valley is a product of colonial transformation following the foundation of Colonia Iulia Augusta Felix Berytus in 15 BCE. The book explores the changes observed in the cities of Berytus and Heliopolis, as well as the sites at Deir el-Qalaa, Niha, and Hosn Niha. The work fundamentally challenges the traditional paradigm, where Baalbek-Heliopolis is seen as a religious site dating from as early as the Bronze Age and associated with the worship of a Semitic or Phoenician deity triad and replaces it with a new perspective where religious activity is largely a product of colonial change.
When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven
"This book investigates rabbinic treatises relating to animals, humans, and other lifeforms. Through an original analysis of creaturely generation and species classification by late ancient Palestinian rabbis and other thinkers in the Roman empire, Rafael Rachel Neis shows how rabbis blurred the lines between the human and other beings. This they did even as they were intent on classifying creatures and delineating the contours of the human. Recognizing that life proliferates via multiple mechanisms beyond sexual copulation between two heterosexual 'male' and 'female' individuals of the same species, the rabbis produced intricate alternatives. This expansive view of generation included human...
Village Potters of the Troodos Mountains
Village Potters of the Troodos Mountains: Ceramic Production in Agios Demetrios, Cyprus 1891-2002, by Gloria London, is a study of four generations of female potters working in a remote Cypriot mountain village. Their coil-built jars, jugs, cookware, beehives, ovens, and decorative pots are the subject of the author's ethnoarchaeological research, including her quantitative data on pot sizes, production rates, firing times, and rate of loss. This data will serve archaeologists worldwide who are concerned with craft specialization and standardization, learning frameworks, markings on pots, and identifying production locations.
Syrian Identity in the Greco-Roman World
By engaging with recent developments in the study of empires, this book examines how inhabitants of Roman imperial Syria reinvented expressions and experiences of Greek, Roman and Syrian identification. It demonstrates how the organization of Greek communities and a peer polity network extending citizenship to ethnic Syrians generated new semiotic frameworks for the performance of Greekness and Syrianness. Within these, Syria's inhabitants reoriented and interwove idioms of diverse cultural origins, including those from the Near East, to express Greek, Roman and Syrian identifications in innovative and complex ways. While exploring a vast array of written and material sources, the book thus posits that Greekness and Syrianness were constantly shifting and transforming categories, and it critiques many assumptions that govern how scholars of antiquity often conceive of Roman imperial Greek identity, ethnicity and culture in the Roman Near East, and processes of 'hybridity' or similar concepts.
Africa and Byzantium
Medieval art history has long emphasized the glories of the Byzantine Empire, but less known are the profound artistic contributions of Nubia, Egypt, Ethiopia, and other powerful African kingdoms whose pivotal interactions with Byzantium had an indelible impact on the medieval Mediterranean world. Bringing together more than 170 masterworks in a range of media and techniques—from mosaic, sculpture, pottery, and metalwork to luxury objects, panel paintings, and religious manuscripts—Africa and Byzantium recounts Africa’s centrality in transcontinental networks of trade and cultural exchange. With incisive scholarship and new photography of works rarely or never before seen in public, this long-overdue publication sheds new light on the staggering artistic achievements of late antique Africa. It reconsiders northern and eastern Africa’s contributions to the development of the premodern world and offers a more complete history of the region as a vibrant, multiethnic society of diverse languages and faiths that played a crucial role in the artistic, economic, and cultural life of Byzantium and beyond.
Icon, Cult, and Context
This festschrift honors UCLA professor emerita Susan Downey and her meticulous scholarship on religious architecture and imagery in the Roman/Hellenistic world. The iconography of gods and goddesses, the analysis of sacred imagery in the context of ancient cult practices, and the design and decoration of sacred spaces are the main themes of the book. Authors examine such subjects as painting from Dura-Europos, Hellenistic sculpture at Saqqara in Egypt, Roman cameo glass, Pompeian fresco, and aspects of Venus in portrait sculpture. The essays on Dura-Europos are especially valuable in light of the present turmoil in the region. Professor Downey's influence shines through in these discussions, which echo her mentorship of several generations of art history and archaeology students and recognize her scholarly achievements. The broad temporal and geographic parameters of the volume are expansive, and the juxtaposition of images and analyses leads to surprising new conclusions.
Mummy Portraits of Roman Egypt
This publication presents fascinating new findings on ancient Romano-Egyptian funerary portraits preserved in international collections. Once interred with mummified remains, nearly a thousand funerary portraits from Roman Egypt survive today in museums around the world, bringing viewers face-to-face with people who lived two thousand years ago. Until recently, few of these paintings had undergone in-depth study to determine by whom they were made and how. An international collaboration known as APPEAR (Ancient Panel Paintings: Examination, Analysis, and Research) was launched in 2013 to promote the study of these objects and to gather scientific and historical findings into a shared databas...
The Archaeology of Political Organization
In this volume, Barbara Stark examines settlement in the coastal plain of lowland Mesoamerica, which was richly endowed with fertile soil and valued tropical resources such as jaguars, cacao, avian species with bright plumage, and cotton. The book provides basic archaeological data about regional settlement from three decades of survey research in south-central Veracruz in the western lower Papaloapan basin, a region with low density urbanism. The data reveals political and social change, with consolidation of wealth by elite families during the Late Classic period. The political analysis considers archaeological evidence related to several organizational principles: collective versus autocr...
