American Journal of Archaeology

114.3 (July 2010)

Karen B. Stern examines the often-neglected decorated tiles of the Roman Dura Europos synagogue ceiling.

This well-preserved synagogue in the equally well-preserved ancient city at the crossroads of the Hellenistic, Persian, and Roman worlds offers a unique example of a building whose form might have had parallels in Syria and other regions of the ancient Mediterranean. Its ceiling includes designs and texts painted onto 234 tiles. Varied patterns depict human faces, hybrid and nonhybrid animals, flowers, fruit, and grains. Some of the hybrid creatures include bird-serpents, centaurs holding fish, and, as shown here, a goat’s head and body affixed to a fish tail.

Melissa Eppihimer examines the fragments from the statues of Manishtushu to reconstruct their forms and textual components and to assess their role in the practice of Akkadian kingship.

Lynne C. Lancaster documents the first Roman use in Greece of the pitched-brick vaulting technique and explores the means by which it was introduced.

Anthony F. Mangieri argues that the painter of the Heroines pyxis, now in the British Museum, meaningfully paired the women to prompt viewers to compare them in the same way as the tradition of Greek catalogue poetry.

Panagiota A. Pantou discusses settlement patterns, architecture, artifact distribution, burial practices, and craft specialization in all three known Late Bronze Age Mycenaean settlements in the Bay of Volos, Thessaly.

Christopher A. Tuttle and Donald R. Keller present a collection of up-to-date field reports in the Jordan Newsletter.

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Matthew Canepa analyzes the techniques by which the kings of the early Sasanian dynasty engaged the past.

Sarah Harvey examines a group of well-preserved Roman-period iron tools from a villa in Boscoreale, Italy, for insights about everyday life at the villa.

Maura K. Heyn discusses the significance of gesture in the funerary portraits from Roman Palmyra in the Syrian steppe to understand the creation and negotiation of identity in the local communities of the empire.

Lidewijde de Jong re-examines the architecture and location of a Roman and Byzantine cemetery in Tyre, to illustrate the profound changes that took place in the first centuries of the Principate in the province of Syria.

Nicholas Hudson studies Roman table assemblages for functional possibilities informed by literary and artistic evidence.

Ivo D. Cholakov and Krastyu Chukalev present a collection of up-to-date field reports in the Bulgaria Newsletter.

About the AJA

The American Journal of Archaeology is one of the world's most distinguished and widely distributed classical archaeology journals. It was founded in 1885 and continues to devote itself to the advancement of archaeological studies and to the promotion of interest in them. Circulation of the AJA reaches 53 countries and almost 1,000 universities, learned societies, departments of antiquities, and museums. It is published quarterly in both print and electronic (PDF) formats in January, April, July, and October and is available through membership in the Archaeological Institute of America or by subscription.