AJA

Egyptian pottery—like the pottery from most excavations—is often prized as a chronological indicator above all else. Pottery thus becomes reified into apparently standard corpora by period, an impression reinforced by ceramic comparison and cross-dating across sites.

This study proposes a definition of a distinct region of Late Minoan (LM) IA Crete on the basis of ceramic style and discusses its cultural meaning. A summary comparison of the stylistic features of Neopalatial, mainly LM IA, fine tableware from Myrtos-Pyrgos and other sites of southeastern Crete shows a distinct style, and I argue that the southeast should be considered a ceramic region.

Public bathing was integral to daily life in ancient Rome. Today, imperial baths loom large in reconstructions of the ancient city, where they evoke the splendor of this uniquely public and social urban tradition. Although archaeological and literary evidence reveals that baths flourished in Rome as early as the third century B.C.E., comparatively little is known about those small, dark, for-profit establishments.

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.

This article investigates how consumer demand shaped markets for high-quality domestic decoration in the Roman world and highlights how this affected the economic strategies of people involved in the production and trade of high-quality wall decoration, mosaics, and sculpture. The argument analyzes the consumption of high-quality domestic decoration at Pompeii and models the structure of demand for decorative skills in the Roman world at large.

This article bridges two fields often kept separate: the study of portrait statues and the study of the statue bases and their texts. However, the statues and their inscribed bases are complementary and necessarily must be studied together. The bases provide information about the titulature of the emperors and the dedicants. Portrait heads have been used in the creation of typologies and identification of regional variations.