American Journal of Archaeology

While there have been numerous studies investigating intestinal parasitic infection in the Roman period, much of this work has been focused in northern Europe, with major gaps in the eastern empire. In order to further elucidate regional patterns in parasitic infection in the Roman empire, we looked for evidence for parasites in sites from Anatolia and the Balkans. Sediment samples from drains as well as coprolites were studied to find evidence for intestinal parasites in the Roman cities of Viminacium (Serbia) and Sardis (Turkey), and results were combined with previous work in these regions. Each sample was tested for preserved helminth (worm) eggs using microscopy and for intestinal protozoa that cause diarrhea, using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Our analysis revealed a predominance of species spread by the contamination of food and water by human feces, namely roundworm and whipworm. The identification of these parasites (which are linked to sanitation and hygiene) in Roman cities in Anatolia and the Balkans is contrasted with the range of zoonotic species found elsewhere in the empire. It appears that variations in cooking practices, diet, urbanization, and climate throughout the empire may have contributed to differences in gastrointestinal diseases in different regions.

Of the many interpretive puzzles presented by the so-called Anaglypha Traiani, a pair of Roman imperial reliefs today located in the Curia Julia, one special curiosity is their depiction of a tree, commonly identified as the Ficus Ruminalis, otherwise rendered naturalistically but shown as if growing directly out of a stone base or pedestal. Close interrogation of this feature yields two important avenues of investigation. The first is a matter of historical realism, concerning how living trees were incorporated into the Forum Romanum in real life and thus how we should conceive of the Ficus Ruminalis itself. The second pertains to the use of the base as a formal device, one which activates—in concert with multiple architectonic platforms across the two panels—a sophisticated interplay between the “living” and the “monumental.” This approach reveals a careful design in which the monuments in the reliefs’ foregrounds were selected on both symbolic and historical grounds. Ultimately, this analysis paves the way for a new reading of the two panels as a pair of distinct ideological visions, united within an overarching temporal framework that emphasizes continuity among Rome’s origins (the Ficus Ruminalis) and republican institutions (the Marsyas statue) and its imperial present, as well as between one emperor and the next.

A group of three fragmentary marble statues of colossal scale came to light in 1913 on a low hill known as Dobër in the countryside of Butrint, Albania. A fourth statue fragment, a veiled female head dated stylistically to the late fourth or third century BCE, now in Ioannina, Greece, was said to have been found in the same area, but new archival research casts doubt on that assertion. In this study, we reassess the technical and iconographic features of these statues. We argue that the group from Dobër, which presumably stood inside a temple there, depicts the enthroned Mother of the Gods joined by two standing companions: Attis or a figure from the Trojan saga, such as Askanios, and a fragmentary and unidentifiable male figure. We propose that the group is a visual representation of the well-known literary links between the coast of Butrint and the land of Troy, and further, that it provides testimony for the privileged position that the region had with Rome during the periods of both the Macedonian Wars and the Augustan colonization. As these statues demonstrate, the area of Butrint was a crucial point of encounter between East and West and of cultural mediation for both Greeks and Romans.

The cleaning, restudy, conservation, and reassembly of the Nike of Samothrace in 2013–2014 have prompted several new proposals as to its topographical context, date, and function. This article seeks to clarify some fundamental issues about the statue itself; the socle and ship’s prow on which it stood; an associated inscription; the precinct and edifice in and around which they were found; and last but not least, their relation to the sanctuary as a whole. These clarifications should enable future work to proceed on a firmer basis than hitherto.

A wide variety of edits can be identified in the Linear B administrative documents from Mycenaean Greece. The writers of these documents (the Mycenaean scribes) can be seen to have made changes to their texts by erasing, rewriting, or adding signs, words, or whole entries. The edits include not only correcting errors and updating information (as might be expected for these administrative documents) but also a wide variety of changes that affect the texts’ presentation rather than their content, such as alterations to their layout, textual structure, and orthography, and even the forms of individual signs. By analyzing these edits and the motivations behind them, this article sheds light on the priorities of the Mycenaean scribes in creating and using their administrative documents and the choices they made in the process of doing so. The results demonstrate that despite these records’ short-term nature (tablets were kept for no longer than a year) they were not merely rough or preliminary texts over which relatively little care was taken but were active documents designed for ongoing use and consultation within the Mycenaean palatial administrations’ yearly administrative cycles.

This article rethinks the presence of the lion in Bronze Age Crete and its participation in poetic culture in the Aegean. In the absence of living lions on the island, representational embodiments were the basis of people’s encounters with the species, and the peculiarities of these object-bodies powerfully contributed to the characterization of the beast. Throughout the Bronze Age, the vast majority of Cretan lion representations occurred in glyptic. Seals were worn on persons’ bodies, consistently placing the leonine in direct relation to the human; this juxtaposition had both physical and cultural dimensions and was invigorated by the spatiotemporal dynamism of seal use. This paralleling of human and beast is considered in its lived context, including its likely relationship to oral traditions, especially the comparison formulated by similes. In the period from Middle Bronze III to Late Bronze II, after centuries of development in Crete, the lion’s association with glyptic extended to the early Mycenaean mainland. This was a moment of intense intra-Aegean sharing that had linguistic, practical, and material dimensions and that likely saw the birth of the epic tradition. I argue that the beast’s persistent position in glyptic contributed to the formulation of Aegean poetic culture, configuring a lasting but fluid parallel between lions and humans.