American Journal of Archaeology

This book attempts to address the public lives of upper-class nonimperial women or women of substantial financial means living beyond Rome in the period spanning the late first century B.C.E. to the third century C.E. The volume is a long-awaited contribution to van Bremen’s landmark study The Limits of Participation: Women and Civic Life in the Greek East in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods (Amsterdam 1996), which explored female participation in the public sphere of Greek cities.

This volume investigates surface pottery finds from Sikyon, Greece, in order to shed light on ceramic production in the region between the second century B.C.E. and the third century C.E. The Sikyon Survey Project, an extensive surface survey of the Sikyon Plateau, was a multidisciplinary research endeavor conducted between 2004 and 2008, with study seasons from 2009 to 2012. The ceramics collected in this survey, a total of 739,313 fragments, include vessel sherds and kiln wasters.

One of the richest and most important archaeological sites of Graeco-Roman date excavated in recent decades in the eastern Mediterranean is ancient Zeugma, located on the Euphrates River in southeastern Turkey. Also known as Seleucia and founded by Seleucus I Nicator ca. 300 B.C.E., Zeugma gained worldwide attention from the discovery of outstanding mosaics of Roman imperial date in many of its houses. The site was explored initially in the 1970s and then more fully in the 1990s and early 2000s.

The exquisite Roman frescoes conserved in situ at Egypt’s Luxor temple, the subject of this volume, are in many ways a departure from the non-naturalistic style most often associated with art of the Tetrarchic emperors. The volume is unprecedented in its multidisciplinary perspective and admirable dual goals of considering these frescoes for the first time in their original architectural, archaeological, and historical environments and placing them more firmly within the greater context of Tetrarchic ideology and Roman artistic achievement writ large.

This book focuses on a defined body of material culture from the first and second centuries C.E.: the inscribed monuments of the Augustales in Italy. These were the monuments of men (and a few women) who were financially as well-to-do as the traditional elite of their communities but lacked the legal right to participate in municipal government (most were freedmen). These monuments were part of the urban fabric of every Italian town, presenting the modern scholar with an opportunity to see the contributions and responses of one element of a complex society to other elements and to itself.

Depictions of architecture are some of the most abundant and underanalyzed elements of Roman art.

Beginning in the Roman Imperial period, individuals from a broad social spectrum could afford a decent burial in a built-up tomb and an inscription that perpetuated their memory. In the city of Rome, the bulk of funerary inscriptions commemorated the lives of men, women, and children of modest means and humble social status. From a strictly historical perspective, some of the most interesting tombs in Rome are large, collective burials. These brought together mostly unrelated individuals, who, while they could not afford a mausoleum of their own, could pay for a spot in one.

The longevity of Roman construction on land is well known, and some notable concrete structures that still stand today are justifiably celebrated. The survival of Roman concrete harbor works is perhaps even more astonishing, having resisted for so long the force of the sea—modern concrete structures are commonly demolished after but a small fraction of the time. So what is it about Roman concrete that explains its extraordinary resilience?

This lavishly illustrated edited volume is the second of three that have resulted from the Memoria Romana project that Galinsky has directed since 2009. While the other two (Memoria Romana: Memory in Rome and Rome in Memory [Ann Arbor 2014] and Memory in Ancient Rome and Early Christianity [Oxford 2016]) focus more on the capital city and written evidence, the balance here falls explicitly more toward material culture, especially in the provinces.

This book represents a synthesis of papers from two international conferences: the First International CAPP Symposium, New Approaches to Archaeological Human Remains in Cyprus, and a conference with the same title as the volume.