American Journal of Archaeology

This article explores how Etruscan artwork presented soldiers in visual media during the Middle Roman Republic (ca. 300–100 B.C.E.), a period when Etruscan communities were required to contribute contingents to the Roman army. It proposes a class-based model for how Etruscans formulated their military identities. Elite representations, in particular cavalry combat on cinerary urns, displayed elaborately hellenized soldiers rather than Roman-style combatants. Meanwhile, nonelite representations, primarily featuring infantrymen on more economically accessible votive figurines, either displayed hybrid panoply or made no attempt to differentiate the portrayed soldier from a generic Roman citizen legionary. In the realm of martial identity, Etruscan elites in visual media appeared culturally aloof from Rome as well as socially removed from common soldiers in their own communities. The article concludes by placing the corpus of Etruscan evidence in the context of more scattered evidence from across the peninsula and suggesting that the tendency of elites to eschew the Roman panoply in visual media, and of nonelites to partially or wholly embrace it, was widespread in Italy prior to the Social War.

Monumental structures clad in relief-carved stone orthostats adorned cities across the fragmented political and ethnolinguistic landscape of the Iron Age Syro-Hittite kingdoms. This building practice passed down from the Hurro-Hittite Late Bronze Age evoked a collective memory of legitimate authority and was important for the construction of royal sovereignty. Differences among individual monuments suggest how Syro-Hittite rulers may have deployed monumental construction to navigate an “eventful” history by adapting it to current political exigencies. This article reevaluates the date of orthostats found in the South Gate of Zincirli, Turkey (ancient Samʾal), applying a seriation approach to the comparison of their stylistic details and iconographic themes and motifs with sculptural groups from other sites. The conclusion that the orthostats date to the early 10th century B.C.E. and are thus older than the ninth-century refoundation of the city suggests that they were recycled from an earlier Neo-Hittite site, proposed to be nearby Pancarlı. The appropriation of architectural spolia in the South Gate and the emulation or imitation of older works in the Citadel Gate by the founders of a new regime reveal a dialectic between the embrace and rejection of traditional Hittite sources of authority.

Communal feasting has provoked much interest among scholars of Aegean prehistory. Discussions of the archaeological, archaeozoological, and textual data of the Mycenaean Palatial period have provided important insights into the role of this ritual practice as part of a sociopolitical strategy of the Mycenaean elite. In the course of these discussions, an increasing number of Linear B documents have been viewed as recording provisions of animals and mixed foodstuffs for state-organized banqueting. The interpretation of other records along similar lines, however, is a highly disputed matter. For example, some scholars view the Fn tablets from Pylos as lists of allocations of barley to the participants of religious feasts. Others, however, regard most of the tablets of this series as purely secular in character and consider them as allocations of grain to “industrial” workers. If one views the recipients listed in these records as attendants not of religious feasts but of secular work feasts (containing some religious elements), much of the contradiction disappears. In addition, this interpretation, which allows for the juxtaposition of predominantly secular features and a few religious aspects as well as for the large number of occupational designations, may also apply to texts from Mycenae and Thebes that have been the focus of much discussion.

Anthropological studies highlight the importance of food in constructing and negotiating various aspects of individual and group identity, including social status. Archaeologists have also explored this topic, working with various types of evidence and frequently applying a diachronic perspective that is usually inaccessible to other disciplines interested in foodways, such as anthropology. Previous studies examining how social status was established, maintained, or negotiated in Early Mycenaean Greece have relied heavily or solely on mortuary data, a necessity given the early focus on mortuary contexts for excavation and publication. In this article, I take a different approach and concentrate on settlement data, in particular the data deriving from those sites that have yielded evidence for the emergence of social inequality. Through the analysis of the cooking pottery repertoire, I investigate the issue of how food was manipulated by those competing for status. I argue that the appearance of innovative cooking utensils and their sets can be associated with changes in food-preparation practices, leading to more elaborate cuisine. Such a cuisine constituted a very effective means of social differentiation and was extensively used in the highly competitive environment of Early Mycenaean polities.

This article presents the results of new excavation, remote sensing, and conservation activities at the Phrygian capital of Gordion in central Turkey. The most important discoveries were of Iron Age date and relate to Gordion’s fortification system and city plan. Fieldwork focused on the southern side of the Citadel Mound, where excavation yielded a large Early Phrygian (ninth century B.C.E.) glacis or stepped terrace wall more than 2.5 m in height that supported a substantial fortification wall nearly 3 m wide. New fortifications dating to the Middle Phrygian (eighth century B.C.E.) and Late Phrygian (sixth century B.C.E.) periods were also uncovered in the same area, as was a new gateway leading into the citadel. A sondage beneath the Early Phrygian “Terrace Building Complex,” or industrial quarter, produced traces of occupation during the Early Bronze Age, as well as evidence for the construction of an enormous terrace during the ninth century B.C.E. A new campaign of remote sensing clarified the street plan in Gordion’s two residential districts (the “Lower Town” and “Outer Town”), in addition to revealing the presence of fortification walls, defensive ditches, and a large fort on the western side of the Outer Town. Conservation activities focused on the Terrace Building, the ninth-century B.C.E. pebble mosaic floor from Megaron 2, and the Early Phrygian Gate Complex, still the best-preserved citadel gate in Iron Age Asia Minor.

Excavations of the Egyptian New Kingdom fortress in Jaffa (Tel Yafo, ancient Yapu), on the southern side of Tel Aviv, were renewed by the Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project from 2011 to 2014. This work is an outgrowth of the project’s reappraisal of Jacob Kaplan’s excavations in the Ramesses Gate area from 1955 to 1962. As the Egyptian fortress in Jaffa is the only one excavated in Canaan, its archaeological record provides a unique perspective on resistance to Egyptian rule from ca. 1460 to 1125 B.C.E., but especially during the second half of the 12th century B.C.E., when Jaffa was twice destroyed. Radiocarbon dates from these two destructions are presented, and it is suggested that they offer the clearest basis thus far for proposing ca. 1125 B.C.E. as a terminus post quem for the end of Egyptian rule in Canaan. The archaeological evidence, taken together with textual sources, yields a picture of local resistance to the Egyptian military presence in Jaffa likely originating in Canaanite centers located throughout the coastal plain.

A hoard of objects was found in 2008, buried under a floor pavement of a room in the Hellenistic administrative building at Tel Kedesh in northern Israel. The hoard consists of an Eros terracotta figurine, glass astragals and gaming pieces, writing paraphernalia made of metal, and a hairpin. In this article, I explore the hoard, its meaning, and its context in terms of findspot and the geographical location of the site on the periphery of Hellenistic Phoenicia. Based on the objects from the hoard, as well as on literary and visual sources from the Hellenistic world and particularly from the southern Levant, I argue that the objects were the property of a young, upper-class bride who buried them as part of a premarriage ritual.