Children’s Graffiti in Roman Pompeii and Herculaneum

Author(s):  
Katherine V. Huntley

The realities of childhood in the Roman world have been difficult to access archaeologically, in part because Roman children lacked a distinctive material culture. The remains of Pompeii and Herculaneum have yielded a somewhat unique type of evidence for children’s lives: graffiti. The chapter will explore how the location and subject matter of the graffiti reveal the realities of children’s lives, including the activities they participated in, the things that interested them, and their relationships with caretakers and peers. The chapter will also look at public areas where children’s graffiti turn up, focusing in particular on Pompeii’s Grand Palaestra, an enclosed space associated with the city’s youth organization. Finally, trends in the subject matter of the children’s graffiti attest to some of the things children frequently encountered and that help particular interest for them.

Author(s):  
Peter N. Miller

This chapter explores the ways amateur historical associations act as incubators of new thinking about how objects could tell stories. It draws from publications of German historical associations produced during the nineteenth century. Beginning in the first decade of the nineteenth century as a patriotic gesture and continuing for another fifty years, a new genre of German history flourished. It was often conducted at the scale of the region or territory, not the state, under the auspices of local historical associations and published in their newly created journals. In these regional associations, what had previously been a means to an end—material sources—became an end in itself: the subject matter of German history.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathias Chukwudi Isiani ◽  
Ngozika Anthonia Obi-Ani ◽  
Chikelue Chris Akabuike ◽  
Stanley Jachike Onyemechalu ◽  
Sochima P. Okafor ◽  
...  

PurposeThe overall aim of this research is to interpret Ikenga and Ofo creativity as it is revered in Igbo societies. Igbo creativity, especially interpreted through material culture, suffers the threat of extinction resulting from the forces of modernity. Forces of modernisation, which appear in the personae of Christianity, education, urbanisation and industrialisation, denigrated indigenous creativity, brandishing them as devious, fetish and primitive. Ironically, in most cases, the drivers of such narratives keep these “fetish” items in their museums and will give a lot to preserve them.Design/methodology/approachThis study centred mostly on several communities in the Nsukka area of Igboland, Nigeria. It relied on both primary and secondary sources of historical enquiry. This qualitative research discussed the nuances of the subject matter as it relates to Igbo cosmos. These approaches involved visiting the study area and conducting personal interviews.FindingsArchaeologists do often rely on material culture to study, periodise and date past human societies. In this study, it is found that material culture, an expression of indigenous creativity, best interprets how society survived or related with their environment. This paper examined two Igbo sculpted artefacts – Ikenga and Ofo – while unearthing the intricacies in Igbo cosmology as regards creativity, spirituality and society.Originality/valueThe shapes, motifs, patterns and designs depict an imaginary history, the intellectualism of the past and even the present. This serves as an objective alternative to the twisted colonial narrative on Igbo material culture and consequently contribute to ongoing efforts to preserve, protect and promote cultural heritage resources in this part of the world.


eTopia ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alysse Kushinski

The discourse on ruins, like ruins themselves, is fragmented and dispersed. Representing both decay and what remains, the ruins’ relationship to temporality is complicated—they can be construed as means for both looking back, as well as looking towards the future. The recent resurgence of literature and theory on the subject matter is consolidating existing work and defining new lines of inquiry. This article investigates the current discourse on ruins through three recent texts. Significant to them all is the dialectical nature of the ruin as both the absence of, and endurance of, material form. All three texts consider ruins through the lens of the built environment and problematize classic conceptions of ruination in consideration of the contemporary moment. Looking at ruination through architecture theory provides a contrast to the romantic accounts of ruins that originally defined the discourse. Through these texts we can see certain limitations of the discourse of ruins, but also visible are nuanced approaches that redefine the ruin as more than just a site or object, but also a set of processes that reflect our relationships to material culture and the built environment. To this I assert a necessity to reconfigure the way we de ne ruins in light of the contemporary moment. The discourse of ruins, while still speaking through earlier tropes of a fragmented ruin studies, is no longer just a survey of the subject of the ruin—it is becoming a mode through which we evaluate the changing nature of our relationship to material culture. KEYWORDS: Ruins, Ruination, Architecture, Super-materiality, Waste 


2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-164
Author(s):  
Maciej Talaga ◽  
Harrison Ridgeway

SummarySeveral subdisciplines within historiography, most notably the arms and armour or martial arts studies, are interested in inferring physical qualities of historical material objects from historical sources. Scholars from these fields face serious deficiency of written accounts when it comes to various crucial information regarding their subject matter. Therefore, researchers’ attention is often drawn to iconographical sources, sometimes resulting in certain fascination with the material culture depicted in primary technical literature (Fachliteratur). This tendency seems particularly strong in studies on HEMA which rely heavily on pre-modern combat treatises known as ‘fight books’ (Fechtbücher) and are tempted either to treat the available iconography as a faithful representation of its corresponding material reality or to interpret apparent mismatch between icono-graphical representations and their material source domain as evidence for the inferior skills of the illustrator.We would like to put forward that there is a fundamental oversight in such approach to Fachliteratur in general and fight books in particular, namely the lack of consideration for the artwork as a diagrammatic representation of the functional aspects of depicted embodied technique, where proportional ‘realism’ is of lesser priority. It may be fruitful to develop a more nuanced method of ‘reading’ such images. Our survey of select late-medieval fight books shows that equipment, and even body parts, are regularly distorted in their depictions in the fight books to better communicate the subject matter, especially where textual descriptions would be complicated. Interpreted in Gestalt terms, this phenomenon may serve as an example of historical pragmatic application of the cognitive principle of holism – that the whole is something different than the sum of its parts.


Author(s):  
Maureen Carroll

The introduction seeks to locate the youngest children in the Roman family and discusses the newly emerging theme of Roman infancy. It outlines the ways in which the book aims to fill a lacuna on the subject of infancy and earliest childhood, isolating the age group of the under one-year-olds because of the very particular historical circumstances that affected this period in the life cycle and attitudes toward it. The introduction presents a methodology for integrating archaeological evidence, material culture, and the iconography of infancy with social and cultural history, an approach for which this subject matter is especially well suited.


PMLA ◽  
1935 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 1320-1327
Author(s):  
Colbert Searles

THE germ of that which follows came into being many years ago in the days of my youth as a university instructor and assistant professor. It was generated by the then quite outspoken attitude of colleagues in the “exact sciences”; the sciences of which the subject-matter can be exactly weighed and measured and the force of its movements mathematically demonstrated. They assured us that the study of languages and literature had little or nothing scientific about it because: “It had no domain of concrete fact in which to work.” Ergo, the scientific spirit was theirs by a stroke of “efficacious grace” as it were. Ours was at best only a kind of “sufficient grace,” pleasant and even necessary to have, but which could, by no means ensure a reception among the elected.


1965 ◽  
Vol 04 (03) ◽  
pp. 112-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Zinsser

An outline has been presented in historical fashion of the steps devised to organize the central core of medical information allowing the subject matter, the patient, to define the nature and the progression of the diseases from which he suffers, with and without therapy; and approaches have been made to organize this information in such fashion as to align the definitions in orderly fashion to teach both diagnostic strategy and the content of the diseases by programmed instruction.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alawiye Abdulmumin Abdurrazzaq ◽  
Ahmad Wifaq Mokhtar ◽  
Abdul Manan Ismail

This article is aimed to examine the extent of the application of Islamic legal objectives by Sheikh Abdullah bn Fudi in his rejoinder against one of their contemporary scholars who accused them of being over-liberal about the religion. He claimed that there has been a careless intermingling of men and women in the preaching and counselling gathering they used to hold, under the leadership of Sheikh Uthman bn Fudi (the Islamic reformer of the nineteenth century in Nigeria and West Africa). Thus, in this study, the researchers seek to answer the following interrogations: who was Abdullah bn Fudi? who was their critic? what was the subject matter of the criticism? How did the rebutter get equipped with some guidelines of higher objectives of Sharĩʻah in his rejoinder to the critic? To this end, this study had tackled the questions afore-stated by using inductive, descriptive and analytical methods to identify the personalities involved, define and analyze some concepts and matters considered as the hub of the study.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 660
Author(s):  
Ranirizal Ranirizal

Performance is the performance shown by educators, both in quality and quantity in carrying out their duties in accordance with the responsibilities given to them professionally. Educator performance development is a very decisive factor in the success of the education and learning process. In fact, in Kindergarten Rayon IV, Dumai City, there is still a low level of competency standards possessed by educators. The intended competency standard is from the standard academic qualifications and four competencies that must be possessed by a kindergarten educator, namely pedagogic, professional, social and personality competencies. This is evidenced by educators not yet mastering learning material with the maximum known when the learning process educators are not able to explain well the subject matter, and educators have not shown maximum performance in carrying out their duties and functions. The purpose of this study was to see whether there was an influence on teacher professionalism on teacher performance in Dumai IV Rayon Kindergarten. The results of the study prove that there is a significant relationship between the professionalism of Kindergarten educators and the performance of educators in Kindergarten Rayon IV, Dumai City. This is evidenced by the value of Sig (2-tailed) professionalism on educator's performance of 0,000, so the calculation shows 0,000 <0.05. This means that Ha is accepted, that is, there is a significant relationship between the professionalism of Kindergarten educators and the Performance of Educators in Kindergarten Rayon IV, Dumai City.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document