The Archaeology of Greece and Rome

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Academic Achievement ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Art History ◽  
Field Survey ◽  
Classical Archaeology ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Of Greece

Over his long and illustrious career as Lecturer, Reader and Professor in Edinburgh University (1961-1976), Lawrence Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge (1976-2001) and currently Fellow of the McDonald Institute of Archaeology at Cambridge, Anthony Snodgrass has influenced and been associated with a long series of eminent classical archaeologists, historians and linguists .In acknowledgement of his immense academic achievement, this collection of essays by a range of international scholars reflects his wide-ranging research interests: Greek prehistory, the Greek Iron Age and Archaic era, Greek texts and Archaeology, Classical Art History, societies on the fringes of the Greek and Roman world, and Regional Field Survey. Not only do they celebrate his achievements but they also represent new avenues of research which will have a broad appeal.

Cheshire Cat and Mickey Mouse: analysis, interpretation and the art of the La Tène Iron Age

1970 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 261-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. V. S. Megaw
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Art History ◽  
Mickey Mouse ◽  
Classical Archaeology ◽  
Italian Physician ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
Prehistoric Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Wilhelm Worringer

Nearly seventy years ago Wilhelm Worringer first wrote that ‘ultimately all our definitions of art are definitions of classical art’ (Worringer, 1953, 132). Today, the study of Western European art history, old or modern, the products of peasant craft-centres or urban ‘schools’, has in the course of time developed its own methodology and, almost, mystique. In contrast, the study of many branches of prehistoric art in Europe and elsewhere is all too often seen as a mere extension of the skilled but subjective approaches of classical archaeology without considering the suitability of the latter's application. The use of the classical art-historian's intuitive methods built up not just from visual exprience but a detailed background of literary, historical and philosophical studies must in fact be almost entirely denied the student of prehistoric or primitive art. It is perhaps only natural that principles of classical art history should be applied to later European prehistory, though it is often difficult to arrive at a precise definition of these principles. It was Johann Joachim Winckelmann who made the first systematic application of categories of style to the history of art (Gombrich, 1968, 319). Sir John Beazley, the greatest of all modern classical art historians followed in this tradition basing attributions ‘on the grounds of tell-tale traits of individual mannerisms’ (Carpenter, 1963, 115 ff.) a scheme first applied to painting less than a century ago by the Italian physician Giovanni Morelli (Gombrich, 1968, 309 ff.) and followed at the turn of the nineteenth century in the study of Italian painting (Lermolieff, 1892–3). With Beazley it is, however, difficult to follow step by step his methods of work.

The use of images: visual history and ancient history

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. R. R. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Art History ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Textual Evidence ◽  
Classical Archaeology ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Visual History

This chapter explores the visual aspect, a territory shared with archaeology and art history. The Greek and Roman world poured an astonishing amount of its surplus into expensive monuments and elaborate public images, and their study is naturally an important part of classical archaeology. Unlike many other archaeologies, this subject studies a world extremely well documented by abundant and diverse literary and textual evidence, and it is thus part of the wider classics project. The discussion explores some of the great gains made by recent work in this area and some of the remaining deficiencies. Gains have resulted from application of historically based questions, while deficiencies arise from the still largely untheorised nature of this subject's research and discourse.

scholarly journals Homer's Entangled Objects: Narrative, Agency and Personhood In and Out of Iron Age Texts

2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-416 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Whitley
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Early Iron Age ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Classical Archaeology ◽  
Narrative Agency ◽  
The World ◽  
Historical Periods ◽  
Of Greece

In recent years, material culture studies have come to embrace contemporary Melanesia and European prehistory, but not classical archaeology and art. Prehistory is still thought, in many quarters, to be intrinsically more ‘ethnographic’ than historical periods; in this discourse, the Greeks (by default) become proto-modern individuals, necessarily opposed to Melanesian ‘dividuals’. Developments in the study of the Iron Age Mediterranean and the world of Homer should undermine such stark polarities. Historic and proto-historic archaeologies have rich potential for refining our notions both of agency and of personhood. This article argues that the forms of material entanglements we find in the Homeric poems, and the forms of agency (sensu Gell 1998) that we can observe in the archaeological record for the Early Iron Age of Greece (broadly 1000–500 bc) are of the same kind. The agency of objects structures Homeric narrative, and Homeric descriptions allow us precisely to define Homeric ‘human–thing entanglement’. This form of ‘material entanglement’ does not appear in the Aegean world before 1100 BC.

Classical Archaeology of Greece: Experiences of the Discipline

1999 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 365
Author(s):  
Ian Morris ◽  
Michael Shanks
Keyword(s):  
Classical Archaeology ◽  
Of Greece

I. Portraits

2004 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 5-28
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Roman Art ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Roman Coins ◽  
Country Houses ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
As If

Portraiture is among the most obvious legacies of classical antiquity. Roman busts of rulers and private individuals, sculpted in marble or occasionally cast in bronze, are the frequent inhabitants of museums and country houses. Imposing portrait-statues survive in great numbers, albeit frequently missing some of their extremities. We also have many smaller and more subtle images like those carved in gems and semiprecious stones, and, of course, the heads on Roman coins whose influence on the design of modern money is still obvious. The very custom of modern portraiture itself is, broadly speaking, derived from Rome, though it is easy to take it for granted as if it were an obvious or universal art-form. The Roman world was truly crowded with portraits. They are the subject of intense study and interesting debate. As such they present a useful point of departure for this survey of Roman art history.

Coinage and Identity in Pre-conquest Britain: 50 BC–AD 50

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Williams
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
English Language ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Major Focus ◽  
Human Identity ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Symbolic World

This Chapter Looks at Coins made and used by peoples on the edge of the Roman world in Britain just before and just after their conquest. In it I want to ask what the evidence of the coinage, its inscriptions, designs, and findspots, can say about various kinds of collective identity in Britain in the late pre-Roman Iron Age and early Roman periods, how they were constituted, and how they changed. The reason for focusing on Britain in this period is not merely that I know more about it than anywhere else. It provides a well-attested external case for comparison with contemporary developments within the Roman empire discussed elsewhere in this volume, especially with regard to such overarching and perhaps overused narrative themes as ‘Romanization’. It also allows us to explore certain current propositions about how to exploit coins as a source for understanding ancient identities. In recent scholarship in ancient history and archaeology, particularly English-language scholarship, ‘identity’ and its kindred concepts have become a major focus of thought and debate, particularly with regard to questions of ‘ethnic identity’, or ‘ethnicity’. So intense has been the focus and so absorbing the debate, however, that certain important aspects of human identity often tend to be left out of the picture. As an instance of this, I might cite the notion of ‘identity’ underlying this very volume, which seems essentially restricted in range to those aspects of identity which we think Roman provincial coin-types are able to tell us about—ethnic, civic, and political. These are important, of course, but they aren’t by any means the whole story. There is perhaps also a general presumption that provincial coin-types take us straightforwardly into the shared symbolic world of the civic communities in whose names they were made. The possibility that the coins and their designs might rather be selectively representing symbols associated with certain groups, the sponsors or adherents of a particular local temple depicted on a city’s coins, or the wealthy participants in a festival whose prize-crowns were adopted as a civic coin-type, is not generally taken into account.

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