Decoration and Demon Traps: The Meanings of Geometric Borders in Roman Mosaics

The thousands of mosaics that survive from the Greek and especially Roman worlds are taken by many to be one of the great surviving artistic hallmarks of these two classical civilizations. The decorative variety of the floors, made usually and mostly from small stone tesserae, strikes a chord with those who view them as works of art (Neal and Cosh 2002: 9). They appear testimony to the erudition of the patrons who commissioned them, to the skilled artists who composed and executed the designs, and to the knowledge of those ancients who walked over them and who were able to interpret knowingly what was beneath their feet. Viewing them in a museum context, many of us judge them as we would an eighteenth-century watercolour or an early Picasso—the end product of inspirational artistic endeavour. The near complete absence of written references from the ancient world regarding mosaics means that we are forced to generate meanings from the floors themselves. What I want to suggest in this chapter is an alternative way of looking at mosaics. I am going to draw on ethnographic and anthropological research to provide additional insights to the archaeological study of mosaics. I want to argue that there is something to be explained in the sheer constancy of some of the geometric borders on mosaics through the Hellenistic and Roman periods—a period of some seven centuries. This constancy is also apparent in overall design in large areas of the Roman Empire. For instance in the northwest provinces, including Britain, the enduring emphasis is on the pattern, and the picture-panels are fitted within this pattern, often in a series of more or less equally weighted panels. These kinds of stability need their explanations just as much as change does. I particularly want to focus on the abstract and geometric borders—for example the meander, the guilloche, the wave-pattern—and seek to understand why these motifs were utilized across the length and breadth of the Roman Empire. I want to take a different approach to that taken by scholarly interpreters who seek to find layers of meaning in figurative representations and then ascribe them to erudite ancient patrons (pace Perring 2003).

A Feast of Beltain? ReXections on the Rich Danebury Harvests

Twenty-five years after embarking on what was to become one of the major Iron Age excavations of the twentieth century, Barry Cunliffe was also reflecting on the endless cycle from Beltain, through Lughnasadh, to Samhain and Imbolc, and back to Beltain (Cunliffe 1995). While the journey to which Cuchulainn aspired was across the bosom of his bride to be, Cunliffe’s journey took him to a deeper understanding of the culmination of European Prehistory. The campaign he so impressively led at Danebury hillfort formed a critical leg of that journey; it remains a keystone to everyone’s understanding of Iron Age society. He was not alone among his research group in reflecting upon that annual cycle of seasons and feasts, which is preserved in various subsequent Celtic and Gaelic accounts; the principal archaeobotanist and archaeozoologist on the Danebury Environs Project incorporated them into their resumé of seasonal economic activities (Campbell and Hamilton 2000). Cunliffe had previously inferred, on the basis of an analysis he conducted with Poole (1995) of different patterns of erosion and infilling in the thousands of pits within the hillfort of Danebury, that Beltain and Samhain were the times of their ritual opening and infilling. These same pits provided the present author with one of the richest archaeobotanical data-sets I have had the opportunity to examine, and formed a cornerstone of my arguments about Iron Age agricultural production (Jones 1981, 1984a and b, 1985, 1991, 1995, 1996). The discussion and critique those analyses have generated are at least as valuable as the original publications themselves, and the most recent of them draws the debate in an interesting direction. In a meticulous and critical study, Van der Veen and Jones (2006) question a number of aspects of my original argument, and shift the emphasis from my own, which was upon relations of production, to a new emphasis upon relations of consumption. Whereas I had connected the plant remains within the pits to the toil of farmers, they speculated upon the celebrations of the feast.

Cores and Peripheries Revisited: The Mining Landscapes of Wadi Faynan (Southern Jordan) 5000 BC–AD 700

One of Barry Cunliffe’s major areas of research interest has been societies in transition, especially in the context of core/periphery relationships between expanding states and societies on their margins. Much of this work has been on the relationships between Rome and the Iron Age societies of southern Britain on the northwestern margins of the empire, and the subsequent pathways of resistance, interaction, and transformation. In this chapter we focus on events and processes on the opposite margins of the Roman empire in the Levant, where the Nabataean state was formally incorporated into the Roman imperial system some sixty years after the Claudian invasion of Britain. We draw on the results of the Wadi Faynan Landscape Survey (1996–2000), an interdisciplinary and diachronic investigation of evidence of environmental and climatic change, settlement pattern, and human activity in the Wadi Faynan in southern Jordan (figure 7.1). Situated about 40 kilometres from the Nabataean capital of Petra, the Wadi Faynan lies in the hot and hyper-arid Jordanian Desert, at a distinctive and spectacular mountain front that reaches 1500m above the desert floor. This landform marks the eastern margin of the desert lowlands of the great Jordanian rift valley, with the trough of the Wadi ‘Arabah to the south and west, and the highlands of the Mountains of Edom and the Jordanian tablelands to the east and north (Bienkowski and Galor 2006). The mean summer temperature on the Jordanian tablelands is in the order of 178c, compared with winter temperatures of about 12ºc (Bruins 2006; Rabb’a 1994). Winter temperatures on the desert floor in the Wadi Faynan are much the same as on the plateau, but in summer temperatures frequently reach 40ºc. Seasonality is strong, with most rain falling between December and March and virtually no precipitation occurring between June and September. Annual rainfall in the lower Wadi Faynan is around 63mm and even less in theWadi ‘Arabah (‘Aqaba receives 30mm for example), whereas the Jordanian Tablelands have an average precipitation exceeding 200mm per year.

The Production Technology of, and Trade in, Egyptian Blue Pigment in the Roman World

Egyptian blue was first used as a pigment on tomb paintings in Egypt from around 2300 BC, and during the subsequent 3,000 years, its use both as a pigment and in the production of small objects spread throughout the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean and to the limits of the Roman Empire. During the Roman period, Egyptian blue was distributed in the form of balls of pigment up to about 15mm across, and appears to have been the most common blue pigment to be used on wall paintings throughout the Empire. Egyptian blue was both the first synthetic pigment, and one of the first materials from antiquity to be examined by modern scientific methods. A small pot containing the pigment that was found during the excavations at Pompeii in 1814 was examined by Sir Humphrey Davy. Subsequently, x-ray diffraction analysis was used to identify the compound as the calcium-copper tetrasilicate C_aC_uSi₄O₁₀, and to establish that Egyptian blue and the rare natural mineral cuprorivaite are the same material. Examination of Egyptian blue samples in cross-section in a scanning electron microscope (SEM) revealed that they consist of an intimate mixture of Egyptian blue crystals (i.e. C_aC_uSi₄O₁₀) and partially reacted quartz particles together with varying amounts of glass phase (Tite, Bimson, and Cowell 1984). At this stage it should be emphasized that, in the literature, the term Egyptian blue tends to be used to describe both crystals of calcium-copper tetrasilicate and the bulk polycrystalline material that is used as the pigment and is sometimes referred to as frit. In this chapter, the suffix ‘crystal’ or ‘mineral’ will be added when the former meaning applies, and the suffix ‘pigment’, ‘sample’, or ‘frit’ will be added when the latter meaning applies. For the current study, a small group of Roman Egyptian blue samples were examined using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) with attached analytical facilities. Using the chemical compositions of the samples, together with the description of the manufacture of Egyptian blue given by Vitruvius (Morgan 1960) at the beginning of the first century BC in his Ten Books on Architecture, an attempt is made to identify the raw materials used in the production of Roman Egyptian blue.

Sailing to the Britannic Isles: Some Mediterranean Perspectives on the Remote Northwest from the Sixth Century bc to the Seventh Century AD

If you were training to be an athlete you would not spend all your time doing exercises: you would also have to learn when and how to relax, for relaxation is generally regarded as one of the most important elements in physical training. To my mind it is equally important for scholars. When you have been doing a lot of serious reading, it is a good idea to give your mind a rest and so build up energy for another bout of hard labour. For this purpose the best sort of book to read is not merely one that is witty and entertaining but also has something interesting to say. This advice from the satirist Lucian, sometime itinerant lecturer and at other times a minor government official, seems as valid today as it was in the second century AD. For students engaged in the history and archaeology of Europe in the first millennia BC and ad, I can currently think of no better respite from the structures, models and databases, that are the currencies of modern research, than Barry Cunliffie’s monograph on the explorer Pytheas published in 2001. Unencumbered with footnotes and with minimal bibliography, a text of barely 170 pages introduces one of the great mysteries of antiquity, the fantastic voyage of exploration by a citizen of Massalia, the Greek ancestor of modern Marseilles, to the British Isles and beyond to Iceland and the Arctic Circle and then in the direction of the Baltic (Cunliffe 2001). Nothing is known of Pytheas himself and the only reasonably certain fact we have concerning the voyage is that it was undertaken around the time of Alexander the Great (d. 323 BC). No less remarkable is that all we know of Pytheas’ own account of his travels is preserved in later writers, who at the least denigrated his achievement and often branded him a downright liar with considerable vehemence, while still exploiting his detailed account of the lands and seas he saw. Despite this the value of his astronomical observations was recognized by some of the greatest minds of antiquity and as a result his place in the development of the geographical sciences is assured.

‘How Dare they Leave all this Unexcavated!’: Continuing to Discover Roman Bath

The frustrated cry of the young Barry Cunliffe has an odd echo in these days of preservation in situ. Sitting in the Roman Baths on his first visit as a schoolboy in 1955, he was astonished at how much was unknown about the Baths, despite their international reputation: large areas ‘surrounded by big question marks . . . all around . . . the word ‘‘unexcavated’’ ’ (Cunliffe 1984: xiii; figure 1). His later understanding of the realities and constraints of excavation only sharpened his desire to know more. Now, fifty years on and more, due in large part to that drive to know, his curiosity, we can claim to have made as much progress in our understanding of the baths and the city around them as had occurred in all the years before his visit, a history of archaeological enquiry stretching back over 400 years. In 1955 the baths were much as they had been discovered in the 1880s and 1890s. They were not well understood. The town, or city, or whatever surrounded it, were almost completely unknown, or at best, misunderstood. It was still possible in that year to argue that the temple of Sulis Minerva was on the north of the King’s Bath, not, as records of earlier discoveries made clear, on the west (Richmond and Toynbee 1955). Yet as the young Cunliffe sat and mused, the archaeological world was beginning to take note and a modern excavation campaign was beginning; indeed had begun: Professor Ian Richmond, in a short eight years to become a colleague, had started ‘his patient and elegant exploration of the East Baths’ the summer before (Cunliffe 1969: v). Richmond initiated a small number of very limited investigations into the East Baths, elucidating a tangle of remains that, while clearly the result of a succession of alterations and archaeological phases, had never been adequately analysed. Richmond’s main aim was to understand the developmental history of the baths, and this approach, combined with a thoughtful and thorough study of the rest of the remains, led to a still broadly accepted phasing and functional analysis (Cunliffe 1969).

Sculpture as Landscape: Archaeology and the Englishness of Henry Moore

The interplay in English thought between archaeology and landscape has been a long-standing one. Even before the notion of ‘landscape’ was well defined as an artistic genre, antiquaries like John Leland became topographers, and topographers such as William Camden became antiquaries. Stuart Piggott was one of the twentieth century archaeologists acutely aware of these links, well analysed in his Ruins in a Landscape (1976), and Barry Cunliffe has certainly been another. Like Piggott, he is a graphic artist of distinction himself, often preferring to draw his own plans and sections for his final excavation reports. As an able illustrator he has taken special pleasure in the work of another notable Wessex countryman, topographer and archaeologist, Heywood Sumner. Born in Hampshire, Sumner (1853–1940) became first an artist and then, on his retirement, a Weld archaeologist. The publication by Cunliffe (1985) of Heywood Sumner’s Wessex reflects again this enduring sympathy between the Weld archaeologist and the artist sensitive to the earthworks and the rolling contours of the English countryside. Sumner was not a great artist, nor did his work add significantly to the development of British archaeology, yet he captured a quality in his archaeological illustrations and in his vision of the earthworks of Wessex which looks back to those earlier antiquaries, Stukeley and Colt Hoare, and forward to such consummate artists of the English landscape as Paul Nash and Henry Moore. He was also a close friend of another significant Weld archaeologist, noted lover of the landscape and pioneer of landscape archaeology, O. G. S. Crawford. Barry Cunliffe, an internationally celebrated figure who has initiated several significant Weld projects overseas, has likewise undertaken some of his most distinguished work in Wessex, from Fishbourne to Hengistbury Head, and in the landscape of Wessex, most notably at Danebury. His treatment of Sumner’s work, for instance in his chapter ‘Landscape with people’, shows great sympathy with the human scale of the English landscape, a quality which is also an important feature in the work of Henry Moore. To regard a sculptor as a landscape artist as I have done in this paper, would, until recently, have seemed rather paradoxical. For it is true that the ostensible subject of most of Moore’s sculptures was the human figure.

Druids: Towards an Archaeolog

A comparison of the first and fourth editions of the magisterial survey and synthesis of Iron Age Communities in Britain shows how much our understanding changed, and improved, between 1974 and 2005. Many of the changes are directly due to Barry Cunliffe’s own work, published promptly and accessibly. Woven through many of those works have been the strands of the interplay between history and archaeology, and between civilization and barbarism. One area in which there has been little change, however, is in the study of religious authority, where our understanding is restricted almost entirely to literary evidence about Druids in Gaul (Cunliffe 2004: 109–11; 2005: 572–4). There are the merest of hints from the funerary data, from a consideration of which the quotation above is taken. It will be argued here that there is rather more evidence for people with religious knowledge and skills in Iron Age Britain than has been thought previously, but that there is little evidence for a specialist priesthood and these roles were combined with others. The evidence is often elusive, but the history of the study of Iron Age religious authority has also militated against its recognition. In order to appreciate this, it is necessary to review briefly the sources of the modern caricature that is the white-robed Druid at Stonehenge. During the Renaissance it was gradually realized that some monuments in the landscape had been made by the ancient inhabitants of the British Isles. With the ‘discovery’ of what were thought to be ‘primitive’ peoples or ‘savages’ in the Americas, Renaissance thinkers were provided with the physical and intellectual materials to create an image of a barbarian antiquity. This antiquity was one where little changed; the past was essentially a time either before or after the biblical Deluge. It was related to the present by origin myths that related modern nations and their mythical founders to Noah and the Garden of Eden.

Bourges in the Earlier Iron Age: An Interim View

Berry in central France figures frequently in assessments of the level of complexity in western temperate Europe at the annexation of Gallia comata in 52 BC. Information from a number of sites, particularly Levroux (Indre: e.g. Büchsenschütz et al. 1988; 1992; 2000; Krausz 1993), contributes to what is now a tolerably well-understood pattern, contrasting markedly with the poorly known settlement record for the earlier Iron Age of the area. One site forms a conspicuous exception. For the end of the Hallstatt Iron Age and the initial phase of its successor—broadly the decades either side of 500 BC— Bourges (Cher) is now known to be of critical importance, not only in regional terms, but also as a variant of the elite phenomenon known as the Fürstensitze that occurs widely across west-central temperate Europe. It will come as no surprise that the first English-language author to recognize the emerging importance of this site was Barry Cunliffe in The Ancient Celts, and it is thus with pleasure that this interim statement on Bourges and its immediate hinterland at the time of the transition from the Hallstatt to La Tène Iron Age has been prepared. Since 1995, with Jacques Troadec, the municipal archaeologist, Olivier Büchsenschütz, Pierre-Yves Milcent and others, the author has been excavating within and on the periphery of Bourges—by the first century BC certainly Avaricum of the Bituriges—as part of a long-term rescue project on that site and its surroundings. A few, selected aspects of this are considered below. The pace of development, and evolving legislative arrangements for rescue archaeology, mean that other important sites in the commune have been examined by Alexis Luberne and colleagues in the State Archaeological Rescue Service, INRAP, and reference to some of their work is included below. The rate of change in and around the city, particularly as military establishments—many initially set up at the time of the 1870 Franco-Prussian war—are redeveloped for light industry, and new housing, transport and other infrastructure is constructed, provides much scope for new discoveries; what follows is thus by necessity provisional.

The Late Castro Culture of Northwest Portugal: Dynamics of Change

The principal aim of this short chapter is to present some ideas and suggest possible directions of research concerning the development of the north-western Portuguese Iron Age, and in particular its late—and most dynamic—phase, that which coincided with Roman acculturation and conquest, towards the end of the first century BC. These processes of acculturation and conquest, and their impact on the Iron Age communities of the region, have long been the subject of discussion and indeed misunderstanding. Many unresolved questions and contradictions have blurred the construction of a coherent picture which is only now starting to take shape, though not necessarily providing definitive answers. If there was an effective military conquest, where is the evidence for the destruction of sites in the archaeological record? If the northwest was already conquered and pacified, why were the local communities building and reinforcing defensive walls? If the Romans were controlling this region, why were hillforts still being built in the traditional indigenous fashion? Generations of archaeologists, myself included, have attempted to answer some of these questions in the course of our research. The Iron Age cultures of northwest Iberia are broadly characterized by hillfort settlements built in stone, either granite or schist. These hillforts, known locally as ‘castros’, provide the name by which the culture is generally known: ‘cultura castreja’, in Portugal, or ‘cultura castrexa’ in Galicia. The word ‘castro’ obviously derives from the Latin ‘castrum’, in the sense of defended settlement. Francisco Martins Sarmento introduced this terminology following his major excavation work at the Citânia de Briteiros, from the 1870s onwards. Martins Sarmento’s excavation and survey work, combined with his remarkable capacity for observation and analysis, brought the Castro culture to widespread international attention, particularly after the Ninth International Congress of Anthropology and Prehistoric Archaeology, held in Lisbon in 1890. Despite this promising start, the Castro culture remained little known to most European archaeologists until the last few decades of the twentieth century, save for the contribution made by Christopher Hawkes (1971; 1984).