The first chapter presents evidence in support of the claim that an interest in ruins was never widespread. It had to begin somewhere and at some time. There had also to be certain factors, which are set out in the chapter, that facilitated the interest. The main evidence for a lack of interest in ruins is seen in the motives for tourism in ancient Greece and Rome – indeed, tourism is one of the leading themes of the whole work. The indifference of the Greeks and Romans to ruins is also found in other cultures, notably China’s. What seems to be needed for the ruins of any culture to arouse interest and to make a favourable impression is a gap in the continuity of that culture, such as occurred in Roman culture from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages in Europe. Someone aiming to bridge that gap – a tourist, say – who surveys past Roman culture with a sympathetic eye and an understanding of its achievements is in a position to find the ruins, the material remains of Roman culture, as interesting as any of its other monuments.

In 1626, workers took aim at four spots marked on the floor of the largest church in Christendom, Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The structure’s immense dome hovered more than four hundred feet above them, for they stood at the intersection of the church’s nave and transept. They began to dig. These shafts, when eventually filled with masonry, would support a towering bronze tent (called a baldacchino) over the high altar. As shovels and picks hacked deep, the excavation took laborers back through layers of history. After breaking through the floor of the Renaissance church, they burrowed through the fill separating it from its fourth-century predecessor. They then cracked through that building’s pavement and struck an ancient cemetery (Fig. I.1). If authorities expected to find anyone’s remains, they were those of Peter himself or one of his papal successors, for they believed the key apostle and later popes were buried here.

The Introduction makes the case for why it is important and timely to return afresh to ancient greek epic, despite or even because of the huge amount of scholarship that already exists on this genre. After a brief overview of the current state of the field, it outlines the main points of innovation and interventions of the volume, focusing on its thematic structure, its emphasis on the lesser-known authors or dimensions of Greek epic, and its integration of ancient material and modern responses to it. It ends with a brief overview of the sections of the volume and draws out the connections between the chapters within them.

Traditional study of Roman military communities has ignored or erased women and their families from daily military life. Archaeological and documentary evidence reveal the inescapable fact that residents of extended military communities interacted inside and outside Roman forts through habitation, commercial endeavors, and social obligations. As a result of having been segregated by historians into external communities women have been acknowledged as existing, but otherwise ignored. Not only have their social and economic contributions been disregarded, but even their identities have been overlooked. This chapter reviews the basic reasons historians have removed women from our conception of life in military contexts and then discusses the evidence for the presence and contributions of military women. The chapter closes with discussion of how the volume is organized. As becomes clear, the presence of women, children, and families within the forts and in the extramural settlements of the Roman army is beyond doubt, thanks to the diligent and sometimes contentious work of scholars over the last thirty years.

Chapter 1 introduces the problems to which this book responds and proposes alternative pathways for understanding the archaeology of the Roman Empire. It shows how particular colonial ways-of-knowing continue to shape the stories told of North Africa’s people and their traditions of worship under the Roman Empire, setting these within the binary of “Romanization” or “resistance.” While approaches to the archaeology of other parts of the Roman Empire have begun to embrace New Materialism as a way of moving beyond “Romanization,” this chapter argues that semiotic approaches offer a more productive means of engaging with and explaining the material dimensions of imperial hegemony.

While many terms are used interchangeably, ‘recycling’, ‘spolia’, ‘reuse’, and ‘reprocessing’ have distinct definitions and histories. This introduction situates previous studies in the areas of ancient recycling and reuse and provides a summary of thirty-eight villa case study sites with archaeological evidence for material salvage and recycling.

Chapter One outlines the first definitions of late antique art proposed by Franz Wickhoff in Die Wiener Genesis (1895) and Alois Riegl in Die Spätrömische Kunst-Industrie (1901).

The sociocultural spaces of the “Minoan” Aegean were teeming with animal bodies. Many of these animals were alive, but many were not—and never had been; the latter are our focus here. Realized across a range of media, such as zoomorphic vessels, frescoes, and seal stones, animals’ bodies took on a rich diversity of material and spatial qualities that could afford distinctive interactive experiences that the notion of “representations” fails to capture. By recognizing both biological and fabricated entities as real embodiments of animals, which could coexist and interact in Aegean spaces, the nature of our discussion changes. We see that the dynamics of representation were caught up in a much wider field of relationships involving these crafted bodies, which characterized their engagements with people. Doing so moves us beyond questions of signification and intentional design, and toward a fuller recognition of people’s actual experiences of animalian bodies. Looking closely at a variety of venues, ranging from palatial courts to a modest house bench, our focus thus can turn to how the world of animalian things was a crucial part of social life in Aegean spaces, and how direct interactions with these other animal bodies were central, yet often overlooked and minimized, components of human relations with nonhuman beasts.

The Introduction sketches the history of research on Hellenistic athletics. It shows that the topic has not achieved much scholarly attention in the past due to the old (and spurious) assumption that the period constituted a “dark age” of sport history. The chapter explains the book’s focus on athletic and equestrian victors and substantiates the study’s methodological approach: Based upon the compilation of a database that includes all the available, mostly epigraphic and literary, sources on Hellenistic athletes, victor epigrams are identified as the key medium for the presentation of agonistic fame in the Hellenistic period. Sixty-one pieces of agonistic poetry form the main evidence for the following case studies. They are grouped into (local, regional, or empire-wide) clusters of epigrams in order to identify characteristic features of the agonistic discourse of each political unit. The aim is to investigate the impact political structures had on the respective agonistic cultures.

Chapter one argues for the significance of visualized divine music by situating ancient viewers’ experience of representations of divine music within their ancient contexts, thereby establishing a well-defined space in which divine music could have been seen, imaginatively heard, and experienced. Laferrière takes as her focus a corpus of fourth-century BCE votive reliefs that depict Pan playing his syrinx and the Nymphs dancing; dedicated to these same gods, the reliefs were consistently deposited in cave shrines throughout Attica. Since the clear archaeological record allows for a reconstruction of the worshipper’s religious experience, Laferrière draws attention to the ways the reliefs provoked specific sensory experiences in the ancient worshippers. Within the cave shrines, worshippers could have gazed upon votive reliefs that were visually similar to the physical cave, so that the distinction between image and reality blurred and collapsed. As a result, these reliefs allowed for a fully embodied experience of the Nymphs: by imaginatively listening to the music that Pan plays, and perhaps even contributing their own music, worshippers are invited to join in the Nymphs’ dance.

This book is about placemaking, a theme increasingly connecting the archaeological discipline with anthropology, urban planning, and the visual arts. From the very first pages, it is good to underscore how this book deals with placemaking from a strictly anthropological, architectural, and archaeological perspective, emphasising the relationship that has been created between historical monuments, their architecture, the urban planning of the Third Rome, and the ideological trends that are recorded between the post-unification period (1870–1922) and that of the fascist regime (1922–45). This clarification is necessary to prepare the reader for the theoretical context of this introduction, as well as to encourage those who are interested in broadening their knowledge of placemaking from the philosophical standpoint, with the heated debates that followed in the same decades.

In the past, architectural change in Archaic Greece was often explained as a somehow natural, coherent evolution from “primitive” wooden structures to sophisticated stone temples. Following the ancient writer Vitruvius, modern authors have attempted to demonstrate that the architectural orders, in particular the Doric, can be traced back to functional necessities typical of wooden buildings. While this explanation of the Doric order has long been questioned, few attempts have been made to explore alternative explanations. The chapter lays out a methodology to analyze architectural change by asking how the experience of sacred spaces and landscapes changed and who were the social groups interested in promoting such change. The chapter highlights the kinetic and multisensorial dimension of the experience of space and architecture, as stressed also by authors from other fields. Further, a survey of recent contributions to the study of the Doric and Ionic orders suggests that they emerged suddenly in the early sixth century BC, rather than evolving slowly over centuries. The emergence of the Doric order went hand in hand with the emergence of architectural sculpture on pediments and friezes. By looking at a series of case studies the book aims to shed light on the relation between the various transformation processes.

One of the most exciting archaeological discoveries of modern times was made by a young Spanish girl called María Sanz du Sautuola in 1879 (Figure 1).1 Inspired by a meeting with French archaeologist Édouard Piette in Paris, who had found various pieces of portable Palaeolithic art, María’s father Marcelino had decided to carry out some excavations in the cave of Altamira, in the region of Cantabria in northern Spain. Whilst her father was working near the mouth of the cave, María went exploring further in. Soon, posterity records, she called out to her father: ‘Daddy, look, oxen.’ María had discovered the stunning cave art on the walls of Altamira – the first Palaeolithic cave art to be recognised in Europe. Sautuola published their findings in 1880 in his Brief Notes on Some Prehistoric Objects from the Province of Santander, which included his pencil drawings of the bison from the ceiling of the cave.

This chapter sets the practice of Egyptian religion in Greece in an imperial and global context. The rise of Isis and Sarapis as popular gods is considered alongside the development of Greek identities found in Second Sophistic literature and Roman provincial archaeology. Proposing a more intersectional and process-based approach, this chapter suggests a new framework for considering minority forms of ethnicity in the Roman Empire.

The editors present the topic, review the historiography, and outline the goals of the present volume, focusing on the high survival rates of cities and economic recovery.