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Books > Humanities > Archaeology > Archaeology by period / region > European archaeology > Classical Greek & Roman archaeology
Whatever aspect of Athenian culture one examines, whether it be tragedy and comedy, philosophy, vase painting and sculpture, oratory and rhetoric, law and politics, or social and economic life, the picture looks very different after 400 BC from before 400 BC. Scholars who have previously addressed this question have concentrated on particular areas and come up with explanations, often connected with the psychological effect of the Peloponnesian War, which are very unconvincing as explanations for the whole range of change. This book attempts to look at a wide range of evidence for cultural change at Athens and to examine the ways in which the changes may have been coordinated. It is a complement to the examination of the rhetoric of revolution as applied to ancient Greece in Rethinking Revolutions through Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 2006).
In this book, Gabriele Cifani reconstructs the early economic history of Rome, from the Iron Age to the early Republic. Bringing a multidisciplinary approach to the topic, he argues that the early Roman economy was more diversified than has been previously acknowledged, going well beyond agriculture and pastoralism. Cifani bases his argument on a systematic review of archaeological evidence for production, trade and consumption. He posits that the existence of a network system, based on cultural interaction, social mobility, and trade, connected Rome and central Tyrrhenian Italy to the Mediterranean Basin even in this early period of Rome's history. Moreover, these trade and cultural links existed in parallel to regional, diversified economies, and institutions. Cifani's book thus offers new insights into the economic basis for the rise of Rome, as well as the social structures of Mediterranean Iron Age societies.
Much of our understanding of the origins and early development of the Greek architectural order is based on the writings of ancient authors, such as Virtruvius, and those of modern interpreters. Traditionally, the archaeological evidence has been viewed secondarily and often made to fit within a literary context, despite contradictions that occur. Barbara Barletta s study examines both forms of evidence in an effort to reconcile the two sources, as well as to offer a coherent reconstruction of the origins and early development of the Greek architectural orders. Beginning with the pre-canonical material, she demonstrates that the relatively late emergence of the Doric and Ionic orders arose from contributions of separate regions of the Greek world, rather than a single center. Barletta s reinterpretations of the evidence also assigns greater importance to the often overlooked contributions of Western Greece and the Cycladic Islands."
This book is an account of an almost completely neglected archaeological epic, the uncovering and restoration of all the classical monuments of Rome during the French occupation (1809 14). This was the first large-scale archaeological programme in the city. Based on archives in Rome and Paris, the archaeology of these five years is placed against its essential background: the fate of the monuments since antiquity and the contemporary Napoleonic political and cultural history. Mr Ridley describes the enormously complicated organisation which carried out the work and identifies the leading administrators, archaeologists and architects. The bulk of the work is a detailed account of the excavation and restoration work on the Forum Romanum, the Colosseum and the Forum of Trajan, the main classical monuments. There are numerous illustrations of the monuments both before and after the French intervention, as well as unpublished plans from the archives. There is an extensive specialist index. The book is intended for anyone interested in archaeology, in Napoleonic Europe and above all, in Rome.
This book explores how art and material culture were used to construct age, gender and social identity in the Greek Early Iron Age, 1100-700 BCE. Coming between the collapse of the Bronze Age palaces and the creation of Archaic city-states, these four centuries witnessed fundamental cultural developments and political realignments. Whereas previous archaeological research has emphasized class-based aspects of change, this study offers a more comprehensive view of early Greece by recognizing the place of children and women in a warrior-focused society. Combining iconographic analysis, gender theory, mortuary analysis, typological study and object biography, Susan Langdon explores how early figural art was used to mediate critical stages in the life-course of men and women. She shows how an understanding of the artistic and material contexts of social change clarifies the emergence of distinctive gender and class asymmetries that laid the basis for classical Greek society.
In 97 CE Julius Frontinus was appointed by the Emperor Nerva to the post of water commissioner for the city of Rome. In the De Aquaductu Urbis Romae he sets forth his duties, responsibilities and accomplishments during his first year in office. He sketches the history of the aqueducts, furnishes a wealth of technical data and quotes verbatim from legal documents. This edition is the first since 1922 to be based on the single authoritative witness discovered at Monte Cassino in 1429 and is also the first to take into account the idiosyncrasies of its twelfth-century scribe, Peter the Deacon, a man notorious for literary affectations of his own. R. H. Rodgers provides the first full commentary since the early eighteenth century, dividing his attention between text and language on the one hand and content and interpretation on the other.
The Frontier area of northern England is the most important and reliable source for archaeologists in existence. The perpetuation of the Roman imperial ideal, the survival of classical art and literature, and the spread of the Christian faith depended on the strength of the Empire's frontier and the people who lived there. In Britain these peoples represent nearly 400 years of a cosmopolitan society with the basic elements of a true civilisation. They had greater freedom and security and were more literate and prosperous than at any previous time or for many centuries after. Dr Salway's study of this area is a detailed investigation of the Romanised part of the civilian population to be made. He describes the people themselves and every aspect of their background and way of life, their legal status and their administrative system. He then examines each of the sites individually, making special use of aerial photographs.
Late in August 410, Rome was starving, its residents were turning on one another, and, to make matters worse, the Gothic army camped at Rome's gates was restless. The Gothic commander was Alaric, a Roman general and barbarian chieftain. Leading an army that was short of food and potentially mutinous, sacking Rome was his only way forward. The old heart of Rome's empire fell to a conqueror's sword for the first time in eight hundred years. For three days, Alaric's Goths sacked the eternal city. In the words of a contemporary, the mother of the world had been murdered. Alaric's story is the culmination of a long historical journey by which the Goths came to be a part of the Roman world. Whether as friends or foes of the Roman empire, the Goths and their history are entwined with the larger history of Rome in the third and fourth centuries. Rome's Gothic Wars explains how the Goths came into existence on the margins of the Roman world, how different Gothic groups dealt with the enormous power of Rome just beyond their lands, and how, in two traumatic years, thousands of Goths entered the imperial provinces and destroyed the army that was sent to suppress them, leaving the emperor of the eternal city dead on the field of battle. Unlike other histories of the barbarians, Rome's Gothic Wars shows exactly how and why modern historians understand the Goths the way they do and why our understanding is so controversial. Michael Kulikowski is associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. A recipient of the Solmsen Fellowship at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he is the author of Late Roman Spain and Its Cities, which was awarded an Honorable Mention in Classics and Archaeology from the Association of American University Presses. His scholarly articles have appeared in Early Medieval Europe, Britannia, Phoenix, and Byzantium, and he has appeared on the History Channel's Barbarians series."
Edward Gibbon laid the fall of the Roman Empire at Christianity's door, suggesting that 'pusillanimous youth preferred the penance of the monastic to the dangers of a military life ... whole legions were buried in these religious sanctuaries'. This surprising study suggests that, far from seeing Christianity as the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire, we should understand the Christianisation of the household as a central Roman survival strategy. By establishing new 'ground rules' for marriage and family life, the Roman Christians of the last century of the Western empire found a way to re-invent the Roman family as a social institution to weather the political, military, and social upheaval of two centuries of invasion and civil war. In doing so, these men and women - both clergy and lay - found themselves changing both what it meant to be Roman, and what it meant to be Christian.
The late sixth century was a period of considerable change in Etruria; this change is traditionally seen as the adoption of superior models from Greece. In a radical re-alignment of agency, this book examines a wide range of Etruscan material culture - mirrors, tombs, sanctuaries, houses and cities - in order to demonstrate the importance of local concerns in the formation of Etruscan material culture. Drawing on recent theoretical developments, the book emphasises the deliberate nature of the smallest of changes in material culture form, and develops the concept of surface as a unifying key to understanding the changes in the ways Etruscans represented themselves in life and death. This concept allows a uniquely holistic approach to the archaeology of Etruscan society and has the potential for other archaeological investigations. The book will interest all scholars and students of classical archaeology.
This 2007 study explores how modern scholars came to write Greek history from a Eurocentric perspective and challenges orthodox readings of Greek history as part of the history of the West. Since the Greeks lacked a national state or a unified society, economy or culture, the polis has helped to create a homogenising national narrative. This book re-examines old polarities such as those between the Greek poleis and Eastern monarchies, or between the ancient consumer and the modern producer city, in order to show the fallacies of standard approaches. It argues for the relevance of Aristotle's concept of the polis, which is interpreted in an intriguing manner. Finally, it proposes an alternative way of looking at Greek history as part of a Mediterranean world-system. This interdisciplinary study engages with debates on globalisation, nationalism, Orientalism and history writing, while also debating developments in classical studies.
Names on Terra Sigillata, the product of 40 years of study, records over 5,000 names and some 300,000 stamps and signatures on Terra Sigillata (samian ware) manufactured in the 1st to the 3rd centuries AD in Gaul, the German provinces and Britain. To be published in 10 volumes, the work has been supported by the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the University of Leeds and the University of Reading, and the Roemisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum. This is the first catalogue of its type to appear since Felix Oswald's Index of Potters' Stamps on Terra Sigillata (`Samian Ware'), published in 1931. The importance of samian as a tool for dating archaeological contexts and the vast increase in samian finds since then has prompted the authors to record the work of the potters in greater detail, illustrating, whenever possible, each individual stamp or signature which the potter used, and enumerating examples of each vessel type on which it appears, together with details of find-spots, repositories and museum accession numbers or excavators' site codes. Dating of the potters' activity is supported, as far as possible, by a discussion of the evidence. This is based on the occurrence of material in historically-dated contexts or on its association with other stamps or signatures dated by this method. The bulk of the material was examined personally by the authors, from kiln sites and occupation sites in France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Britain, but the catalogue also includes published records which they were able to verify, both from those areas and from other parts of the Roman Empire.
This collection of papers illustrates how our picture of the Greco-Roman East has changed in recent decades. The chapters, by a distinguished international cast of contributors, present a view of life in the Eastern Empire from the bottom up, and show how a thoughtful use of both more recent and existing material evidence can shed light on aspects of social and political life that could barely be guessed at from the literary record alone. The evidence of coins, inscriptions and archaeological data is used in the investigation of wider socio-historical issues, including processes of Hellenization and acculturation, the permeability and flexibility of political boundaries at all levels, the interaction of civil and religious authority, and the operation of networks of patronage and power from the highest to the lowest social level.
In this study, Hamish Forbes explores how Greek villagers have understood and reacted to their landscapes over the centuries, from the late medieval period to the present. Analyzing how they have seen themselves belonging to their local communities and within both local and wider landscapes, Forbes examines how these aspects of belonging have informed each other. Forbes also illuminates cross-disciplinary interests in memory and the importance of monuments. Based on data gathered over 25 years, Forbes' study combines the rich detail of ethnographic field work with historical and archaeological time-depth, showing how landscapes have important meaning beyond the religious sphere in terms of kinship, ideas about the past, and in their role as productive assets.
This book examines how Romans used their pottery and the implications of these practices on the archaeological record. It is organized around a flow model for the life cycle of Roman pottery that includes a set of eight distinct practices: manufacture, distribution, prime use, reuse, maintenance, recycling, discard, reclamation. J. Theodore Pe??a evaluates how these practices operated, how they have shaped the archaeological record, and the implications of these processes on archaeological research through the examination of a wide array of archaeological, textual, representational, and comparative ethnographic evidence. The result is a rich portrayal of the dynamic that shaped the archaeological record of the ancient Romans that will be of interest to archaeologists, ceramicists, and students of material culture.
What was the impact of Romanisation on non-elite life in central Italy during the late third and second centuries BC? Focusing on the increasing spread of black-gloss pottery across the peninsula, Dr Roth demonstrates the importance of the study of such everyday artefacts as a way of approaching aspects of social history that are otherwise little documented. Placing its subject within the wider debate over cultural identity in the Roman world, the book argues that stylistic changes in such objects of everyday use document the development of new forms of social representation among non-elite groups in Roman Italy. In contrast to previous accounts, the book concludes that, rather than pointing to a loss of regional cultural identities, the ceramic patterns suggest that the Romanisation of Italy provided new material opportunities across the social scale.
Mid-fifth-century Athens saw the development of the Athenian empire, the radicalization of Athenian democracy through the empowerment of poorer citizens, the adornment of the city through a massive and expensive building program, the classical age of Athenian tragedy, the assembly of intellectuals offering novel approaches to philosophical and scientific issues, and the end of the Spartan-Athenian alliance against Persia and the beginning of open hostilities between the two greatest powers of ancient Greece. The Athenian statesman Pericles both fostered and supported many of these developments. Although it is no longer fashionable to view Periclean Athens as a social or cultural paradigm, study of the history, society, art, and literature of mid-fifth-century Athens remains central to any understanding of Greek history. This collection of essays reveal the political, religious, economic, social, artistic, literary, intellectual, and military infrastructure that made the Age of Pericles possible.
What were the eating and drinking habits of the inhabitants of Britain during the Roman period? Drawing on evidence from a large number of archaeological excavations, this fascinating new study shows how varied these habits were in different regions and amongst different communities and challenges the idea that there was any one single way of being Roman or native. Integrating a range of archaeological sources, including pottery, metalwork and environmental evidence such as animal bone and seeds, this book illuminates eating and drinking choices, providing invaluable insights into how those communities regarded their world. The book contains sections on the nature of the different types of evidence used and how this can be analysed. It will be a useful guide to all archaeologists and those who wish to learn about the strength and weaknesses of this material and how best to use it.
What were the eating and drinking habits of the inhabitants of Britain during the Roman period? Drawing on evidence from a large number of archaeological excavations, this fascinating new study shows how varied these habits were in different regions and amongst different communities and challenges the idea that there was any one single way of being Roman or native. Integrating a range of archaeological sources, including pottery, metalwork and environmental evidence such as animal bone and seeds, this book illuminates eating and drinking choices, providing invaluable insights into how those communities regarded their world. The book contains sections on the nature of the different types of evidence used and how this can be analysed. It will be a useful guide to all archaeologists and those who wish to learn about the strength and weaknesses of this material and how best to use it.
Rome's Gothic Wars is a concise introduction to research on the Roman Empire's relations with one of the most important barbarian groups of the ancient world. The book uses archaeological and historical evidence to look not just at the course of events, but at the social and political causes of conflict between the empire and its Gothic neighbours. In eight chapters, Michael Kulikowski traces the history of Romano-Gothic relations from their earliest stage in the third century, through the development of strong Gothic politics in the early fourth century, until the entry of many Goths into the empire in 376 and the catastrophic Gothic war that followed. The book closes with a detailed look at the career of Alaric, the powerful Gothic general who sacked the city of Rome in 410.
The fully revised second edition of this successful volume includes updates on the latest archaeological research in all chapters, and two new essays on Greek and Roman art. It retains its unique, paired essay format, as well as key contributions from leading archaeologists and historians of the classical world. * Second edition is updated and revised throughout, showcasing the latest research and fresh theoretical approaches in classical archaeology * Includes brand new essays on ancient Greek and Roman art in a modern context * Designed to encourage critical thinking about the interpretation of ancient material culture and the role of modern perceptions in shaping the study of art and archaeology * Features paired essays one covering the Greek world, the other, the Roman to stimulate a dialogue not only between the two ancient cultures, but between scholars from different historiographic and methodological traditions * Includes maps, chronologies, diagrams, photographs, and short editorial introductions to each chapter
The Antonine Wall lay at the very extremity of the Roman world. For a generation, in the middle of the second century AD, it was the north-west frontier of the Roman empire. Furthermore, it was one of only three "artificial" frontiers along the European boundaries of the empire: the other two are Hadrian's Wall and the German Limes. Although the Antonine Wall fits into the general pattern of Roman frontiers, in many ways it was the most developed frontier in Europe, with certain distinct characteristics. Perhaps of greatest significance is the survival of the collection of Roman military sculpture, the Distance Slabs. These record the lengths constructed by each legion and their relationship to the labour camps allow further conclusions to be made about the work of constructing the Antonine Wall.
Focusing on the Eastern Mediterranean world in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, this collection of essays draws on new discoveries in archaeology and epigraphy. It illustrates how methods and interpretations have developed over the last two decades. The essays cover a wide range of social and historical issues, including processes of Hellenization and acculturation, the permeability and flexibility of political boundaries, the interaction of civil and religious authority, and the operation of networks of patronage and power.
Julius Frontinus was appointed by the Emperor Nerva to the post of water commissioner for the city of Rome in 97 CE. In On the Water-Rights of the City of Rome he documents his duties, responsibilities and accomplishments during his first year in office. He also sketches the history of the aqueducts and furnishes a wealth of technical data. This is the most authoritative edition of this work to be published to date.
In this innovative study, James Whitley examines the relationship between the development of pot style and social changes in the Dark Age of Greece (1100-700 BC). He focuses on Athens, where the Protogeometric and Geometric styles first appeared. He considers pot shape and painted decoration primarily in relation to the other relevant features--metal artifacts, grave architecture, funerary rites, and the age and sex of the deceased--and also takes into account different contexts in which these shapes and decorations appear. A computer analysis of grave assemblages supports his view that pot style is an integral part of the collective representations of Early Athenian society. It is a lens through which we can focus on the changing social circumstances of Dark Age Greece. Dr. Whitley's approach to the study of style challenges many of the assumptions that have underpinned more traditional studies of Early Greek art. |
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