Embodied Identities

The landscape of central Tyrrhenian Italy became increasingly engraved with roads cut deep in the ground in the course of the seventh and sixth centuries bc . This development was mainly for pragmatic reasons, such as the need for better infrastructure and transport facilities resulting from increased vehicular traffic between and within regions. In addition to providing logistic benefits, road-cuttings also contributed to developing the socio-political aspects of the proto-urban centres of central Italy through their monumentality, which arguably was utilized in politicizing territorial landscapes as well as in enhancing funerary rituals. In this paper I shall examine road-cuttings as instruments of urbanization in iron age and Archaic central Italy by attempting to present a point of view in which the road-cuttings in central Italy are seen not only as pragmatic facilities, but also as building blocks of landscapes of power and identity. This goal is approached by using the methods of landscape archaeology and phenomenology in a study of 110 road-cuttings from central Italy and assessing their relations to their physical surroundings.

An integral part of the transition from ‘huts’ to ‘houses’ in the seventh and early sixth century BC was the adoption of a new roofing system using wooden beams and terracotta tiles instead of traditional thatch. The two elements of the new system formed an integrated unit, with special tiles designed and positioned to protect the perishable wooden beams from rain, wind, and fire; many also carried painted and moulded decorations that have encouraged study of their iconography as well as function. The disappearance of wooden trusses and supporting mud-brick walls from the archaeological record means that thousands of these durable tiles and architectural terracottas now comprise the primary evidence for the size, form, and decoration of many early Etruscan and Latial superstructures. Excavations in the last seventy years have yielded new information about the distribution of the decorative elements of these roofs in Etruria and Latium, and in particular about the different types of buildings on which they appeared. It is clear that architectural terracottas were initially placed on a wide variety of buildings, unlike their Greek counterparts, but gradually became the preserve of religious architecture. This chapter will examine the nature and location of these roofs, their imagery, and explanations for their increasingly limited use. As such it will offer a detailed analysis of the process by which terracottas became a means of differentiating religious buildings from vernacular architecture during the sixth century BC. Tile production appears to have begun in central Italy by the middle of the seventh century BC and can be associated with significant changes in society and economy. With an approximate weight of 60 kilograms per square metre for tiles and up to 85 kilograms per square metre for the supporting roof beams, the downward and outward pressure of tiled roofs had to be countered with strong, preferably stonebased, walls following rectangular or square plans, the careful selection of timbers to span greater distances, and specialized craftsmen to make, fit, and repair the roofs. All of these factors imply more sedentary communities than hut architecture, growing technical infrastructure, and an ability and readiness to invest in the greater capital expense of a tiled roof.

The material found in graves invariably raises questions for archaeologists, whatever the period. Such material is often referred to as ‘grave goods’, but the term is very imprecise. It seems too restrictive nowadays, given the diverse nature and status of the remains that can be found in graves. The term is overly interpretative, as well. Not all of the items unearthed with skeletons are ‘grave goods’. In the initial stages of analysis, it is better to employ ‘associated remains’. This term (1) encompasses all of the remains found whether deposited deliberately or not, (2) covers their diverse natures by including both artefacts and ecofacts – i.e. tangible remains whether manufactured or otherwise (ceramic, lithic or bone, adornments and faunal remains) and more fleeting remains such as mineral, ash and plant macro-remains, (3) qualifies the degree of their association with the deceased, whether worn or deposited in the grave, and (4) does not pre-judge the role they might have played in the funerary ceremony (Zemour, 2013). The notion of ‘grave goods’ has changed with the way graves are understood. The archaeological approach to burial contexts has gone through several stages. Initially, the focus was on the architecture and ‘grave goods’ before shifting to the human remains. It was not until the late 20th century that burials came to be analysed and interpreted more holistically. What is referred today as the ‘archaeology of death’, or ‘archaeothanatology’, covers all periods and all types of deposits of human remains. This approach seeks, among other things, to reconstruct and interpret mortuary actions in conjunction with all of the other archaeological data. As graves are understood as systems and no longer as juxtaposed elements, they become a diversified and multi-disciplinary field of investigation. This affects the understanding of ‘grave goods’ quite fundamentally. New questions and study protocols have emerged, which progressively provide an increasingly refined understanding of the ways in which remains are associated with the deceased. After outlining 420the changes in the approach to remains associated with the dead, this chapter illustrates specific examples and the main contributions of the current approach using cases drawn mostly from chrono-cultural contexts investigated by the authors, thereby contrasting the state of practice for prehistoric and historic periods.

The architectural transformations of the seventh and early sixth centuries, often described as the change from huts to houses, generated a range of building types that some scholars have associated with particular types of religious activities. Some small buildings with one or two rooms have been interpreted as oikos shrines; some buildings with multiple adjacent rooms are thought to have been venues for ritual banquets; and some courtyard complexes have been cast as political sanctuaries or residences where the inhabitants observed familial cults. The archaeological evidence for religious activities associated with any of these building types, however, is not straightforward. The first part of this chapter examines whether it is possible to identify any preferred plan for structures that sheltered and complemented religious rituals during the seventh and early sixth centuries BC. The second part then contrasts this inquiry with the relatively straightforward identification of religious buildings during and after the sixth century BC permitted by the introduction of a distinctive, religious architectural marker, namely podia. As such this chapter explores the emergence of a formal architectural vocabulary for Etrusco-Italic religious buildings and identifies when and where cult buildings became architecturally differentiated from other structures within settlements. Although the architectural changes of the seventh and early sixth centuries BC in Latium and Etruria are not linear or uniform, it is clear that round, oval, and rectangular huts with wattle-and-daub walls and thatched coverings were gradually replaced by rectangular structures with stone foundations and tiled roofs. From the middle of the seventh century plans of the new buildings were regularized to the point where it is possible to identify three main types. The names of these types, however, vary both within and between different scholarly traditions, with the result that a rectangular, tile-roofed building thought to have a religious function can be variously labelled an oikos shrine, a proto-temple, or a temple, and a more elaborate building may be described as a Breithaus, a casa a vani affiancati, a courtyard building, a palazzo, a regia, or an elite residence.

The construction of monumental temples and sanctuaries during the sixth century BC changed the appearance of cult sites and settlements in Archaic Tyrrhenian Italy. The relationship between monumental cult buildings and their settings, however, is not well understood. As will be discussed below, scholars have argued that the placement and orientation of Archaic temples was influenced by the terrain, pre-existing cult sites, ritual geography, and the requirements of those within settlements. It has also been unclear whether religious monumentalization followed recognizable topographical patterns, particular to each region, culture, or religion, or alternatively varied according to local needs and customs. Thus, although the archaeology of landscapes and settlements has become an increasingly common element of Latial and Etruscan studies, the religious dimension of these landscapes and cityscapes may benefit from further analysis. This chapter accordingly examines the topography of early monumental temples in Latium and Etruria both in terms of their position in the landscape and in relation to features such as votive deposits, roads, and other buildings. The first part of the chapter presents an overview of the organization and characteristics of settlements in central Italy in the seventh and sixth centuries BC to establish the context for the introduction of the first monumental temples. The second and third parts test hypotheses about the location of Archaic cult buildings against the archaeological evidence. It will be suggested that what at first appears to be great diversity may actually represent a variety of responses to the same concern, namely a desire to be accessible to visitors, travellers, and an increasingly mobile population. The fourth and final part uses these findings to argue that it may be timely to review traditional typologies for cult sites that are based upon topographical relationships with urban centres. The incorporation of landscape archaeology into Etruscan and Latial studies over the last five decades has generated new data and models for reconstructing regional settlement hierarchies, population densities, and relationships with the physical environment. It is now possible to recognize broad, if complex, patterns in the location and organization of settlements as well as changes to those patterns over time.

Review Article Democracy’s Beginning: The Athenian Story, Thomas N Mitchell, (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2015), 350 pages. The euphoric assumption that the collapse of communism in 1989 signalled the triumph of democracy and the arrival of a post-ideological world – the end of history, perhaps, as Francis Fukuyama suggested – is the context in which Thomas Mitchell, the distinguished classicist and former provost of Trinity College Dublin, sets his study of Athenian democracy. He notes that the number of electoral democracies decreased over the ten years to 2015 and that fully developed liberal democracy, ‘one of the rarest, most delicate and fragile flowers in the jungle of human experience’, has had a very short history since the rebirth in the seventeenth century of the ideal which first flourished inAthens in the fifth and fourth centuries bc. The study of the development of the world’s first democracy could scarcely fail to be interesting, and Mitchell presents us with a master class. He marshals the evidence for the institutional arrangements devised by the Athenians to ensure the functioning of their democracy but never loses sight of the ideals and principles which inspired these institutions. He provides a summary of the salient events of the period in so far as they are relevant to the story of the democracy. Where there are differing views on the historical narrative or the reliability of the historical sources, particularly Thucydides’s history, he discusses the evidence and gives his considered opinion. The polis, or city state, developed as the dominant form of political organisation in the Greek world between 800 bc and 500 bc and, by the end of the fifth century, there were over eight hundred such states. Each was a small, self-governing unit with an urban centre and hinterland. Two waves of Greek colonisation in the eighth and seventh centuries, the first towards Sicily and southern Italy and the second along the Hellespont and the Black Sea, led to the emergence of a well-to-do population of traders alongside the relatively prosperous farmers. This weakened the monopoly power of the ascendancy, as did the development of a new battle array for Greek armies, the hoplite phalanx of heavily-armed massed infantry. The phalanx required large manpower and was possible only because of the growing numbers who could afford to equip themselves, thanks to the wealth acquired from Studies • volume 107 • number 425 99 trade. The broader winds of change in the Greek world at this time saw the beginnings of philosophy, when people sought answers to questions about the origin and nature of the universe, not in myth, but in human powers of observation and logical reasoning. Athens and Sparta responded in diametrically opposite ways to these changes, and to the social and political unrest arising from the oppressive rule of privileged elites in the seventh and sixth centuries bc. Sparta developed a constitution which had a blend of monarchic, aristocratic and democratic features. Its dominant characteristic was the imposition on young male citizens of a strict community-based educational and military regime. The role of soldier was inseparable from that of citizen. Sparta was lauded for its adherence to the rule of law and enjoyed political stability for four centuries. Aristotle observed that Sparta’s warrior culture was appropriate only to conditions of war, while ignoring the arts of peace. Sparta did not participate in the new wave of literary and artistic creativity and intellectual discovery that was sweeping across most of the rest of Greece. Athens was ruled by a narrow group of noble families. The unrest there resulted in the election in 594 of Solon, an aristocrat, with full powers to reform the political and legal system. Solon’s vision centred on the closely connected concepts of justice (dike) and the order and harmony (eunomia) that came with it. Solon cancelled debts and freed those enslaved by the practice (which he banned) of lending on the security of the debtor’s person. He extended access to justice to all by giving the right of appeal to a court of the people. Solon’s most fundamental change was to use wealth rather than birth as a...

During the seventh and sixth centuries bc parallels observed between Daskyleion and Gordion regarding trade amphoras imply that common ports and routes were used by these settlements. These similarities, as far as the transfer of goods to settlements in the inner part of Anatolia are concerned, place a special emphasis on the Hellespontine-Phrygia route to the southern ports of Propontis. During this period, this route supplied Greek goods to Phrygia on an equal level to the contemporary Ionia-Sardes route.

While Etruscan sites have received considerable attention over the years, scholarly focus has rarely been directed on the faunal remains from the various celebrated archaeological localities. The present is a zooarchaeological analysis of archaeofaunal material from Gonfienti, a renowned Etruscan locality near Prato, in north-central Tuscany. The vast, complex archaeological site includes a large building, called Edifice 1, that was constructed starting from the sixth century BC. Predominant taphonomic signatures, human-induced damage, archaeobiological evidence and mortality patterns obtained from the study of the faunal remains from the building’s main phase of occupation revealed that the householders depended principally on cattle and subordinately on domestic suids for much of their subsistence, although game also formed part of the diet. The zooarchaeological interpretations match up very well with the interpretations of the excavators and archaeologists concerning the function of Edifice 1 and the use of some of its rooms. In addition, the low incidence of in situ weathering, extensive corrosion of cortical bone surfaces possibly by exposure to alkaline solutions and the relatively high frequency of waterfowls in the studied samples suggest that the area hosting Edifice 1 experienced very humid conditions and was surrounded by large wetland expanses at the time of its main Etruscan occupation.

This chapter studies the cult of Menelaus and Helen at Therapne. A ‘happy congruence’ of evidence, from the seventh century BC onward, indicates that Menelaus and Helen were honoured at a place known in antiquity as Therapne. Indeed, authors from the early archaic period through the end of the era attest to the presence of a shrine to Menelaus and/or Menelaus and Helen on the hills across the Eurotas River from modern Sparta. The site, comprising an archaic shrine built next to and atop an extensive Mycenaean site, was well-studied by the British School early and late in the twentieth century. Moreover, inscriptional evidence corresponds with the ancient testimonia to indicate that Menelaus and Helen were worshiped at the place already known in antiquity as the Menelaion. Dedications to Helen and Menelaus dated to the seventh and sixth centuries BC are among the earliest reported inscriptional evidence for the worship of any Homeric hero in Greece. The archaic cult at the Menelaion is frequently discussed both for the study of hero cult in itself and for the question as to how early Greek cult did intersect with the proliferation of epic poetry.

Ever since the 1979 Islamic revolution and the return of Ayatollah Khomeini, Tehran, the capital city of Iran, has been much in the news because of the anti-Western theocratic rule of its current Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i, and the behavior of the previous President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad, principally because of worldwide concern that the Islamic Republic of Iran is developing nuclear weapons to use against Israel. The comings and goings of several Iranian presidents over the past few decades, whether hardliners or moderates, have been against the backdrop of the Supreme Leader, supported by the Revolutionary Guards, who is the final authority. Today's president, Hassan Rouhani, appears to be in favor of rapprochement with the West, and a diplomatic solution is now being considered by Iran and Western nations.

The insula del menandro (pompeii I 10) is one of a number of large and slightly irregular blocks lying between the presumed old part of the city (the Altstadt, roughly equivalent to the area south of Via delle Terme and Via della Fortuna and west of Via Stabiana) and the regular rectangular grid which occupies the eastern part of the final walled city (the Neustadt) . It has traditionally been believed that the Altstadt was the original settlement, dating perhaps to the seventh or sixth centuries BC, and that this expanded during the fifth or fourth centuries to accommodate a massive rise in population; but research since the early 1980s has suggested that there was a circuit of walls on the present line as early as the sixth century BC, in which case the Altstadt should perhaps be regarded as a religious or commercial enclave marked off within the city—a ‘kind of acropolis’, as Kockel describes it. None the less, it is clear that the development of the walled area did not take place in one fell swoop but represents a series of successive phases spread over a period of time. A crucial phase In the process was the laying out, perhaps in the early third century BC, of the city’s three major streets: the principal cardo, Via Vesuvio/Stabiana, and the two main decumani, Via delle Terme/della Fortuna/di Nola and Via dell’Abbondanza. The creation of our quarter ought logically to have come soon after, since It is predicated upon the existence of the new thoroughfares. The positions of Via di Nola and Via dell’Abbondanza were determined by dividing the length of Via Stabiana into three; the divisions so created were then bisected by further decumani aligned upon the towers of the eastern defences, and the central and southern zones were further subdivided to establish a series of rhomboidal blocks roughly 60 m. wide and deep. This phase extended only a couple of blocks east of Via Stabiana, and our insula is one of those on the eastern periphery. The rectangular grid to the east is clearly later.

This paper attempts to bridge the gulf between two often separate research agendas in Archaic period Etruria, one concerned with the archaeology of wine and agricultural production and redistribution, the other with figured representations of drinking and the associated symbolic visual language. It does so by examining the relationship between changing processes of production, consumption and exchange and the symbolism of drinking in the visual and material culture of sixth-century bc Tyrrhenian Etruria. In this analysis, I maintain that changing modes of agricultural production and distribution had an impact on such symbolism in elite funerary and domestic contexts, with key evidence also coming from sanctuaries. In particular, it is argued that during the seventh century bc, the visual language related to wine drinking alludes to experiences of bodily otherness; this is indicated by the symbolic correlation between accessibility to wine, the dangers of maritime travel and death. From the sixth century bc, we can trace a shift towards a visual language that centred on cultural difference or otherness: this is noticeable in the introduction of Dionysiac imagery and new mythological narratives of cross-cultural encounters, as well as in a new emphasis on codified drinking and culturally differentiated drinking vessels. This shift is more or less contemporary with other changes, namely the production and distribution of agricultural surplus in the Tyrrhenian region and beyond, and shifting values of objects in that exchange.

This book began by stating that histories of religious architecture can be accounts of both buildings and people. This particular history, focused on the archaeological evidence for the development of cult buildings in early central Italy, has reconsidered traditional narratives about the form and function of Etrusco-Italic religious architecture and proposed an alternative reconstruction of how their architects and audiences may have interacted with one another in Rome, Latium, and Etruria between the ninth and the sixth centuries BC. Comparison with the construction of monumental temples elsewhere also indicated that settlements including Rome, Satricum, Pyrgi, and Tarquinia can perhaps be considered part of a network of Archaic Mediterranean settlements with material, commercial, and religious connections, and that monumental architecture may have been a mechanism for successful social interaction. This study has therefore supported the suggestion that the physical and social fabric of ancient communities were closely linked, and that regional studies of Latium and Etruria may furthermore benefit from being set in Italic and Mediterranean contexts. This concluding chapter briefly recapitulates the arguments made in the main body of the book and the significance of each of those arguments for studies of ancient architecture and society. It also assesses how these findings relate to broader debates about Archaic Italy. Finally, it acknowledges the limitations of this analysis and highlights opportunities for future research. Part I of this book demonstrated that ancient religious architecture was a protean phenomenon. Three chapters analysed the ambiguous evidence for Iron Age sacred huts, the range of different buildings types associated with ritual activities in the seventh century BC, and the emergence of a separate architectural language for religious buildings during the Archaic period. Detailed analyses of foundations and roofs revealed that as changes in technology and society led to the widespread use of more permanent building materials, the physical fabric of central Italic settlements was also increasingly marked by the use of particular architectural forms and decorations to differentiate cult buildings from other structures, setting them apart in a form of architectural consecration.

Archaic Naukratis was a busy trading place in the Western Delta of the Nile, renowned for its sanctuaries and courtesans, granting the Greeks access to Egyptian grain and luxury items. Now, more than one hundred years after the discovery and excavation of Naukratis, the author offers the first full-length analysis of the archaeology and archaic history of this important site. Although Naukratis always features in modern accounts of ancient Greek colonization, it was not a place where the Greeks could freely establish their own political and social organization--it was under the strict control of the Egyptian pharaoh and his officials. To understand the special status of Naukratis, the author takes the port of trade model, surveying the political, social, and economic background of both Late Period Egypt and archaic Greece. A major section of the book comprises an archaeological re-evaluation of the topography of archaic Naukratis and its material finds. The sanctuaries, archaic pottery styles, terracottas, faiences, statuettes, and other small finds are examined in the light of recent scholarship, and an in-depth study of the literary evidence is brought to bear on the archaeological material. This book comprises a significant contribution to our understanding of Graeco-Egyptian relations during the seventh and sixth centuries BC and also demonstrates that Polanyian economic theory can play an invaluable rôle in the ongoing debate about the concepts best employed to analyse the ancient Greek economy.

SummaryIn this work the authors make a synthesis of the updated studies on Phoenician trade in the north‐eastern area of the Iberian Peninsula during the seventh and sixth centuries BC. Also presented are the lines of research, and their latest developments, pursued by the teams of researchers that work in this field.