Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology

This thesis explores how space and ritual functioned rhetorically in religious settings in ancient Greece. Epidaurus, Eleusis, and Delphi were the three sacred spaces used as case studies. These spaces represented three different functions of Greek religion: healing, mystery cult, and oracular divination. Using the method of close reading, rhetorical analysis of the spaces and rituals revealed that foundation myths gave rhetorical meaning to the place of the sanctuary, which framed the spaces within it. This meaning was communicated to the inner self of the supplicants who performed rituals in those spaces. The repetition of rituals in those spaces made them into places of public memory, and the interplay of ritual, place, and memory resulted in a sense of Greek and polis identity.

The Archaeology Department of the University of Liverpool has carried out two groundbreaking projects that have improved our understanding of how human culture developed in ancient times. Playing a key role in that research has been the KEYENCE VHX-7000 Series Digital Microscope, the world's first 4K ultra-high accuracy microscope.

Ancient Egyptian mirrors have received a great deal of attention for their cultural significance and connections to religious beliefs. However, in-depth investigations into their manufacture have been lacking with only a handful included in wider analyses. So how were mirrors manufactured? The preliminary metallurgical analysis presented here aims to shed light on this. With the use of SEM-EDX, analyses of Egyptian mirrors from a range of UK museum collections, spanning from the Old Kingdom through to the Late Period, have revealed the chemical composition and microstructure of the metal.

Some metallurgical analyses have been conducted on Ancient Egyptian mirrors; however, both compositional and microstructural data are necessary in order to fully reconstruct the manufacturing sequences of these artefacts. Traditional sampling and analytical methods for researching metal artefacts have their limitations for investigating mirrors in particular; for example, a mounted 'V' cross-section is often not a viable sampling option as it is too visually destructive to a complete disk, and surface analysis only provides limited compositional data. These observations resulted in the adaptation of deep-filed edge abrasion sampling, based on coin studies, with SEM-EDX analyses for Egyptian mirrors. This paper will establish how the methodology gathers reliable compositional and microstructural data while remaining visually discreet. This study demonstrates the methodology on four mirrors varying in condition, shape, and size in comparison to the traditional mounted 'V' crosssection taken in the 1990s from the same specimens.

It is through clothing and ornamentation that human beings use the body to indicate age, marital status, class, ethnicity, sex, a sense of style and a host of other socio-cultural identities.  Clothing is one of the most easily recognized cultural signs – it is both public and private, material and symbolic, it is the ‘social skin’, and its two sided quality invites us to explore both the individual and collective identities the dressed body enables. But, how can we decipher and read this veritable ‘language’ of dress in the ancient world? My research confronts this dilemma within the context of the Monterozzi necropolis in the Etruscan city of Tarquinia and its wall painted tombs. The analysis and interpretation of these iconographical representations is especially important in Etruscan studies where we are typically limited to the direct evidence of art for any reconstruction of their society. These tomb paintings represent some of the most evocative and important forms of archaeological data from the ancient world. They allow for the investigation of aspects of the inhabitants’ lives that are undetectable in other forms of evidence. Yet, they remain undervalued and underutilised, often being seen through a lens of excessive simplification by a focus on the ‘main artistic fundamentals’. How then will an interpretation of this language of clothing impact our understanding of the socio-cultural development of Etruria? This presentation will serve to outline the proposed theory and methods that will allow us to recover what has been lost in translation, examining the communicative potential of dress and tomb paintings, and how Etruscan individuals and communities styled themselves throughout the Archaic and Classical periods of ancient Italy.

Clothing and bodily ornamentation are major vehicles for self-representation and, far from playing a merely decorative role in history, they are increasingly being recognized as central to debates concerning gender, morality, and the human body. They stand on the watershed of the past and the future, conveying a stronger sense of their present than do most other forms of material culture. Clothing then is one of the most easily recognized cultural signs – it is both public and private, material and symbolic, it is the ‘social skin’, and its two sided quality invites us to explore both the individual and collective identities the dressed body enables. It is eminently malleable and a window through which we can perceive a substantial proportion of the self – be it family affiliation, occupation, religion, ethnicity, legal and economic status, class, age, sex or a sense of style. How then are we to interpret and understand the dress of Minoan ladies, Scythian warriors, Etruscan princes, Viking marauders, medieval saints, Renaissance noblemen or Danish peasants? How do we go about using the variety of literary, iconographic and textile evidence to dress the past? This session aims to discuss just that, and we invite contributions that interweave the potential of ‘dress’ from any period or place to re-tailor our understanding and appreciation of clothing and adornment in the past.

The annual seminar on Central Mediterranean Prehistory will be held in Liverpool on Thursday 19th of May 2016.

This long-standing event aims to gather scholars working on prehistory in the Central Mediterranean in order to present their current research, exchange ideas and explore new research directions in a friendly environment. Academics, post-docs, PhD students and independent scholars from the UK and overseas are encouraged to attend and present papers or posters relevant to the field of prehistory of Italy, Corsica, Malta, the eastern Adriatic coast, southern France, and Mediterranean areas of North Africa. The time frame is from the Palaeolithic to Iron Age, up to 500 BC.

The special significance of Tarquinian tomb paintings are not only their splendid colors and rich iconography, but also the assemblage of pictorial dress that they present. Dress possesses recognizable, coherent, and significant organizational groupings that constitute an intentional form of non-verbal communication. This paper discusses an innovative methodological approach used to identify and examine the painted structures of such dress through the application of a hierarchical clustering analysis. The use of dress is a crucial component in the dynamic system of communication within and between societies. It is used to shape and communicate identity, facilitate interaction, negotiate difference, and to create or traverse sociological boundaries. The active process of adorning the body draws from a shared linguistic repertoire that is used to communicate, or to conceal, a host of socio-cultural identities, such as age, personhood, class, ethnicity, sex, gender, or social status. This paper explores some of the ‘fashionological’ and linguistic theories, as well as the statistical methods, which can be deployed to examine the communicative potential of the dress depicted throughout the painted Tarquinian tombs. Its aim is to demonstrate how best to identify and investigate the pictorial forms, language, and structures of the painted dress. It ‘dresses’ the Phersu and the Pygmy to exemplify how the data produced by this innovative approach can retailor our understanding of Tarquinia, its tombs, and its tomb paintings throughout the Archaic and Classical periods of ancient Italy.

Dress  is  one  of  the  most  useful  and  communicative  aspects  of  material  culture,  which  is  all  the  more  emphatically  emphasized  by  this  paper’s  exercise  in  its  pictorial  quantification  and  visualization.  This  quantitative  analysis  of  the  representations  of  dress  focuses  on  6th  –5th  century  BC  Athenian  painted  amphorae  from  Etruria.  Traditional  methods  used  to  analyze  the  figurative  scenes  on  Greek  painted  pottery  lack  scalability  as  well  as  the  capability  to  investigate  significant  patterns  of  representation.  This  presentation  introduces  ImagePlot,  a  piece  of  image  analysis  software  that  enhances  and  extends  the  analyses  of  Greek  painted  pottery.  ImagePlot  permits  examination  of  both  the  macro  and  the  micro  arrangements  of  pictorial  expression  by  visualizing  key  characteristics  such  as  brightness,  saturation,  hue,  shape,  object,  and  subject.  Crucially,  ImagePlot  not  only  offers  a  means  to  investigate  large  collections  of  Greek  painted  pottery,  but  also  freely  available  online  collections  such  as  this  studies’  190  examples  from  the  British  Museum  Collection  Online  and  the  Metropolitan  Museum  of  Art.  This  project  repurposes  the  data  from  several  online  repositories  to  innovatively  visualize  trends  of  color  usage  and  patterns  of  dress  representation.  By  bringing  together  online  archaeological  data  sets  it  seeks  to  answer  questions  about  the  way  that  artists  chose  to  represent  figurative  scenes,  and  the  benefits  of  computational  visual  analyses.

The popular image of the Roman military is one in which it is cast as an ordered, and in many ways ͚
modern,͛ organization. That is to say that it is often presented as a uniform entity: unmatched in regulation
and order, and supplied with identical pieces of equipment. This can be seen quite clearly in the 2000 movie
Gladiator. In it the main character, Maximus, is a general in the armies of Marcus Aurelius, fighting against
the Germans. One of the opening scenes is of the Roman battle lines: row upon row of legionaries who are
armed and equipped identically, like little toy soldiers; they wear the same lorica segmentata armour, carry
the same curved scutum, and wield exactly the same weapons. This first scene is designed to show the
Roman ͚military machine͛ in all its grandeur. It is a great example of the popular understanding of how
uniform the equipment of the Roman army was and how it prosecuted battles. The tendency to see Roman
military equipment and the Roman army in general as extremely uniform, however, is not limited to
Hollywood. Scholars and students of Roman history are just as likely to portray Roman military equipment in
the same uniform, homogeneous manner.
This tendency is, in fact, the traditional or received view of Roman military equipment. Graham
Webster, who will be discussed in more detail in the following chapter, was one of the fathers of Roman
equipment studies. In his 1969 book The Roman Imperial army of the first and second centuries A.D., he
wrote ͞[t]he equipment issued to legionaries was remarkably uniform throughout the Empire…͟ (Webster,
1969: 122). In order to account for this uniformity Webster went on to say that there must have been large
scale production centres at the heart of the Roman Empire. Peter Connolly, who followed after Webster and
will also be discussed in more depth in the next chapter, insisted upon the same equipment homogeny.
More recent scholars of Roman equipment, such as Simon James, M.C. Bishop and Jon Coulston, have
disagreed with the centralized production models set forth by Webster et al, and have put forth their own
models of localized production. As of yet they have not fully explored the repercussions on equipment
uniformity that their local production models suggest. The continued use of strict typology by these recent  authors points to the fact that they still have not decided to challenge the traditional ideas about equipment
uniformity.