Books by Sophie Crawford-Brown
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Papers by Sophie Crawford-Brown
American Journal of Archaeology 128.1, 2024
The recent exhibition at the San Antonio Museum of Art, Roman Landscapes: Visions of Nature and M... more The recent exhibition at the San Antonio Museum of Art, Roman Landscapes: Visions of Nature and Myth from Rome and Pompeii, brought together a range of works produced between roughly 100 BCE and 200 CE and found in the areas of Rome and the Bay of Naples. This beautifully curated exhibit, as well as the accompanying catalogue, scrutinized and problematized categories like the bucolic, the real versus the mythic, and the meaning of “landscape” itself. It took a deliberately expansive approach to the latter by featuring images diverse in their subject, style, medium, and context, constituting the first instance in which these objects were grouped together in a museum space as part of a broader generic category. With its progression from tranquil scenes of country life, to the dangerous landscapes of myth, to the imagery of tombs and of death itself, the exhibition offered visitors much to reflect on regarding the ways in which humans invent, interact with, harm, and are harmed by the natural environment. Its strong ecocritical framing made this exhibition particularly relevant for current scholarly directions in the field of Roman art, while at the same time centering and historicizing a vital contemporary anxiety.
(Full review available here: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/728419)
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Journal of Roman Archaeology, 35, 2022
The Augustan marble “revolution” marked more than the substitution of one building material for a... more The Augustan marble “revolution” marked more than the substitution of one building material for another. It changed Rome’s color, texture, and light, and visually redefined its sacred architecture. For centuries, temples in and around Rome had been decorated with brightly painted architectural terracottas, which typically featured a swirling array of plants and flowers. Terracotta was the material of sacred tradition, and the vegetal motifs employed on temples evoked a pious Italic past. The lush array of plant life present in Augustan art has not been adequately considered against this background. This paper explores the use of traditional plant motifs in Augustan art and architecture, with an emphasis on viewer response. It considers the so-called Campana reliefs before turning to a more detailed analysis of the Ara Pacis’s vegetal panels. These, I argue, consciously evoked ancient temple decoration and drew it into the new visual language of the Augustan Principate.
(Full article available here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-roman-archaeology/article/down-from-the-roof-reframing-plants-in-augustan-art/9BCDCA3B278BBA3A673D378DB80980E1/share/f492c13d4a784b7e5090c24e6e58e6b93314ab88)
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American Journal of Archaeology
https://www.ajaonline.org/book-review/4275
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Cosa and the Colonial Landscape of Republican Italy (Third and Second Centuries BCE) , 2019
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Deliciae Fictiles V: Networks and Workshops, Fifth International Conference on Architectural Terracottas and Decorative Roof Systems in Italy, 2019
Situated on the modern border between Lazio and Campania, the site of Minturnae has long occupied... more Situated on the modern border between Lazio and Campania, the site of Minturnae has long occupied a liminal position in studies of architectural terracottas. On the one hand, terracottas from Minturnae’s Marica sanctuary offer important evidence for the development of Campanian roofing systems in the 6th century BCE. Minturnae’s archaic terracottas reveal a close connection to Capua, and are strongly indebted to architectural terracotta techniques and styles originating in the Greek world and popular in pre-Roman Campania. On the other hand, the architectural terracottas from the colony of Minturnae have often been compared with Italic examples to the north, particularly from sites like Cosa, Gabii, Falerii, and even Luna. A number of terracottas from Minturnae, however, are virtually unknown outside of the immediate region, appearing only at nearby sites like Teanum Sidicinum, Aquinum, and Fregellae. The rarity of these terracottas, and the geographic specificity of their distribution, render them ideal for tracking the movement of artisans and ideas within the region.
This paper uses the site of Minturnae as a starting-point to trace artisan connections in the local region from the Archaic period to the Late Republic. I argue that Roman conquest did not fundamentally destroy such relationships, but simply added new sites to a pre-existing network. Minturnae played a vital role within this network, and appears to have acted as something of a melting-pot, a place in which styles and traditions from a variety of sites interacted to create a distinctly Minturnese visual landscape.
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Orizzonti 16, 2015
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Etruscan News. Sezione Americana dell’Istituto di Studi Etruschi ed Italici. Issue n. 12, 2010
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Conference Presentations by Sophie Crawford-Brown
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In 2014, Cosa Excavations began its second excavation season working towards examining a small, p... more In 2014, Cosa Excavations began its second excavation season working towards examining a small, public bath complex near to the Cosa's famous forum. Through digital applications, our goal is to make the site of Cosa, not only our excavations on the bath complex, as accessible as possible to the public both in Italy and abroad. (Co-authored with Matthew Brennan (Indiana University), Sophie Crawford-Brown (University of Pennsylvania) and Ann Glennie (FSU))
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Books by Sophie Crawford-Brown
Papers by Sophie Crawford-Brown
(Full review available here: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/728419)
(Full article available here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-roman-archaeology/article/down-from-the-roof-reframing-plants-in-augustan-art/9BCDCA3B278BBA3A673D378DB80980E1/share/f492c13d4a784b7e5090c24e6e58e6b93314ab88)
This paper uses the site of Minturnae as a starting-point to trace artisan connections in the local region from the Archaic period to the Late Republic. I argue that Roman conquest did not fundamentally destroy such relationships, but simply added new sites to a pre-existing network. Minturnae played a vital role within this network, and appears to have acted as something of a melting-pot, a place in which styles and traditions from a variety of sites interacted to create a distinctly Minturnese visual landscape.
Conference Presentations by Sophie Crawford-Brown
(Full review available here: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/728419)
(Full article available here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-roman-archaeology/article/down-from-the-roof-reframing-plants-in-augustan-art/9BCDCA3B278BBA3A673D378DB80980E1/share/f492c13d4a784b7e5090c24e6e58e6b93314ab88)
This paper uses the site of Minturnae as a starting-point to trace artisan connections in the local region from the Archaic period to the Late Republic. I argue that Roman conquest did not fundamentally destroy such relationships, but simply added new sites to a pre-existing network. Minturnae played a vital role within this network, and appears to have acted as something of a melting-pot, a place in which styles and traditions from a variety of sites interacted to create a distinctly Minturnese visual landscape.