American Journal of Archaeology

Few ancient Mesopotamian names live in the public memory, even fewer are of women. She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia, ca. 3400–2000 B.C. at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York, changed that. The exhibition, which was featured on many popular platforms and publications from the New York Times to Hyperallergic, celebrated Enheduanna, the first poet whose name we know, her individuality, agency, and the creative power of her words. At the same time, it highlighted the different roles of women reflected in Sumerian and Akkadian material and visual culture. Exhibits on ancient individuals and individual stories have the potential to change biased historical narratives. By reviewing the curatorial practices of the exhibit, this paper examines the role of She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia in challenging the traditional ancient western Asian canon.

Malaria has persisted in Italy since the Roman Imperial period, perhaps since as early as the second century BCE. Yet little is known regarding Romans’ everyday interactions with this historically oppressive mosquito-borne disease, knowledge of which is crucial for understanding the broader significance of malaria in Roman history. This is in part due to the limitations of current approaches for studying ancient malaria, which focus primarily on diagnosing specific incidences of infection. Drawing on landscape epidemiology and contemporary malariology, this article shifts focus toward a more holistic understanding of the multifaceted determinants of malaria and its transmission in antiquity, with particular emphasis on Roman villa estates in central Italy. It is argued that, despite the presence of malaria and the naturally high risk of transmission throughout much of the region, villa estates very likely reduced local risk of malaria transmission by utilizing a suite of agricultural practices that reduced local mosquito densities and separated susceptible hosts and malaria’s mosquito vectors. In addition to improving our understanding of the specific entanglement between Roman villa estate agriculture and malaria in central Italy, this article demonstrates the benefit of an interdisciplinary approach and the interpretive utility of archaeological evidence for ancient disease studies more broadly.

Spectacular and rare gold-glass portraits from the third century CE have long been associated with Alexandria as the place of production on the basis of inscriptions on two examples, one in Brescia and one in New York. This article reconsiders the archaeological, literary, and especially epigraphic evidence for such a connection and ultimately concludes that the grounds on which the connection rests need to be reconsidered. The inscriptions were identified almost 100 years ago as Alexandrian Greek given the terminations of words in iota, but I demonstrate the absence of such a dialect and offer an alternative onomastic reading to resolve the problem of the iota endings. I propose that the designations on the gold-glass roundels instead represent a specific kind of nickname that flourished in the later Roman Imperial period and that popularly ended in -i in Latin or -ι in Greek inscriptions. Evaluating the dissemination of the Alexandrian hypothesis over decades of scholarship, this article proposes that the desire to attribute the gold-glass portraits to Alexandria is part of a larger impulse in art history of the classical period to assign especially remarkable and luxurious works of art without provenience to ancient metropolises.

This article proposes a new method for reconstructing how bronzewares were employed in everyday acts of food preparation in first-century CE Pompeii. Through the morphologically sensitive analysis of use alterations (physical or chemical changes to the body of an object resulting from use) exhibited by bronze kitchenwares recovered from 19 properties in the town, I retrace the life histories of individual implements and offer new insights into how particular forms tended to be used. This study thus represents the first large-scale investigation of use alterations in Roman bronzewares, which rarely survive archaeologically but are amply attested in a state of exceptional preservation at the Vesuvian sites. In this article, I review the most common types of use alterations exhibited by this material, including various forms of accretion, attrition, and deformation, as well as intentional modifications (such as repairs), and consider what these tell us about the mechanics of meal-making in antiquity. Biographical sketches of two common bronze vessel forms at Pompeii, the pentola and the boiler-pitcher, offer a final illustration of the promise this sort of analysis holds for assessing the technical choices of ancient cooks, whose labor merits greater scholarly attention than it has garnered to date.