American Journal of Archaeology

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston holds the finest collections of antiquities from ancient Nubia outside Egypt and Sudan, but the museum has only rarely displayed this material since its excavation by George Reisner in the early 20th century. The exhibition “Ancient Nubia Now” (2019–2020) was a visually spectacular display that was in one sense a fairly traditional introduction to the history and visual cultures of Nubia. The survey began with the kingdom of Kerma (2400–1500 BCE), extended through the Egyptian occupation of the New Kingdom (1550–1070 BCE), and into the Napatan and Meroitic periods of the empire of Kush (750 BCE–364 CE). The exhibition was also innovative, however, in its inclusion of a range of community voices and mild criticism of the museum itself. Noncuratorial voices included members of the Nubian diaspora and African-American scholars. The museum’s self-criticism acknowledged the colonial history of the collection itself, Reisner’s history of racist interpretations of the archaeological record, and the museum’s responsibilities as stewards of the collection. This review walks readers through the exhibit in its multiple voices and highlights as well some of the absences in its presentation.

At Gerace near Enna in Sicily, excavation on a Roman villa-estate has revealed a freestanding bath house erected ca. 380 CE. It may never have been completed; one of three pools in its cold room was never installed, and the room’s wall decoration was left unfinished. An unusual feature is the use of pisé (rammed earth) construction in one internal wall as insulation material. The baths were in use until an earthquake struck between 450 and 500 CE. A short-lived repair program was followed by systematic stripping of reusable material; mosaics were smashed in heated rooms to retrieve bricks, and marble panels were removed from walls. By contrast, the cold room’s mosaic was intact. It carries an inscription around all four sides of the room that gives us the estate name, the praedia Philippianorum (the estate of the Philippiani), and refers also to Asclepiades and Capitolini. All three appear again in the center of the floor as monograms, a rare occurrence of such use in the provinces. The text of the inscription is discussed, and alternative interpretations of what it might mean are offered. Tile-stamp designs featuring horses and considerable quantities of equid bones suggest there was a stud farm on the estate.

This article presents the results of the first excavations at the site of ancient Eleon in eastern Boeotia, Greece. Fieldwork focused on the elevated limestone ridge on the western edge of the village of Arma about 14 km east of Thebes. The chronological framework of the excavated remains includes pottery dating from Early Helladic II through early Middle Helladic found in secondary contexts and not associated with any architectural remains. Funerary activity began during the Middle Helladic period, reaching a peak both in terms of the number of graves and monumentality in Late Helladic I. An impressive burial complex, the Blue Stone Structure, is contemporary with other cemeteries of the Shaft Grave period in southern and central Greece. During the Mycenaean Palatial period, contemporary with references to the toponym e-re-o-ni (Eleon) in Linear B tablets found at Thebes, activity on the site included significant craft production. Occupation continued directly into Postpalatial periods (Late Helladic IIIC Early and Middle), through several phases of building, destruction, and reconstruction. By the sixth century BCE, the construction of the large polygonal wall along the eastern edge of the plateau and an array of ceramics and figurines, of local, Corinthian, and Attic origins in secondary deposition, indicate renewed occupation.

In recent years, scholars have become increasingly skeptical of the idea that there is any relationship between the capacities of entertainment structures such as theaters and amphitheaters and the populations of Graeco-Roman cities. In this article, we begin by offering a model of information percolation in cities grounded in settlement scaling theory. We then show that there is a systematic relationship between the capacities of both theaters and amphitheaters and the populations of cities in the Roman empire, but this relationship is far from linear, indicating that a decreasing fraction of the population attended events in entertainment structures. In addition, although there is a great deal of variation in the extent to which sites conform to the underlying relationships, there is a relationship between the sizes of these deviations and the overall standing of sites as reflected in their civic statuses. Collecting similar measures for other relationships might be a useful way of characterizing sites and indicates a fruitful avenue for future research.