American Journal of Archaeology

Public bathing was integral to daily life in ancient Rome. Today, imperial baths loom large in reconstructions of the ancient city, where they evoke the splendor of this uniquely public and social urban tradition. Although archaeological and literary evidence reveals that baths flourished in Rome as early as the third century B.C.E., comparatively little is known about those small, dark, for-profit establishments. This paper examines the introduction of baths into Rome and the earliest bathing facilities before turning to the urban and political impact of the Thermae Agrippae (Baths of Agrippa), constructed in the late first century B.C.E. The formerly private bath complex, made public upon Agrippa’s death, marks a radical departure from previous establishments, offering expansive gardens filled with sculpture, large pools, and impressive architecture. This paper, for the first time, traces similarities in the innovative design and luxurious decoration of the Thermae Agrippae with that of the private urban estates (horti) of elites in Rome. It situates Agrippa’s bequest in an era in which the expediency of offering public access to elite private spaces was rapidly becoming evident to Rome’s most astute politicians. This nationalization of Agrippa’s former estate aligns with Augustan urban policies and explains a significant shift in architectural nomenclature: from balnea to thermae.

Egyptian pottery—like the pottery from most excavations—is often prized as a chronological indicator above all else. Pottery thus becomes reified into apparently standard corpora by period, an impression reinforced by ceramic comparison and cross-dating across sites. Using data from select contexts at one Egyptian settlement site (Elephantine Island) and one specific ceramic form (the bread mold), this article argues that such an approach oversimplifies the ceramic record, ignoring localizing tendencies, continuities between periods, and the entanglement of the material record with long-lived social structures and patterns. Elephantine bread molds show technological continuity and change that does not move in lockstep with greater political changes, thus providing a window into local systems and the value of a regional approach to ceramics.

This article bridges two fields often kept separate: the study of portrait statues and the study of the statue bases and their texts. However, the statues and their inscribed bases are complementary and necessarily must be studied together. The bases provide information about the titulature of the emperors and the dedicants. Portrait heads have been used in the creation of typologies and identification of regional variations. Too often the portrait statues of one imperial family member are studied in isolation from those of other family members and even from their original context. In this paper, I gather for the first time evidence for 11 statuary assemblages representing the Antonine family in Roman Spain. The inscribed bases and portraits are considered along with their display locations and the dedicants. I combine an investigation of visual representations with the study of imperial ideology to learn more about the life of provincial towns in Spain. Although many of these objects were uncovered without scientific excavation, patterns of dedication can, nevertheless, be assessed. This study paves the way for future inquiries into imperial portraiture in Spain and the practices of benefaction beyond dedications to the imperial family.

This article investigates how consumer demand shaped markets for high-quality domestic decoration in the Roman world and highlights how this affected the economic strategies of people involved in the production and trade of high-quality wall decoration, mosaics, and sculpture. The argument analyzes the consumption of high-quality domestic decoration at Pompeii and models the structure of demand for decorative skills in the Roman world at large. The Pompeian case study focuses on three categories of high-quality decoration: Late Hellenistic opus vermiculatum mosaics, first-century C.E. fourth-style panel pictures, and domestic sculpture. Analyzing the spread of these mosaics, paintings, and statues over a database of Pompeian houses makes it possible to reconstruct a demand profile for each category of decoration and to discuss the nature of its supply economy. It is argued that the market for high-quality decoration at Pompeii provided few incentives for professionals to acquire specialist skills and that this has broader implications: as market conditions in Pompeii and the Bay of Naples region were significantly above average, the strategic possibilities for painters, mosaicists, and sculptors in many parts of the Roman world were even more restricted and, consequently, their motivation to invest in skills and repertoire remained limited.