American Journal of Archaeology

This article explores how Etruscan artwork presented soldiers in visual media during the Middle Roman Republic (ca. 300–100 B.C.E.), a period when Etruscan communities were required to contribute contingents to the Roman army. It proposes a class-based model for how Etruscans formulated their military identities. Elite representations, in particular cavalry combat on cinerary urns, displayed elaborately hellenized soldiers rather than Roman-style combatants. Meanwhile, nonelite representations, primarily featuring infantrymen on more economically accessible votive figurines, either displayed hybrid panoply or made no attempt to differentiate the portrayed soldier from a generic Roman citizen legionary. In the realm of martial identity, Etruscan elites in visual media appeared culturally aloof from Rome as well as socially removed from common soldiers in their own communities. The article concludes by placing the corpus of Etruscan evidence in the context of more scattered evidence from across the peninsula and suggesting that the tendency of elites to eschew the Roman panoply in visual media, and of nonelites to partially or wholly embrace it, was widespread in Italy prior to the Social War.

Monumental structures clad in relief-carved stone orthostats adorned cities across the fragmented political and ethnolinguistic landscape of the Iron Age Syro-Hittite kingdoms. This building practice passed down from the Hurro-Hittite Late Bronze Age evoked a collective memory of legitimate authority and was important for the construction of royal sovereignty. Differences among individual monuments suggest how Syro-Hittite rulers may have deployed monumental construction to navigate an “eventful” history by adapting it to current political exigencies. This article reevaluates the date of orthostats found in the South Gate of Zincirli, Turkey (ancient Samʾal), applying a seriation approach to the comparison of their stylistic details and iconographic themes and motifs with sculptural groups from other sites. The conclusion that the orthostats date to the early 10th century B.C.E. and are thus older than the ninth-century refoundation of the city suggests that they were recycled from an earlier Neo-Hittite site, proposed to be nearby Pancarlı. The appropriation of architectural spolia in the South Gate and the emulation or imitation of older works in the Citadel Gate by the founders of a new regime reveal a dialectic between the embrace and rejection of traditional Hittite sources of authority.

Communal feasting has provoked much interest among scholars of Aegean prehistory. Discussions of the archaeological, archaeozoological, and textual data of the Mycenaean Palatial period have provided important insights into the role of this ritual practice as part of a sociopolitical strategy of the Mycenaean elite. In the course of these discussions, an increasing number of Linear B documents have been viewed as recording provisions of animals and mixed foodstuffs for state-organized banqueting. The interpretation of other records along similar lines, however, is a highly disputed matter. For example, some scholars view the Fn tablets from Pylos as lists of allocations of barley to the participants of religious feasts. Others, however, regard most of the tablets of this series as purely secular in character and consider them as allocations of grain to “industrial” workers. If one views the recipients listed in these records as attendants not of religious feasts but of secular work feasts (containing some religious elements), much of the contradiction disappears. In addition, this interpretation, which allows for the juxtaposition of predominantly secular features and a few religious aspects as well as for the large number of occupational designations, may also apply to texts from Mycenae and Thebes that have been the focus of much discussion.