American Journal of Archaeology

A Roman bust in the Knole collection (Kent, United Kingdom) was sold by Thomas Jenkins to John Frederick Sackville, Third Duke of Dorset, in Rome in 1771. Researchers who studied the bust since the end of the 19th century were unanimous in their opinion: it was a modern sculpture. However, the present study is able to refute that hypothesis, demonstrating that the bust was sculpted in a workshop in Rome in the second quarter of the third century CE. The vitis (centurion’s staff) and the dagger at the figure’s left side indicate that it represents a Roman centurion.

New evidence for color decoration on garments calls into question previously held assumptions about the nature of local dress styles in Roman Gaul. So-called Gallic dress, consisting of a sleeved, unbelted tunic for both men and women, accompanied by a hooded cape for men and a rectangular mantle for women, was especially popular in the northwestern provinces from the late first to the late third century CE. Most recent research on the subject has seen it as entirely local in origin and the result of the development of a Gallic/northwestern regional identity. However, recently published evidence, including a detailed study of paint remains on a corpus of funerary reliefs in eastern Gaul, a reconstructed second tunic from the textile find site at Les Martres-de-Veyre (France), and wall painting fragments from Maasbracht (Netherlands) have revealed that the sleeved Gallic tunics could in fact be decorated with two vertical parallel bands, clavi—a typically Roman tunic decoration. As a result, it is necessary to reevaluate our understanding of how Gallic dress developed, what it signified, and ultimately the extent to which we can reconstruct local dress styles in the Roman provinces when so little of the original paintwork on stone monuments survives.

An extended area of quarrying activity has been located at Xobourgo, on the Greek island of Tenos, where extraction continued for millennia to the north of the ancient settlement. The quarrying was centered on the protuberance of Xobourgo, a leucogranite outcrop that lies to the southwest of a larger granodiorite zone. The joint study of the material’s properties, the quarry’s layout, the extraction traces, and the use of leucogranite in constructions at Xobourgo shows that the quarrying activity was related to local building projects, especially fortifications. These are dated to the period that spans from the Early Iron Age (11th–10th century BCE) to the end of the Classical period (end of the fourth century BCE), as well as to the era of Venetian rule (1204–1715 CE). Extraction techniques differed through time depending on available tools, traditions, and the type of masonry. The leucogranite was exploited for its endurance, workability, and aesthetic value. Extraction so close to the adjacent settlement was also advantageous due to low transport costs. High levels of stoneworking skill, in line with the scale of constructions undertaken at the site, are diachronically attested.

Recent excavations and research projects are bringing Crete to the center of debates about state formation in ancient Greece. Civic feasting in the Archaic period, correlating in epigraphic terms to the andreion institution known on Crete, has emerged with greater clarity in the archaeological record. These feasts took place in the public mess halls where food and drink were served to citizens. Feasting buildings at Azoria help establish criteria for distinguishing andreion-style feasts from other forms as a more regular and inclusive practice emerging at the end of the seventh century BCE. Ceramic assemblages also provide clues to the defining characteristics of such feasting, with the standardization in the cup line best expressing a communalistic ideology. The frequency of the high-necked cup in addition to volumetric studies presented here point to a standard Cretan cup, implying uniform practices. In a broader sense, the cups themselves and their austere style contributed to a new ideology and defined citizenship in performative terms, the social glue underpinning the early Cretan polis.

This article presents evidence for a new reconstruction of the presentation scene portrayed on the Late Bronze Age ivory pyxis excavated at Mochlos. Previously undetected locks of hair, anatomical parts, dress, and attributes facilitate a recreation of the figures. It argues against Soles’ assertion that the goddess holds a lily to crown the shorter male as king and that the leading male is a hero or god based on imagery on the Ur III cylinder of Gudea. It finds instead that the goddess holds an olive branch, and the composition echoes the iconography in Old Syrian paintings and glyptic, including on one seal that was actually found at Mochlos. Supported by iconographic and textual evidence, this study proposes that the ritual, adopted and adapted from the Near East, depicts a Minoan ruler offering a vessel to the goddess for her blessing over the couple, possibly marking a dynastic marriage, and that the pyxis and jewelry found within it were bridal gifts.

Suburbs and other zones of urban sprawl are not recent phenomena; they are as old as cities themselves. However, archaeological investigation of them has been relatively scarce, biasing reconstructions of the scale and diversity of early urban populations, industries, and economies, as well as reconstructions of ancient cities’ size and form. Here, we use aerial and satellite imagery in combination with ground survey to identify and characterize the extramural areas of one of the world’s earliest cities, Ur (Tell al-Muqayyar), in southern Iraq. The results suggest the need for some revisions of earlier impressionistic ideas about the extent, location, and dates of Ur’s suburbs. The distributions of ceramics of periods spanning the fifth to first millennium BCE suggest that Ur may have been founded in the fifth to fourth millennium BCE as a pair of spatially separate settlements that grew at different rates, only one of which developed into the city’s highly mounded core; that more distant suburbs formed by the third millennium BCE; and that intensity of occupation of various extramural zones covering hundreds of hectares shifted throughout the third to first millennium BCE. Overall, the data challenge characterizations of Ur as more compact and spatially continuous than other early Mesopotamian cities.