American Journal of Archaeology

In 2021, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) unveiled five newly revitalized galleries for nearly 550 objects from their renowned collection of Greek and Roman art. The new installations include one featuring Graeco-Roman gods and goddesses and others devoted to Early Greek art, Roman portraiture, the Byzantine Empire, and a gallery for rotating exhibits exploring how 20th- and 21st-century artists have interacted with the art of the ancient Mediterranean. The curatorial team is to be congratulated for maintaining the thought-provoking juxtaposition of objects in a variety of media and from different chronological periods and geographies, as well as augmenting these with state-of-the-art digital installations that enhance viewer experience. Given the importance of provenance in contemporary discussions of ancient objects, though, it seems that the MFA has missed an opportunity here to take the lead in revealing to the public how their amazing collection came to be.

In recent decades, studies of Roman domestic space have proliferated. The result is a rich but impenetrable picture, with scholars often favoring the use of ancient sources on one hand and finds from excavated houses or material remains on the other. Studies have emphasized how light can be approached to investigate space and its social meaning. At the same time, in the field of digital technologies applied to archaeological investigation, light simulation and analysis have proven to be advantageous tools. Based on the concept of light as a powerful social agent, this study presents new insights into social and spatial behavior in the Roman house through simulation of natural and artificial light on a digital 3D reconstruction of the House of the Greek Epigrams (V.1.18) in Pompeii.

The small, second-century BCE temple of Herakles at Kleonai has long been a landmark in the southern Corinthia, visited by early travelers in Greece and thoroughly studied and published. Less attention, however, has been paid to the in situ fragmentary colossal cult statue of Herakles, and questions concerning its date, artist, and sculptural “type” remain unresolved. The fragmentary nature, colossal scale, and significant context of the fragment have made these interrelated issues difficult to study using traditional means of documentation. This article presents a novel reexamination of the cult statue in its architectural and archaeological contexts, employing methods drawn from both traditional sculptural study and recent innovations in digital object documentation. In September 2020, the authors undertook a complete restudy of the Kleonai torso, collecting detailed measurements and photographs. This data set was used to create a scaled 3D photogrammetric model that illuminates previously undocumented traces of facture and offers new evidence for the display context of the complete statue. These results resituate this fragmentary sculpture as one of the most notable examples of a Hellenistic sculptural type, the Herakles Epitrapezios, popular across the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean.

This article presents a new evaluation of alabaster figurines wearing crescent crowns, identified as the syncretized deity Ishtar-Aphrodite, from the Seleucid-Parthian period in Babylonia (ca. second century BCE–first century CE). Unlike previous studies, this article recontextualizes the alabaster goddesses as the most opulent and explicitly divine versions of two popular types in the broader, flourishing figurine tradition of Hellenistic Babylonia. Miniaturization theory, which elucidates the sensory and perceptual effects of small-scale objects, forms the methodological basis of this analysis, in dialogue with archaeological data and textual sources from Mesopotamia and the wider Hellenistic world. Using this approach, I argue that these figurines were open to identification as both goddesses and mortals so that a girl or woman could use them to construct her own sexual agency and facilitate her journey to the afterlife, even as she invoked the goddess’ assistance with both. The few unambiguous goddess figurines were depicted with crescent crowns to link their elite owners to the Babylonian temples and their prestigious astrological knowledge. This article makes the contribution of articulating the significant intertwining of Greek and Babylonian cultural values and religious beliefs that shaped these figurines, which were hybrid in more than just style.

This article considers evidence for the form and materials used in monumental Phrygian architecture in Central Anatolia during the Middle Iron Age (eighth–sixth centuries BCE) to argue for a later (sixth-century BCE) date for the Midas Monument. Examination of this monument and other rock-cut architectural facades in the Phrygian Highlands leads to the conclusion that all of the monumental facades in the Phrygian Highlands represent buildings with low, double-pitched, tiled roofs and architectural terracotta revetment tiles that should be dated to the first half of the sixth century. This conclusion has significant implications for the history of Midas City itself and the nature of Lydian rule in Central Anatolia.