This paper sets out to consider anew the sculptural landscape of imperial Gabii by integrating newly examined evidence with the city’s archaeological record. Long portrayed in ancient sources as a city in decline after the Middle Republic, Gabii yielded an extraordinary assemblage of more than thirty life-sized statues during the excavations of the eighteenth-century antiquary, Gavin Hamilton. A previously understudied inventory from the Borghese Archives attests additional, largely fragmentary sculptures, ranging from imperial portraits to mythological figures, that expand our understanding of the city’s civic and cultic environment. By situating the archival material within the city’s archaeological context, the civic, imperial and religious display of the city comes more sharply into view, and contributes towards a more nuanced understanding of this liminal city in the imperial period.
The Alcester Benefaction Board is an exceptionally complex and well-preserved seventeenth-century polychrome wooden monument. Conservation treatment in 2020–1 presented the opportunity to examine the material history of the Alcester Board in depth for the first time. Many previously unknown aspects, including the date of its construction, were revealed. Identification of the pigments enabled a complete digital reconstruction of both its original appearance and that of later repainting. This led to a reassessment of expectations about the materials and techniques used. The study also offered some insight into the visual sources, purpose and possible reception of the object.
Descriptions of abandoned ruins abound across the pages of travelogues created by European visitors to Ottoman Anatolia during the long nineteenth century. Yet, remnants of ancient architecture were often less devoid of inhabitation than these authors presented. Some of the most common reusers of antiquities as dwellings were nomadic and semi-nomadic communities, understudied groups in the growing subfield of research on antiquities reuse. Travelogues, with their descriptions of daily life, are vital sources to illuminate such reuse practices. This paper explores how travel authors’ over-assumption of abandonment has perpetuated in contemporary scholarship, especially when inhabitations were of nomadic or semi-nomadic natures. There are many reasons for over-assumption, including orientalism, romanticism, sedentary biases against nomadism and chronological biases against the present in favour of a glorified ‘Classical’ past. Not all causes were malicious, however. Epistemological disconnects over what it meant to ‘inhabit’ a space left authors unsure of what they were seeing. Furthermore, the way they travelled often lacked repeated visits and generally fell in the wintery half of the year, making it more difficult to recognise seasonal inhabitations. This paper proposes methodologies for circumnavigating over-assumptions of abandonment in travelogues. It demonstrates how one can trace nomadic and semi-nomadic inhabitation, even that left unnoticed by the travel authors, through graveyards and changes in vegetation growth eaten by the inhabitants’ flocks. There is great potential for moving beyond abandonment as default assumption to re-evaluate longue durée histories of ancient Anatolian architecture and its afterlives, and, as this is a largely methodological intervention, implications extend beyond this region.
