Research Note: Dining and Numismatic Imagery during the Roman Empire (Version 1)

This post is offered as in-process research note. Nothing about it is complete, neither the evidence it collects, nor the citations to secondary scholarship that it makes, nor the conclusions that it reaches. It is also an unfinished translation of existing text and scanned images from desktop editing tools into a blog post. The planned venue for publication of the finished version is volume 1.2 of the new journal Past Discussed Quarterly (PDQ). I am making this very early draft available now so as to encourage "community review" prior to submission and, I hope, eventual acceptance. I therefore welcome comments and look forward to incorporating those into later versions of this note.

[A note on process: Some of the editing of the first version of this text happened directly within the Blogger interface. I'm sure this has introduced various typos and other misfortunes. My plan is to hit the "Publish" button and then copy-edit in-place. When I make major changes to content, I will publish those as a whole new post. This is all an experiment so bear with me.]

The following paragraphs provide a preliminary survey of the use of numismatic imagery in the decoration of objects related to dining during the Roman empire. Such use includes the actual incorporation of coins into the material culture of dining and also the copying of numismatic imagery into different media. In form, this note is essentially a list of objects that are examples of such incorporation and reuse.

Dining is defined very broadly and the objects listed below may well have been used in religious activities as opposed to daily meals. There is no need, however, to draw a very strong line between religion and daily life so that the objects collected below do all bear upon the issue of dining when the group is taken as whole. The importance of empire extends beyond merely the definition of the chronological bounds of the study, which at the current time focusses on the second and third centuries. Roman imperial coins, as well as most provincial issues, usually bore images of the current emperor and/or his family so that they are inherently "imperial" objects. Coins also have reverses whose legends and imagery can be understood to communicate themes of imperial propaganda, though the efficacy of this communication is a hotly debated topic in the field of ancient numismatics. Accordingly, when possible the list below will make clear which image, imperial portrait or reverse message, is displayed or reproduced. Doing so can make a small contribution to the problem of the extent to which numismatic imagery was actively examined and responded to by ancient viewers. Preliminary conclusions along these lines are made during the course of presenting the relevant objects.

Italian and Gaulish Sigillata Vessels
An article by Marabini Moevs (AJA 84 [1980]:322) makes reference in its text and notes to Italian and Gaulish Sigillata vessels whose decoration includes direct copies of coins. These are made by pressing the face of a coin into the molds in which such vessels were produced.

Partial list:

1. An Arretine Krater with impressed coin of Augustus repeated 8 times. The legend "AVGVSTVS CAESAR" is legible. (ArchCl 7 [1955]).
2. Impressions of a coin of a "Julio-Claudian prince" appear on a Southern Gallic bowl.(Knorr 1919:87)
3. A single sherd of a late Italian Sigillata bowl partially preserves an obverse portrait of the empress Sabina (Marabini Moeves 1984)
4. Arretine or Gallic bowl with impression of a coin with eagle. (ArchCl 7 [1955])

Even in the absence of a complete list of published pieces, it should be stressed that the direct reproduction of numismatic imagery on sigillata vessels is a sporadic phenomenon. Nonetheless, when such reproduction does occur it certainly illustrates an avenue for the incorporation of the imperial image into the visual setting of the meals at which such vessels were used.

Appliqué Medallion's on Claire-B Vessels from the southern Rhone valley
Claire-B is the name given to a well-slipped tableware manufactured in the Rhone valley around Lyon and further south. Table jugs with appliqué medallions are a regular part of this series and were meant for pouring wine and other beverages. Though they are larger than coins, the circular shape of these medallions means that they share some of the formal constraints and appearance of numismatic imagery. The following example drawn from Déchelette's 1904 survey of decorated vases from Gaul has obvious similarities with both coin and medallion reverses also showing scenes of imperial interaction with an assembled populace.

A medallion celebrating the defeat of Armenia shows a personification similar to those appearing on Antonine coinage:


It is probably not useful to say that either the ceramic or numismatic version of this image is the "original" that influenced the copy. Rather, they are both small-scale versions of visual motifs that appeared in larger media. To put this another way, provincial reproduction of imperial propaganda does not prove that numismatic reverses were the route by which such propaganda reached the provinces. It does suggest that coins existed in a milieu of images and that the numismatic versions may not have been ignored. Indeed, motifs that appear on coins were actually brought into people's homes in the form of ceramic vessels. This domestic acceptance of imperial imagery is a reminder of Greg Woolf's observation that the material correlates of "Romanization" are often the work of provincial craft industries. The combination of coin and vessel indicates that there was frequent interaction between imperial and provincial agency during the reception of images.

A bronze vessel now in Boston (mfa.org:63.2644)
In 1963, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston acquired a bronze vessel from the well-known numismatic collector H. von Aulock, with the purchase being made in Istanbul and the object being understood to have come from western Asia Minor. In form it is a deep pot with rounded-walls and a flat handle extending from the rim. In these aspects it is unremarkable. More distinctive are the five coins attached to the exterior surface, with all showing their reverse side. As listed on the MFA's website, the coins are:

1. Cyzicus. Dionysos seated on pantheress, holding thyrsos. (Commodus)
2. Hierocaesarea. Artemis with a quiver or bowcase on shoulder facing Apollo (?) with lyre and cloak. (Commodus)
3. Hierocaesarea. Artemis standing to right discharging arrow. Stag running at left, beside her. (Marcus Aurelius)
4. Smyrna. Bull standing right. (Antinous)
5. Smyrna. Bull standing right. (Antinous)

[These coins are sufficiently well-known and distinct so that the chronology can be inferred.]
In addition to these pieces, two coins were purchased later but are believed to have been attached to the vessel as well:

1. Troy. Marcus Aurelius/Aeneas right bearing on left arm Anchises and looking left at Ascanius
2. Koinon of Bithynia. Hadrian/Distyle temple with star in pediment; Hadrian stands between Bithynia and Roma, who crowns him.

Assuming that the two detached coins are part of the original ensemble and also had their reverses visible, this collected group of images contains an eclectic mix of local gods and sacred animals, along side a hint of Roman sympathy/loyalty in the form of a reference to Aeneas and to the image of the emperor accompanied by Roma and a loyal province. In this provincial context, it is the reverse images that are chosen to achieve the transformation of this vessel from functional object into a bearer of meaning.

The Rennes Patera

Now in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Rennes Patera was discovered in that French city in 1774 along with 43 aureii, the latest of which was issued during the reign of Aurelian (d. 275). The object is a shallow, gold plate, 1.315 kilos in weight - or aproximately 4 Roman pounds - with a central medallion showing a drunken Hercules standing next to a seated Bacchus, the two being engaged in a contest that pits strength against wine. The latter prevails, as shown by the surrounding motif of Bacchus' triumphal march, in which the victor rides in panther-drawn chariot, with the loser languishing bareback a few ranks behind him. While there is perhaps some humor to be found in this arrangement of images - though this much gold makes the joke expensive - there is also an explicit imperial context. The outermost band of decoration consists of 16 aureii depicting emperors ranging from Hadrian to Septimius Severus, alternated with junior and female members of the imperial families, including Severus' sons Caracalla and Geta as Caesars. In all cases the obverse is showing, though descriptions of both sides of each coin can be given following their removal and resetting, notes on which were published in 1858. The list of coins (Obverse/Reverse), starting from the top as indicated by the orientation of the central medallion and moving clock-wise, is:

1. Hadrian/Hispania Reclining/HISPANIA
2. Caracalla/Geta r.
3. Marcus Aurelius/Victory advancing
4. Faustina, Jr./Laetitia stg.,LAETITIA
5. Antoninus Pius/Liberalitas stg.
6. Geta/Severus btw. std. sons.
7. Commodus/Liberty, LIBERT
8. Diva Faustina/Ceres stg.
9. Septimius Severus/Caracalla and Geta,AETERNIT IMPERI
10. Caracalla/Severus and Julia Domna, CONCORDIAE AETERNAE
11. Antoninus Pius/Jupiter std.
12. Diva Faustina/Ceres
13. Antoninus Pius/Liberalitas stg.
14. Commodus/Hilaritas, HILARITAS
15. Septimius Severus/Julia Domna btw. Caracalla and Geta
16. Julia Domna/Laetitia stg., LAETITIA

(Based on Chabouillet1858]:360-363)

Although the accompanying hoard dates the deposition of this object to the reign of Aurelian or later, it is presumably Severan in composition. The combination of this date with the objects Bacchic/Dionysiac, Herculean and Imperial associations makes several categories of evidence useful as context for understanding this object. The first category is epigraphic and relies on the overlap between Severus' manufactured ancestry as implied by the patera and as advertised in public inscriptions. Taking just one example, CIL VIII.9317, from Caesaria in Mauretania, begins with the following dedication:

To Imperator Caesar, son of the divine Marcus Antoninus Pius Sarmaticus Germanicus, brother of the divine Commodus, grandson of the divine Antoninus Pius, great-grandson of the divine Hadrian, descendant of the divine Trajan Parthicus, descendant of the divine Nerva, Lucius Septimius Severus Pius Pertinax Augustus…

While the patera does not stretch back so far as Nerva, the emperors Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius and Commodus do appear. This suggests considerable awareness of, and sensitivity to, Severan dynastic concerns on the part of the designer/patron of this object. That Pertinax is not represented among the depicted emperors is not a surprise given Septimius' emphasis of his manufactured Antonine descent. [On a practical note, the gold of Pertinax may not have so readily available.] The alternated family portraits, culminating to some extent in the then current heirs Caracalla and Geta, only add to the dynastic context.

Further Severan links are found in the Bacchic and Herculean imagery. Both gods are depicted on the reverse of a coin of Severus issued in 194 (RIC IV.25).

Courtesy of CNG Coins, via Wildwinds

The pairing of Bacchus and Hercules is also found in the Basilica at Severus' hometown of Leptis Magna. Here the pilasters to the left and right of the apse are decorated with scenes from the lives of each divinity. (flicker, flickr [both with cc licenses]).

The coin is an official issue and the architectural sculpture is part of an imperially sponsored program of public display. Both Bacchus and Hercules were popular gods at this time as well (ANRW II.17.2:684-702; LIMC V:158) so that the motif of their contest also appears in private domestic contexts. It is found in the second-century mosaic decoration of the so-called Atrium House at Antioch (Illustrated at Ling 1998: fig. 33) and in an early third-century version from nearby Seleucia (Ling 1998:fig. 36).

These comparanda, not all of which would have been known to any single ancient viewer, reveal the Rennes Patera to be an extremely sophisticated object. It brings together a set of ideas that were current at the highest levels of both society and government. It belongs in this study because numismatic imagery is an essential component of the "program" of its visual composition, which highlights the role of coins in providing imperial portraits that could be re-used in non-commercial contexts. Of course, one cannot say that the patera was used during dining. It is plausibly a ritual object - perhaps a part of the imperial cult - and almost certainly used during extra-ordinary circumstances, and not during the repetitive occurrence of everyday meals. Nonetheless, authors such as Athenaeus create a place for Bacchus, Hercules and the Emperor at the Roman meal so that the Rennes Patera may give a window into the thoughts of drunk and loyal Roman aristocrats as they conversed merrily with each other during evening gatherings.

A final note is necessary when discussing this object. There are rumors that the patera is an 18th century fake; but without having found such an opinion in writing, I find this unlikely.

Jewelry
It was noted above that the Rennes Patera need not have been used in the setting of a meal. The same can be said of jewelry which incorporates coins. Bruhn's study of coins and costume is an excellent introduction to the topic (8-16,30-32). Her fig. 6, showing a necklace (metmuseum.org:36.9.1) with aurei of Lucius Verus, Julia Domna and Alexander Severus in pendant settings, is a good example of the prevalence of such pieces in the third century. Bruhn (32) also cites a 2nd century Egyptian funerary portrait, now in Detroit (dia.org:25.2). Zooming in on the deceased's necklace shows that the pendant holds a coin. It may also be reasonable to suggest that the obverse is showing.

A Late Antique Coda
The focus of this note is the pagan empire. A late Roman silver plate in Munich in which the central medallion copies a quinquennalia issue of Licinius II is relevant (cf. Leader-Newby 2004:20). A later example of a similar phenomenon is a silver plate, now last, incorporating a gold solidus of Theodosius II.

(After Barrate 1993:fig. 20)
Finally, I note an ARS lamp type (cf. Hayes 1980:313) which has the alternated impressions of the obverse and reverse of a gold coin (tremisses?) of Theodosius II impressed on its shoulder.

(After le Blant 1886:plate ii, for additional examples see Bejaui 1997:283)

At a time when the emperor stressed the religious unity of the state, it is fitting that these lamps' manufacturer would choose to show both the obverse and reverse of an imperial coin.

Appendix on Primary Texts
[Needs more passages and to be integrated into main text]

With the objects described above in mind, it is appropriate to consider some of the textual evidence for Roman attitudes towards coins. Suetonius relates that Augustus gave foreign coins as gifts during the Saturnalia.(Aug. 73) Philostratus in his early third century life of Apollonius of Tyana relates a story set during the reign of Tiberius, in which a slave-owner was convicted of impiety because the slave he struck was carrying a coin with the image of the emperor on it. Cassius Dio, also writing in the early third century, refers to coinage on numerous occasions. He relates that "...Brutus stamped upon the coins which were being minted his own likeness and a cap and two daggers, indicating by this and by the inscription that he and Cassius had liberated the fatherland." (LXVII.25) He also writes of a young equestrian was sentenced to death for taking a coin into a brothel and that a senator was similarly punished for wearing a coin of Augustus set in a necklace when he went to the toilet. Finally, he relates that under Elagabalus a certain “Valerianus Paetus was executed because he had because he had stamped some likenesses of himself and plated them with gold to serve as ornaments for his mistresses.”(LXXIX.4) This was seen as a precursor to rebellion. Although hardly unanimous, these and similar passages tend to confirm that it was the imperial likeness on coins that often drew the particular attention.

Various Items

• The Antikythera Survey Project (ASP) has a nice website. The results page has links to brief overviews of Prehistoric , Classical-Roman, and Medieval-Recent Pottery. These pages are available in Greek as well. The Downloads page provides access to a selection of field-data and imagery.
• On a related note, the ASP page on Classical-Roman Pottery links to a PDF of Acta Terrae Septemcastrensis V.1 (2006). Speaking of 'rare publications', Worldcat lists one institution that subscribes to this series, though there may be cataloging issues hiding other holdings. But this one volume can't be rare if it's online, right? Download it for the many contributions that include ceramic evidence. For example, the ASP article on page 223 by Nikoleta Pyrrou illustrates a stamped Phokaian Red-Slip (LRC) sherd and some hard to make out Late Roman Amphora 2.
• I've poked about Search Pigeon, a Google Custom Search tool for open-access journals. Searching for 'roman pottery' led me to Hrčak: Portal of scientific journals of Croatia, on which I found Kristina Jelinčić's Roman Pottery from Ilok, and to Marwan Abu Khalaf, Ibrahim Abu A‘mar, Salah Al-Houdalieh, and Robert Hoyland's The Byzantine and Early Islamic settlement of Khirbat Shuwayka. The latter has nice color images of late roman pottery.
• The UPenn library now lists Babesch - Bulletin Antieke Beschaving in its digital holdings. Among other titles, I downloaded D. Malfitana, J. Poblome and J. Lund, Eastern Sigillata A in Italy: a socio-economic evaluation, vol. 80 (2005) and D. Steures' Late Roman Thirst: how dark coloured drinking sets from Trier were used, vol. 77 (2002). I am glad to now have both in my collection of digital offprints.

Fathi Bejaoui, Ceramique et Religion Chretienne

Current Epigraphy runs a series of posts on rare publications. Here's one in ceramics:

Bejaoui, F. (1997) Céramique et Religion Chrétienne: les thèmes bibliques sur la sigillée africaine, Tunis. (worldcat)

According to Worldcat, it is held by five American and two European institutions.

By way of reaction, the sometimes poor black-and-white images don't detract from this being a useful collection of interesting iconography.

Various Items

• The list of watchable video episodes at Emerging Cypriot, from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project, continues to grow. The second and third shorts have a lot of ceramic content and are well-worth downloading. The whole idea is great but I have a critique of the presentation. When you go to the site, the titles of the not yet released episodes are shown but you have to mouse-over thumbnail images representing the available ones to see what you're going to get. This is odd and may prioritize the visual effect triggered by the mouse-over rather than the experience of a user trying to find a particular episode. When they are all released, it will be hard to find any one title.
• The PDF of F. de Callataÿ and H. Gitler's The Coin of Coins
illustrates a nice overlap between ceramic and numismatic imagery on page 38.
• Gabriel Bijovsky's article A Byzantine Gold Hoard from Bet She'an from the American Numismatic Society Magazine has images of sixth to seventh century ceramics as well. The full publication of the hoard is in Revue Numismatique 158 (2002).

PRAP and Geography Markup Language (GML)

I have begun moving PRAP's GIS data from ESRI shapefiles into Geography Markup Language (GML) and have included the resulting files in the pre-release version of the PRAP Digital Archive.

The initial conversion was easy. I used the macports.org site to install the GDAL libraries, which include tools for working with vector data. Converting the shapefile that represents the tracts PRAP walked required only executing the command 'ogr2ogr -f "GML" tracts.gml tracts.shp'. This produced an xml file in gml format that required just a little cleaning to be on its way to something that I'll be comfortable archiving. Here's an example of how the outlines of a tract are currently represented in that file:

<gml:featureMember gml:id="prap:collectionunit:K94-001">
  <gml:geometryProperty>
    <gml:Polygon>
      <gml:outerBoundaryIs>
        <gml:LinearRing>
          <gml:coordinates>15200.344657999999981,28729.004949499998474 15213.297062499999811,28831.356068500001129 15221.920192999999927,28827.91327050000109 15228.021194499999183,28823.439226499998767 15222.873737500000061,28762.960040000001754 15268.410846500000844,28761.380233500000031 15266.11084800000026,28728.121744000000035 15200.344657999999981,28729.004949499998474</gml:coordinates>
        </gml:LinearRing>
      </gml:outerBoundaryIs>
    </gml:Polygon>
  </gml:geometryProperty>
</gml:featureMember>

Sure, GML is verbose but that's not a problem since I'm delivering the archive as a compressed tar ball. An actual problem is that the PRAP data is not currently georeferenced so that the co-ords you see above represent an arbitrary grid the project established for its study area. Converting this grid to UTM is doable and is "on my list".

After a few more conversions, the files "tracts.gml", "coast.gml", and "surveyed.gml" can be found in the "spatial/gml" directory of the archive. I have displayed all of these in the open source mapping application QGis so that I know they're passable GML, if not fully compliant with the latest version of the standard.

I have also added an examples directory. The only files in there now are "mapars.xsl" and "ars.gml". "mapars.xsl" is a style sheet that will query the pottery records in the file 'compiled/prap_gml.xml' to find the African Red-Slip, extract the tracts in which those sherds were found, and write that list to a gml file that can likewise be displayed in QGis or any other GML-aware mapping program. Here's the stylesheet:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!--
Running 'xsltproc mapars.xsl ../compiled/prap_gml.xml > ars.gml'
will produce a gml file showing tracts where African Red-Slip (ars) was 
recorded.
-->
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
 xmlns:x="http://www.w3.org/2002/06/xhtml2/"
 xmlns:gml="http://www.opengis.net/gml"
 xmlns:exsl="http://exslt.org/common"
 extension-element-prefixes="exsl">
 <xsl:output method="xml" encoding="utf-8" indent="yes"/>

 <xsl:key name="classes" match="//*[@class]" use="@class"/>
 <xsl:key name="ware" match="//x:div[@class='pottery']" use="x:span[@property='ware']"/>
 <xsl:key name="gml:ids" match="//*[@gml:id]" use="@gml:id"/>
        
 <xsl:template match="/"> 
<gml:FeatureCollection xmlns:gml="http://www.opengis.net/gml">
  <gml:boundedBy>
    <gml:Box>
      <gml:coord>
        <gml:X>14625.166504</gml:X>
        <gml:Y>13709.92893965028</gml:Y>
      </gml:coord>
      <gml:coord>
        <gml:X>35518.298225</gml:X>
        <gml:Y>30227.18022459958</gml:Y>
      </gml:coord>
    </gml:Box>
  </gml:boundedBy>

  <xsl:for-each select="key('ware','African Red-Slip')">        
    <xsl:variable name="cuid" select="concat('prap:collectionunit:',x:span[@property='cuidentifier'])"/>
    <xsl:copy-of select="key('gml:ids',$cuid)"/>
   </xsl:for-each>
</gml:FeatureCollection>
 </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

"ars.gml" is the mappable gml file; see the comment at the top of the stylesheet for the command that will generate it once you've unpacked the tar ball.

To be clear, I think this is incredibly cool. PRAP is now moving towards a consistent xml-based representation for all its data other than digitized photographs. I've already written about using svg to represent ceramic profiles. I will apply the same technique to PRAP's drawings. This consistency of representation will allow PRAP to use the same set of open-source tools to manipulate, analyze, report on and publish its results. And not only will we be able to publish the base data and the results, we will be equally clear about the processes that were applied to the data in order to reach our interpretations.

Data, algorithms and results will all be there for everyone to see. Or at least, that's the idea. There's a long way to go before it happens.

Mediterranean Ceramics Reference Stability Report, Number 5

The MCRSR first appeared in October, 2007. For the fifth installment, I am again making only one addition, no. 16, a Halaf period jar from Domuztepe in Turkey. The information for this piece comes from Open Context, a project that describes itself as:

a free, open access resource for the electronic publication of primary field research from archaeology and related disciplines.

It is useful that there is a concise url established for each record in Open Context. On the page linked below, you'll see a "Cite Item" button that provides a full citation for this piece. It seems, however, that all such Open Context URLs include the string "space.php?". A brief exchange with Eric Kansa, Open Context's lead developer, has indicated that these unnecessary characters may be removed in the future.

The previously listed URLs for MCRSR items 1-15 remain valid. Readers of last month's report will note that this means that no. 4 from the American Journal of Archaeology is still available at ajaonline.org.

1. Walters' Catalogue of the Roman Pottery in the Departments of Antiquities, British Museum from Google Books: http://books.google.com/books?id=M2UEAAAAYAAJ

2. Robinson's Agora V from JSTOR: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1558-8610%281959%295%3C%3E1.0.CO%3B2-3

3. Lattara 6: http://www.lattara.net/LATTARAPUB/PUBLAT/LATTARA6/lattara6.html

4. K. Greene's AJA article on Early Roman lead glazed pottery: http://www.ajaonline.org/pdfs/111.4/AJA1114_Greene.pdf

5. Heath and Tekkök, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Pottery at Ilion (Troia): http://classics.uc.edu/troy/grbpottery/

6. Vessel from Çatalhoyuk (via Flickr): http://www.flickr.com/photos/catalhoyuk/971964416/

7. A Late Minoan III Pyxis from the Metropolitan Museum of Art: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ho/03/eus/hod_1999.423.htm

8. An undocumented ARS Hayes 70 bowl from the dealer Classical Numismatics Group: http://cngcoins.com/Coin.aspx?CoinID=86618

9. Fifteenth Century Mosque Lamp from Jerusalem now in the British Museum: http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/me/m/mosque_lamp.aspx

10. The Perseus Project Vase Catalog: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0043

11. Wikimedia Commons Image of a Greek Geometric Skyphos in the Louvre: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Skyphos_birds_Louvre_CA3822.jpg

12. Sagalassos from Pleiades: http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/639087

13. Inscribed pot from Aphrodisias (HTML): http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/iaph2007/iAph150353.html

14. Inscribed pot from Aphrodisias (XML): http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/iaph2007/xml/iAph150353.xml

15. Hellenistic lamp from Assos, Turkey at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: http://mfa.org/collections/search_art.asp?recview=true&id=199476&coll_keywords=&coll_accession=84%2E110&coll_name=&coll_artist=&coll_place=&coll_medium=&coll_culture=&coll_classification=&coll_credit=&coll_provenance=&coll_location=&coll_has_images=&coll_on_view=&coll_sort=2&coll_sort_order=0&coll_view=0&coll_package=0&coll_start=1

16. Open Context record for Halaf period jar from Domuztepe, Turkey: http://www.opencontext.org/database/space.php?item=14926_DT_Spatial

Emerging Cypriot Update

As noted by Bill Caraher in a comment to my last post, "An Artifact's Journey" wasn't supposed to be released yet. As I said, it's a nice piece so I hope it comes back soon.

Emerging Cypriot

The Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project has begun to release a collection of video shorts under the title Emerging Cypriot. So far they seem nicely done. It does look like there's a little confusion with the links in that the top-right thumbnail, "Learning Fieldwalking", links to the video "An Artifact's Journey". No bother since "Journey" follows the route of a sherd through processing and drawing. I enjoyed that.

One not quite substantive comment, the URL for the "Journey" short ends with "An%20Artifact's%20Journey.m4v". That means the file name has spaces and an apostrophe in it. This is wasn't a problem for me but I can imagine situations in which those characters will cause problems on a command line.

PRAP Images: From Join Table to Containment

In my ongoing effort to create an archival version of PRAP's field data, I'm looking at how we dealt with image metadata and what we want to do now. A basic issue with the photographic record of an archaeological field project is that each photo can be of multiple subjects and each potential subject - a site, a tract, a piece of pottery - can appear in multiple photos. Photograph 203.29 is an example.

These relationships aren't very hard to handle in an adequate fashion with a modern database using a straigtforward many-to-many structure. At PRAP we had a table listing photographs and a separate table listing what identifiable entities appeared in each photograph. The latter can be called a join table. A schematic representation of the content of image 203.29 would be as follows:

Photographs
id: 203.29
filmtype: color slide
caption: byz sherds from area B.

Image<->Subject Join Table
photo_id: 203.29
subject_id: B92-181-02
position: left

photo_id:203.29
subject_id: B92-181-03
position: right

Sherds
id:B92-181-02
<info about sherd>

id:B92-181-03
<info about sherd>

I'm skipping over a whole lot of detail but I hope it's clear that this establishes that sherd B92-181-02 is the object at the left of photo 203.29. You can see this information put into action with further links on the PRAP website, which is serving the filemaker versions of our databases.

At this point I should say that it was Debi Harlan, now of the excellent ArchAtlas project, and I who implemented this system in the field.

One way to represent this many-to-many concept in xml is just to wrap markup around the records of the join table and leave it at that. For example:

Image<->Subject Join
<div class="imagelink">
  <span property="image" src="prap:image:203.29" />
  <span property="subject" src="prap:pottery:B92-181-02" />
  <span property="position">Left</span>
</div>
<div class="imagelink">
  <span property="image" src="prap:image:203.29" />
  <span property="subject" src="prap:pottery:B92-186-03" />
  <span property="position">Right</span>
</div>

Image Info
<div class="image" id="prap:image:203.29">
  <span  property="filmtype">CS</span>
  <span  property="label">Late Byzantine decorated base contiguous to Site B02, Kavalaria; Byzantine decorated bowl rim from B team tract</span>
  <span  property="photologdescription">B-92-181-2 (left), B-92-186-3 (right), respectively LByz decorated base, Byz decorated bowl rim</span>
</div>

You can see that each 'imagelink' div refers to a separately instantiated image and a separately instantiated subject. Unfortunately, there is some fragility and a lot of unnecessary overhead to this structure. The fragility comes from the possibility of change in one the joined tables. Perhaps "203.29" was a typo in the database. If you change the id of a photo, it needs to be changed in the join information as well.

XML allows one to take advantage of containment to incorporate the link information directly into the image database as follows:

<div class="image" id="prap:image:203.29">
  <span  property="filmtype">CS</span>
  <span  property="label">Late Byzantine decorated base contiguous to Site B02, Kavalaria; Byzantine decorated bowl rim from B team tract</span>
  <span  property="photologdescription">B-92-181-2 (left), B-92-186-3 (right), respectively LByz decorated base, Byz decorated bowl rim</span>
  <span property="subjects">
    <span>
      <span  property="subject" src="prap:pottery:B92-181-02" />
      <span  property="position">Left</span>
    </span>
    <span>
      <span  property="subject" src="prap:pottery:B92-186-03" />
      <span  property="position">Right</span>
    </span>
  </span>
</div>

I'm not yet happy with the details of this markup. Among the many odd things is the extra 'span' surrounding each subject-position pair. I'd like to call that something. The advantage of this representation is that the text from <div> to </div> is a self-contained description of the image with well-structured links to the named entities that appear within it.

One last point... I was not about to cut-and-paste the subject info into each image div. Instead, I wrote a quick-and-dirty xslt stylesheet to process the two xml datasets and produce a single set of image descriptions that point to their subjects. Here it is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
 xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
 xmlns:x="http://www.w3.org/2002/06/xhtml2/" >

<xsl:key name="classes" match="//*[@class]" use="@class"/>
<xsl:key name="srcs" match="//*[@src]" use="@src"/>

<xsl:template match="/"> 
 <xsl:for-each select="key('classes','image')">
  <div class="{@class}" id="{@id}">
   <xsl:copy-of select="./*"/>
   <span property="subjects">
    <xsl:for-each select="key('srcs',@id)/..">
     <span>
      <xsl:choose>
       <xsl:when test="count(x:span[@property='subject']) &gt; 1">
        <xsl:apply-templates select="x:span[not(@property='image')]"/>
       </xsl:when>
       <xsl:otherwise>
        <xsl:copy-of select="x:span[not(@property='image')]"/>
       </xsl:otherwise>
      </xsl:choose>
     </span>
    </xsl:for-each>
   </span>
  </div>
 </xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="x:span">
 <xsl:if test="not(contains(@src,':collectionunit:'))">
  <xsl:copy-of select="."/>
 </xsl:if>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

This stylesheet has now been used to combine the image and image link portions of the PRAP Digital Archive and the tar ball has been updated.

I realize that I'm diving right into xml, xslt, etc. without much explanation. One purpose of this post is simply to share notes on what I've done. The other is to move towards the idea of a "PRAP Digital Archive Cookbook" that illustrates how to work with the PRAP data. This post can't be the beginning of such a publication since it has described a process that changed the underlying files in such a way that the just quoted xslt stylesheet will no longer work. But stay tuned for more fun things to do with this developing dataset...

PRAP, xhtml 2.0 and Archaeological Databases

For some years now I have been working in collaboration with many colleagues on data from the Pylos Regional Archaeological Project (PRAP). As with most more-or-less recent field-projects, one result of all our work is a collection of database files. Ours happen to be in FileMaker but that's a detail in terms of this discussion. What I really want to focus on is our decision to package all the data into an archival format that can be made available for use by all-comers and for storage by institutions that want to help ensure access to this resource over the long term. But what format should we use?

There are a couple of options that are specific to archaeology and/or cultural heritage management. Open Context is using a subset of the ArchaeoML datamodel. There's also the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model. Right now, I am moving the PRAP data into an xhtml 2.0 based representation and thought I'd take the time to say what I like about it. Of course, I don't mean to reject other options. It's just that I'm looking for a lightweight standard in which to test the data and relationships that we want to archive in as accessible a format as possible. Who knows what will come in the future so for now I'm focusing on the present.

PRAP is a survey project so the first phase of fieldwork was to collect material by tracts, defined roughly as units of similar surface conditions: an olive grove (perhaps divided), a terrace, a fallow field. On the basis of density, Places Of Special Interest (POSIs) were identified - I'll call them sites from now on. Sites where then collected by a grid or by subdividing tracts. Either way, the material from a site consisted of both the tract collection material and the site collection material. Both tracts and the divisions of the site pickup are generically known as "collection units". Collection units held pottery and collected sherds could be numbered by extending the collection unit from which they came. In this system, "A92-001" is a tract collection unit, "A93-901001" is a site collection unit, and "A92-001-01" is a sherd from the tract, whereas "A93-901001-01" is from the site collection.

I'll now go over some broad ideas for representing this data model in xhtml .

Version of 2.0 of xhtml includes the Core, Embedding, and Metainformation attribute modules. In combination with the div and span elements, these modules make the following hypothetical xml fragments/stubs (almost) valid as part of a more complete document.

First, two sherds:

<div class="pottery" id="prap:pottery:A92-001-01">
<span property="ware">African Red Slip</span>
<span property="part">Rim</part>
<span property="quantity">1</span>
<span property="collectionunit" src="prap:collectionunit:A92-001"/>
</div>

<div class="pottery" id="prap:pottery:A93-901001-01">
<span property="ware">African Red Slip</span>
<span property="part">Rim</part>
<span property="quantity">1</span>
<span property="collectionunit" src="prap:collectionunit:A93-901001"/>
</div>

Now, two collection units:

<div class="collectionunit" id="prap:collectionunit:A92-001">
<span property="method">tract collection</span>
<span property="site" src="prap:site:A01"/>
</div>

<div class="collectionunit" id="prap:collectionunit:A93-901001">
<span property="method">site collection</span>
<span property="site" src="prap:site:A01"/>
</div>

Now the site A01:
<div class="site" id="prap:site:A01">
<span property="description">An ancient site.</span>
</div>

In the above model, divs have classes and a unique id and are analogous to records in a column-oriented database. Divs consist of spans, which have properties and either content or a src attribute. Spans are analogous to database columns/fields. If a span has content, that's the value of the property. If it has a src attribute, that's a reference to the id of an existing div. In this near xml, each sherd is said to come from a collection unit and each collection unit is assigned to a site. Therefore, it is possible to know that these sherds both came from site A01.

I like the fact that each div is self-documenting as to its structure. That's better than a line in a tab-separated text file. I also like that the metainformation is strongly typed. Take for example the following snippet of xslt:

<xsl:key name="classes" match="//*[@class]" use="@class"/>
<xsl:key name="ids" match="//*[@id]" use="@id"/>
<xsl:key name="properties" match="//*[@property]" use="@property"/>
<xsl:key name="srcs" match="//*[@src]" use="@src"/>

When applied to a large repository of xhtml data, this code will build quickly searchable indexes of all the class, id, property, and src attributes. That will in-turn allow for efficient navigation of the database structure. You can see this in practice if you download and unpack the file at prapdigitalarchive-prerelease.tar.gz. Pay attention to the prerelease in the filename. What you're getting is my very preliminary efforts to put the thoughts expressed above into action. You are also getting a mass of unedited field data so don't be picky. And note the CC by-nc-nd license on the files.

Some points of interest. Unpack the file in its own directory. If you want to just see output, look in the pdf folder for sitegazetteer.pdf. If you want to generate this file yourself, you'll need to execute something like the following sequence of commands from within the directory you created for unpacking:

xmllint -xinclude data/include.xml > data/prap.xml
xsltproc xslt/sitegazetteer.xsl data/prap.xml > sg.fo
fop sg.fo sitegazetteer.pdf

[Fop is available here.]

Or look at xslt/test.xsl to see a simple manipulation of class, id, property and src attributes. Run that against prap.xml for some not very interesting output.

I don't know that anybody will actually download the file and run these transformations. My point is that you can. That's another advantage of using an xml based data model/work flow. We can publish not only the data but the scripts that we use to manipulate that data. That's an important principle being embraced by researchers, particularly in the sciences.

So... I'm at the beginning of developing the PRAP Digital Archive and this is the first public announcement of it. There are many little things to do and big decisions to make before it gets anywhere near being "finished". But I'll update the tar ball as I go along and will highlight the ceramic bits as appropriate.

Pricing of GRBPIlion on Lulu.com

Shawn Graham of Electric Archaeology has published a collection of his blog posts on Lulu.com, the same Print-on-Demand service we use for GRBPIlion. This is cool.

I am also reminded by his post to be explicit about the pricing for the Ilion volume. Specifically, the current $21.03 cost is the minimum charge Lulu sets for printing and binding. Any amount above this would be split 80/20 between me and them. I will admit to guessing that even for $21.03, somebody - perhaps Lulu, perhaps the printer they use - is retaining at least a portion of the money, but I'm not bothered by that. All I know is that neither I nor Project Troia gets any revenue so that it's fair to say that we're trying to keep reader costs as low as possible.

This follows in the great tradition of scholars giving away their research for essentially no direct commercial gain. That's what happens when you sign over copyright to a journal for some minimal payment, often in the form of offprints. Academic books aren't usually money makers for their authors either. With Lulu, it is possible to be explicit about such economic factors and so drive hidden overhead out of the publication process.

Author Rights

Publishing Archaeology has discussed SPARC's Author Rights addendum. This bears on access to scholarly research so it's of interest here as well.

(via John Wallrodt)

Olympia Lamps Dissertation

ABZU has noted the digital publication of Ulrich Hübinger's 2003 Freie Universität, Berlin dissertation Die archaischen Lampen aus Olympia. Here is the beginning of the abstract:

Die Dissertation behandelt an einer Auswahl von 187 repräsentativen Beispielen rund 800 Funde von Lampen der archaischen Zeit (etwa 700 bis 580/70 v. Chr.) sowie einige verwandte Beispiele der beiden folgenden Jahrzehnte aus dem Zeusheiligtum von Olympia, die in mehr als hundert Jahren deutscher Ausgrabungstätigkeit zwischen 1874 und 1981 geborgen wurden.

The individual chapters and appendices are available as separate pdfs or the whole lot can be downloaded as a zip or tar file.

GRBPIlion now CC

Greek, Roman and Byzantine Pottery from Ilion (Troia) is now clearly marked as being released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported license. Previously, only the PDF version was CC. Now you can download the whole publication and redistribute it if you so please. To make this easier, all the files are compiled into a single TAR ball. FYI, it's about 170 meg.

Our hope is that this will make the information more useful and also allow other institutions to archive and redistribute the material themselves.

An eventual "target audience" for the TAR ball is librarians and administrators of digital repositories. GRBPIlion is still very fluid so I don't know how this will fit into the acquisition strategies of such entities. We will be doing things like getting an ISBN (or maybe an ISSN) but we are also eager for suggestions of how best to make this resource consumable by anyone thinking about long-term preservation of scholarly information.

A Burial in Britain

The embedded video shows the excavation of a 3rd Century AD sarcophagus in Britain.


Opening a Roman Coffin from Wessex Archaeology on Vimeo.

Apart from the fact that it's an excellent use of multi-media to bring the practicalities of archaeological field-work to the public, there is a close-up of a "small lustrous pot imported from France" at about 9:02 into the video. At this point I'll admit that Britain isn't the Mediterranean and the vessel in question is from northern Gaul so also a little outside my usual geographic range. But that's OK, it's all Roman so we're still more-or-less on topic.

The Wessex Archaeology site has a page with further information. This paragraph is interesting:

Everything points to the woman having been of high status. Almost 300 graves have been excavated at Boscombe Down in five separate cemeteries. Although many contained wooden coffins, this is the only one with a stone coffin. Dating to around 220 AD, the burial is the earliest in its cemetery and the later burials clustered around it. Many of the people in the other graves were buried with hobnailed shoes or boots for their journey to the next world and local copies of the imported pot are common finds.

I like the use of ceramics in the interpretation of social status.

Italian Sigillata in US Libraries

Anyone looking for an introduction to current thinking about Italian Sigillata could do worse than consulting the following four books:

• Ettlinger, E. (1990). Conspectus formarum terrae sigillatae Italico modo confectae


• Marabini Moevs, M. T. (2006). Cosa : the Italian sigillata


• Oxé, A., H. Comfort and P. Kenrick. (2000). Corpus vasorum Arretinorum : a catalogue of the signatures, shapes and chronology of Italian sigillata


• Poblome, J. et al, eds. (2004). Early Italian sigillata : the chronological framework and trade patterns : proceedings of the First International ROCT-Congress, Leuven, May 7 and 8, 1999

Here's how one would do when looking for these titles at various libraries.

	Conspectus	Cosa	OCK	Poblome et al.
Berkeley	On shelf	On shelf	On shelf	On shelf
Cincinnati	On shelf	On shelf	On shelf	On shelf
Columbia	Offsite	Not held	On shelf	On shelf
Harvard	On shelf	On shelf	Off site	"no online circulation information"
Michigan	Not held	On shelf	On shelf	On shelf

Two notes:
1: I chose the libraries somewhat arbitrarily. I use the Columbia library. Harvard is the largest university library system in the US. Cincinnati, Michigan and Berkeley all have strong graduate programs in Classical Archaeology.

2: The table obscures some detail. In particular, only the Burnham Classical Library at Cincinnati houses all these volumes in a single building. The other library systems distribute them between a main library, an art history library, and/or off-site storage.

Despite the fact that moving a volume "off site" is a terrible thing to do, this post isn't really a complaint. In fact, the table suggests that one's ability to study Italian Sigillata isn't half-bad if you live within convenient distance of a major research library. And there's always ILL.

Regular readers of this blog can probably guess that I'm itching to launch into a diatribe about how archaeologists would be better served if all this information were online. Take that as a subtext. For now, I'll just mention that Google Books lists "No preview available" for all these titles. That is a bummer.

Mediterranean Ceramics Reference Stability Report, Number 4

The MCRSR first appeared in October, 2007. For the fourth installment, I am making only one addition, no. 15, a Hellenistic lamp from Assos, Turkey now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts. The URL for this entry is long and I have commented on this situation in a previous post. As a postscript to those observations, I'll briefly mention that I contacted Christine Kondoleon at the MFA and she kindly passed along my e-mail to the relevant department, which in turn seemed open to the ideas I had expressed in the post. So I now include an MFA URL as a way of tracking what happens on its website. In terms of the specific object, the lamp is interesting in part for coming from a well-recorded, at least for its day, excavation. The Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) began work at Assos in 1880 and in 1884 donated many of the resulting finds to the MFA. It is encouraging that information about these well provenanced objects is now available to all comers via the Museum's searchable collections database.

There are no changes to report for the other 14 URLs in the list below. There is, however, a hint of gathering instability. Some readers may have noticed that the AIA will cease to make PDFs of the American Journal of Archaeology's articles available for free download. Articles will be available via the commercial service Atypon. The change was announced in this letter from Naomi Norman, the AJA Editor-in-Chief. It should come as no surprise that I am disappointed by this decision. As an AIA Academic Trustee, I feel it is incumbent upon me to continue to work within the framework of the AIA's governing structure so I will not comment on ongoing discussions as the Institute faces the important issues surrounding the dissemination of scholarship in a digital age. I do encourage interested parties to read Dr. Norman's letter. It is a public document that captures a moment in time as learned societies negotiate this new territory. In terms of the MCRSR, the decision, which is in the process of being put into effect, may lead to a change in the URL for no. 4, K. Greene's article in AJA 111 (2007).

1. Walters' Catalogue of the Roman Pottery in the Departments of Antiquities, British Museum from Google Books: http://books.google.com/books?id=M2UEAAAAYAAJ

2. Robinson's Agora V from JSTOR: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1558-8610%281959%295%3C%3E1.0.CO%3B2-3

3. Lattara 6: http://www.lattara.net/LATTARAPUB/PUBLAT/LATTARA6/lattara6.html

4. K. Greene's AJA article on Early Roman lead glazed pottery: http://www.ajaonline.org/pdfs/111.4/AJA1114_Greene.pdf

5. Heath and Tekkök, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Pottery at Ilion (Troia): http://classics.uc.edu/troy/grbpottery/

6. Vessel from Çatalhoyuk (via Flickr): http://www.flickr.com/photos/catalhoyuk/971964416/

7. A Late Minoan III Pyxis from the Metropolitan Museum of Art: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ho/03/eus/hod_1999.423.htm

8. An undocumented ARS Hayes 70 bowl from the dealer Classical Numismatics Group: http://cngcoins.com/Coin.aspx?CoinID=86618

9. Fifteenth Century Mosque Lamp from Jerusalem now in the British Museum: http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/me/m/mosque_lamp.aspx

10. The Perseus Project Vase Catalog: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0043

11. Wikimedia Commons Image of a Greek Geometric Skyphos in the Louvre: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Skyphos_birds_Louvre_CA3822.jpg

12. Sagalassos from Pleiades: http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/639087

13. Inscribed pot from Aphrodisias (HTML): http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/iaph2007/iAph150353.html

14. Inscribed pot from Aphrodisias (XML): http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/iaph2007/xml/iAph150353.xml

15. Hellenistic lamp from Assos, Turkey at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: http://mfa.org/collections/search_art.asp?recview=true&id=199476&coll_keywords=&coll_accession=84%2E110&coll_name=&coll_artist=&coll_place=&coll_medium=&coll_culture=&coll_classification=&coll_credit=&coll_provenance=&coll_location=&coll_has_images=&coll_on_view=&coll_sort=2&coll_sort_order=0&coll_view=0&coll_package=0&coll_start=1

Journal of Roman Archaeology 20 (2007)

I am back from my holiday-season family excursions and the AIA/APA meetings in Chicago. A late present from me to myself was waiting upon my return: volume 20 of the Journal of Roman Archaeology in two fascicules.

All long-time readers of the JRA will immediately notice the smaller format, which was necessitated by the US Postal Service's increased overseas rates. I'm currently leaning toward preferring this smaller size. It's certainly easier to hold and won't require finding shelf space for more oversize volumes. The text is smaller and that will probably become more of a problem as my eyes continue to age.

In terms of content, excellence continues. I haven't read it cover-to-cover yet (will I ever?) but have enjoyed what I've come across so far. Of direct interest to ceramicists are J.T. Peña's article on tituli picti from Pompeii and environs (p. 233) and S. Rotroff's review of J. Poblome et al.'s volume on early Italian sigillata (p. 418).

Ceramics are deeply integrated into the study of Roman archaeology and this is reflected throughout the JRA's articles. I'll cite only one instance. M. Gawlikowski's superb article on the Mithraeum at Hawarte in Syria is an enjoyable read given the unusual iconography of the cave's wall-paintings and given the bright color plates which accompany the text (p. 337). I also took note of the following brief description of the fill of a pit cut into the floor of the cave:

The finds, carefully processed by G. Majcherek, represent a significant number of more or less complete vessels. Common wares were rather scarce, most being elegant tableware, including drinking cups, a dozen Eastern Sigillata A plates, some lamps, and a large skyphos with applied vine-scroll decoration. The finds are chronologically consistent, dating to the second half of the 1st. c. A.D. Taken together with some glass vessels, abundant animal bone fragments and ashes, they provide convincing evidence that the pit was used as a bothros (deposit for sacrificial remains). (p. 342)

Can there be anybody who does not eagerly await the full publication of this deposit?!?

One point. So far as I can tell, JRA articles are not generally available online. Furthermore, the publisher tightly holds on to redistribution rights. This text, in bold face, follows the copyright statement on page 2:

Pemission to copy may be obtained only direct from JRA, by e-mail, letter, fax or phone.
The Copyright Clearance Center (USA), the Copyright Licensing Agency (UK), and other national Reproduction Rights Organizations are not permitted to authorize copying or to collect fees for doing so.

While I certainly don't know the details, I believe the JRA exists as an independent entity funded largely from sales of the journal and its supplements (though one sometimes sees reference to subventions from other sources). In this context, I am more sympathetic than might be expected to the financial considerations that must be in play as the JRA considers whether or not to "go digital." It's also the case that the publisher, John Humphrey, was a professor of mine at the University of Michigan so that I am confident in saying that his main goal in publishing the JRA is the timely dissemination of archaeological information and analysis. Despite this prior disposition, I do have to say that I, along with many colleagues, eagerly await the inevitable day when I can bring the JRA's content into the field on my computer hard-drive.

Don't Buy This Book

As I've mentioned before, Billur Tekkök and I are editing the digital publication Greek, Roman and Byzantine Pottery at Ilion (Troia). I'll talk about our work as part of the AIA panel "Web-Based Research Tools for Mediterranean Archaeology".

One point that I will stress is that we intend to deliver this information in whatever formats will be useful to users. Currently, this means the website, a PDF file released under a Creative Commons license, and as a bound volume available for purchase from Lulu.com. It's pretty trivial to generate the PDF - which we produce so that users can take all our content into the field - and then upload it to Lulu, after which third parties can purchase a printed copy.

That last "format" brings me to the title of the post. Don't buy the bound version yet. I'm going to update it at least once before going to Chicago and, looking further out, our goal is to expand the content in time for the summer field season. This is all to say that the whole thing is a draft so there's no point in spending real money when you can get all the text and images for free.

If that's the case, why are we producing a bound version at all? At some point we'll freeze a first edition and submit it for review and encourage libraries to purchase it. There's still a role for a printed volume as an archival format and there are still times when it's convenient to have information available on the printed page; like when it's over 37 Celsius and you don't want to bring your computer outside into the heat and dust.

Information when you want it and how you want it is the model we're pursuing, even if that means using such old-school technologies as the printed book.

And one reason to buy now... if you'd like to see the quality of Lulu volumes. In general, I can say that the paper quality is good, text is sharp, but the image reproduction is only decent, though I think I can tweak the process to make the images more faithful to their original colors and quality.

Ceramica in Italia

A version of the 1998 volume Ceramica in Italia. 6-7 secolo. Atti del convegno in onore di John W. Hayes : Roma, 11-13 maggio 1995 has long been available on the internet as a series of PDFs. I say a version because the pages in each file are unnumbered and some spelling errors were introduced into the text by the digital conversion process.

The location of these files has changed over time and they are now on the Portale di Archeologia Medievale of the Dipartimento di Archeologia e Storia delle Arti of the Università di Siena.

Despite its editorial shortcomings, it's worth having access to the digital version of this publication. But there is no direct link on the Siena website. Instead, you can use the following two curl commands to download the individual files:

curl -o vol1_#1.pdf http://archeologiamedievale.unisi.it/NewPages/COLLANE/TESTIBAM/ceramica/[01-29].pdf

curl -o vol2_#1.pdf http://archeologiamedievale.unisi.it/NewPages/COLLANE/TESTIBAM/ceramica/vol2/[01-26].pdf

[I'm sure some browsers will wrap these long lines or have other problems so make sure everything from 'curl' to 'pdf' is on one line when you paste each command into your shell.]

You'll end up with 55 PDFs in whichever directory you started the download.

The curl program should already be on your machine if you're running Mac OS X or another Unix-like OS. If not, it should be trivial to install it. A windows version is available from the curl download page.

Drapers Gardens Vessel Hoard

The Drapers Gardens, London find of copper-alloy vessels is of interest to ceramicists. Here's a picture:



The best summary of the whole site that I found is from the Pre-Construct Archaeology site. This is the private firm that actually did the digging. It looks like they've done a superb job.

As a little bit of an aside, I enjoyed the range of headlines given to the newspaper articles about this find. The following list is drawn from a search in Google news:

• Day-to-day relics reveal Roman London


• Londinium bourgoisie revealed in unique Roman find


• Roman artifacts discovered in London well


• Archaeologists unearth Roman-style dining utensils in London


• Haul of ancient Roman artefacts found in London well stuns experts


• London dig finds history by the bucketful

The last article, from the London Times Online, includes the following image (it's number 5 in the "slide show" at the top of the article):



The deposition of the vessel hoard is dated to after 375 AD by its stratigraphic position above two coins. That makes the metal vessel illustrated above a nice point of comparison with contemporary ceramics. Download this PDF from Lattara 6 and see forms 71 to 76 for African Red-Slip that shares the general idea of a more-or-less deep bowl with wide and more-or-less horizontal rim. Many of the ceramic vessels also have decoration on the outer edges of their rims.

It looks like the metal vessels from Drapers Garden trend larger than their ceramic analogs. That's nice because one can imagine them going well together on a table, though it's somewhat speculative to think that metal and ceramics were mixed when such dishes were laid out for a meal.

Metal in use by wealthier households and African Red-Slip more widely available to folks living somewhat near to the coast and/or a major trade route together led the way in establishing this part of the koine of late Roman table vessels. The general form was further spread by potters collectively less prolific than their North African colleagues. See the first entry in the publication of "Late Roman West Asia Minor 'Light Colored' Ware" at Ilion/Troy (with profile drawing and photograph below). That's an unwieldy name for an interesting ware that almost broke into the front ranks of the ceramic trade. For example, it's found in small amounts at Berenice in present day Libya. The example from Ilion shows the decorative rim edge, though in this instance the motif is not continuous. That's a common feature on ceramic vessels.

Another source for online publications

I randomly stumbled across the downloadable publications page of the Centro para el Estudio de la Interdependencia Provincial
en la Antigüedad Clasica. It's great and has many articles related to amphora production.

As an example of the high-quality of the available titles, I particularly note a rare online sighting of a JRA Supplement chapter.

Meta-post about a Meta-blog

Chuck Jones has started - and I am on the "team" of - the "Ancient World Bloggers Group" blog.

Mediterranean Ceramics Reference Stability Report, Number 3

[Updated to confirm that no. 3 is still available and to fix the URL of no. 13.]

The MCRSR first appeared in October. For the third edition, I am once again making additions, nos. 13 and 14. Thirteen is an an inscribed pot published by the Inscriptions of Aphrodisias project. Fourteen is the XML version of the same. It will be interesting to see if one URL is more stable than the other. Gabriel Bodard suggested that I list this item.

I intend to get to 20 URLs total and am happy to consider other suggestions. Over the course of this month I am going to look for potential additions from North Africa, Eastern Europe, and the east coast of the Mediterranean.

There have been no changes to the 12 URLs listed last month. At the time of writing, I am unable to connect to the server at lattara.net (no. 3 below) but this is probably due to a temporary glitch. I'll update this post when either I can get through or I determine that the resource is gone or has been moved.

1. Walters' Catalogue of the Roman Pottery in the Departments of Antiquities, British Museum from Google Books: http://books.google.com/books?id=M2UEAAAAYAAJ

2. Robinson's Agora V from JSTOR: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1558-8610%281959%295%3C%3E1.0.CO%3B2-3

3. Lattara 6: http://www.lattara.net/LATTARAPUB/PUBLAT/LATTARA6/lattara6.html

4. K. Greene's AJA article on Early Roman lead glazed pottery: http://www.ajaonline.org/pdfs/111.4/AJA1114_Greene.pdf

5. Heath and Tekkök, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Pottery at Ilion (Troia): http://classics.uc.edu/troy/grbpottery/

6. Vessel from Çatalhoyuk (via Flickr): http://www.flickr.com/photos/catalhoyuk/971964416/

7. A Late Minoan III Pyxis from the Metropolitan Museum of Art: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ho/03/eus/hod_1999.423.htm

8. An undocumented ARS Hayes 70 bowl from the dealer Classical Numismatics Group: http://cngcoins.com/Coin.aspx?CoinID=86618

9. Fifteenth Century Mosque Lamp from Jerusalem now in the British Museum: http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/me/m/mosque_lamp.aspx

10. The Perseus Project Vase Catalog: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0043

11. Wikimedia Commons Image of a Greek Geometric Skyphos in the Louvre: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Skyphos_birds_Louvre_CA3822.jpg

12. Sagalassos from Pleiades: http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/639087

13. Inscribed pot from Aphrodisias (HTML): http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/iaph2007/iAph150353.html

14. Inscribed pot from Aphrodisias (XML): http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/iaph2007/xml/iAph150353.xml

URLs

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is clearly a leader in providing on-line access to its collection database. As of writing, descriptions of 339,125 "artworks" are searchable, out of a total estimated collection of 450,000 objects. Additionally, a high percentage of the records have images.

Enough of praise, now for some constructive criticism...

If one uses the 'keyword' field of the Advanced Search form to look for "african red slip", a list of 14 objects is returned. Clicking on the fourth item brings up a useful description of an ARS Hayes 53 plate of the fourth to early fifth century AD, an object purchased in 1989 but undocumented prior to that date (mfa.org:1989.690).

The URL used to access the record is:

http://mfa.org/collections/search_art.asp?recview=true&id=154537&coll_keywords=african+red+slip&coll_accession=&coll_name=&coll_artist=&coll_place=&coll_medium=&coll_culture=&coll_classification=&coll_credit=&coll_provenance=&coll_location=&coll_has_images=&coll_on_view=&coll_sort=2&coll_sort_order=0&coll_view=0&coll_package=0&coll_start=1

This string of characters is so long that nobody would use it as a fixed reference to that object in a publication. Rather, one would fall back on the scholarly practice of using "MFA 1989.690" and leave it up to the reader to track down the object. The MFA site makes this relatively easy in that the Advanced Search page has a field for accession number. If you enter "1989.690" in that field, you end up at a page with the URL:

http://mfa.org/collections/search_art.asp?coll_accession=1989.690&coll_name=&coll_artist=&coll_medium=&coll_culture=&coll_classification=&coll_credit=&coll_provenance=&coll_keywords=&coll_sort=2&coll_sort_order=0&submit=Search

Although this feature is undocumented, that URL can be shortened to:

http://mfa.org/collections/search_art.asp?coll_accession=1989.690

That is a reasonable length and means that the MFA's own unique identifier for the object can be made actionable in a fairly clean manner. There is, however, a further issue. That URL does not lead to the full information and image for the object, only to an abbreviated list view. The shortest URL that I could compose to link to the full view was:

http://mfa.org/collections/search_art.asp?recview=true&id=154537

I don't know the semantics of the ID field, but it looks like a numeric primary-key imposed by the database system, one that is not otherwise publicly documented by the institution. This is my main criticism: the full information for mfa.org:1989.690 is not directly accessible by its publicly documented unique identifier.

This may seem a subtle point, and I don't mean for it to distract from the obvious benefit provided by the MFA's efforts. But as we move towards an effective infrastructure for digital publication and scholarship, I would like to see URLs such as http://mfa.org/collection/1989.690 instantiated as valid links to useful information.

Remixing is Fun!

Here's a moonlit snapshot of me looking at my prize-winning entry in the Catalhoyuk Remixing Day Contest:



The whole day was a blast! There were two guided tours of the island and I went on one entirely and half of the second. It's a lot of fun to walk and fly around with a bunch of other avatars. There were also conversations around the campfire. Yes, the space is virtual, but the conversations are real (if still a little tentative). North America, Europe and Australia were represented among the groups that I spoke to. Again, very cool.

The OKAPI Team deserves a lot of credit for putting this together. Sure, the technology can be improved but they will be ready when it does get better and that is good for archaeology as a whole.

Second Life

As some of you may know, Wednesday is Remixing Catalhoyuk Day on the OKAPI Second Life island. There's a remixing contest at 5:00 PM PST and I made an entry. It doesn't have anything to do with ceramics right now, but SL holds potential for archaeological publication.

This post is by way of explanation and is linked from the two entrances....

"Burial Passage" intends to immerse users in images related to the excavation of the multiple burial below the NW platform of building 3. You can walk through it in either direction. I sort of like going uphill. The images at the two entrances are bookends. The central image showing excavation mediates between the two surrounding images.

I should also say that I'm trying to solve a practical issue here. SL can make it hard to orient yourself to images. I've tried to position the panels so that as you walk through them, their detail becomes apparent. Slow down as you go through and you'll see what I mean. You can also "move" up and down the passage with "mouselook". That works pretty well.

And there's an easter egg. Type '/1 start excavation' to make the panels disappear and re-appear in sequence. Actually, I had trouble with the sequencing but I think that's because of latency in my internet connection.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.

SVG Diameter Chart

Last summer I needed a diameter chart in a pinch so I made one using SVG. I have added the svg source-file and a jpeg rendering to mediterraneanceramics.org. Nothing too fancy but perhaps useful if you don't have a chart at hand when the time comes to describe your sherds.

If you look at the SVG code itself, you'll see that I have placed the file in the public domain. I've used the language found on Wikimedia Commons, which I think should be sufficient to set this free. This means that you can make changes or do whatever you want to the file. If so inclined, send me any improvements with a statement that your work is in the public domain as well.

A Ceramic Typology for the Mediterranean

At http://mediterraneanceramics.org/typology, you'll see a *highly* experimental beginning of what will become a broad ceramic typology for the Mediterranean. That page links to individual pages for major categories with well known typologies. There is also a sylk-formatted spreadsheet of the whole typology available for download.

Think of this as a .01 release. If you look at the xhtml you'll see the beginnings of a bibliographic infrastructure that will be exposed soon. In general, the xhtml file will try to capture the inevitable and necessary complexity of current ceramic scholarship, while the spreadsheet will reduce this to a column-oriented format that is usable in existing database management systems.

LR Coarse Wares from the Athenian Agora

This is a great image of jugs from a well group:


The excavator dates the deposit to the "late 4th/early 5th AD." Similar pieces to the "gouged" jugs in the lower two rows are published from Agora V group M, e.g. agathe.gr:P+22011. Such "oblique gouging" continues into the 6th century, when Attic jugs of this type are available in Corinth (Slane and Sanders 2005:no. 2-16).

More Publication?

Chuck Jones of the Blegen Library at the American School in Athens left a comment to my post on publication trends. He usefully points to some encouraging developments in terms of institutions taking responsibility for digital publication of their own content.

I spoke of trends pointing in the wrong direction. With Chuck's comment in mind, I'll now rephrase and say we're probably closer to a tipping point than I implied. Here's more evidence of that. David Brown Books quoted me USD 200.00 for Catherine Abadie-Reynal's recent volume on the ceramics of Argos. That's a ridiculous amount and I look to basic economic self-interest on the part of libraries to be part of the solution to these high prices.

[As an aside, if you don't want to be tempted to spend such sums, don't read Chuck's posts about new acquisitions in Athens.]

To put it another way, what will lead to more scholarly impact? Continuing to publish at ever higher prices? Or using technology to cut out the cost of distribution. See this pot from Aphrodisias for an example of the latter. [HT: Gabriel Bodard]

Scalable Vector Graphics

The digital publication of Greek, Roman and Byzantine pottery from Ilion that I'm working on with Billur Tekkök uses the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) standard to store profile drawings of the sherds it catalogs. SVG is an open format that relies on XML to represent curves, shapes and other useful drawing elements in a text-based format.

As a Mac user, I'm pleased that Safari 3, included in the latest version of OS X and in the most recent update to version 10.4, supports SVG. FireFox support has been around for a while, and I understand that Opera, Konqueror and some other browsers can also deal with SVG more-or-less directly. For its part, Internet Explorer can render SVG files using an Adobe plugin.

If you're using an SVG-capable browser, point it to http://www.mediterraneanceramics.org/testbed/M18.0099-1.svg to see a profile drawing of a late 4th/early 5th century AD African Red-Slip Hayes form 71 bowl. [For pictures of a similar piece, try agathe.gr:P+34646.] Depending on how you're viewing this file, you can zoom in on the image and it will retain its nice curves. Perhaps best of all, if you print it, the hard-copy version should be at one-to-one scale relative to the original and also smoothly rendered.

One file that gives you good looking profiles on screen and on paper? I think that's cool.

A technical note: Because not all browsers like SVG, GRBP Ilion currently converts its svg files to jpegs using the Batik SVG Toolkit from the Apache Foundation.

Publication?

Two pretty recently published books that I consult with increasing regularity are Gundula Lüdorf's typology of Roman and Early Byzantine coarse wares from western Asia Minor and Dominique Pieri's discussion of the distribution of Late Roman Eastern Mediterranean Amphoras in Gaul, which also presents a useful typology that extends Riley's well-known LR series.

These two works indicate that our ability to categorize and compare a greater percentage of the pottery that we find on Mediterranean, and particularly Aegean, sites is only increasing. This is a good thing and, as works of scholarship, Lüdorf and Pieri's efforts show that trends are looking up.

Unfortunately, these books also show that trends are heading in the wrong direction when considered from the perspective of publication and distribution of such scholarship. The Lüdorf book costs USD 115.00 when purchased from David Brown. The Pieri volume is available for EUR 65.00 from Librairie Archéologique, my preferred source for French books that aren't on Amazon.fr. As of writing, that's approximately USD 220 for both books before shipping and handling. That amount of money will keep this important information out of many people's hands.

And there are further subtleties. I live in New York City and often use the Columbia Library, which is undoubtedly a first-rate research environment. Its online catalog indicates that the Lüdorf volume was received on February 14, 2007. The location of the book, however, is listed as "In preparation for Offsite". While I can't give specific dates, it has been this way since shortly after the book was received. Expensive books are going straight offsite. Something is broken with this system of publication. I know I'm not the first to say this and I'm sure I won't be the last.

A rhetorical question: is the price of their work or the storage policies of major libraries the fault of the authors? Not entirely. And not yet. I am not so naive as to rail against these two scholars for not choosing open access digital publication. But I do think the time is coming when authors will have to explain why they haven't made their scholarship available through such outlets as The Stoa Consortium or the Public Library of Science. And perhaps we can look forward to a future when work not published in similarly minded venues or otherwise at no cost to the reader doesn't count in professional evaluation procedures. It's a fair bet that universities, as evaluators of scholarship, will press for this, given that they are also bleeding money to buy books that they can't even efficiently distribute to their users.

To repeat what I said before, I know I'm not the first to say all this and I'm sure I won't be the last.

Mediterranean Ceramics Reference Stability Report, Number 2

The MCRSR first appeared in October. For this second go-round I am adding two more resources, nos. 11 and 12. Eleven is an image from Wikimedia Commons, 12 is the entry for Sagallasos, an important Roman period production center, from the Pleiades digital atlas.

There have been no changes to the 10 URLs listed last month.

1. Walters' Catalogue of the Roman Pottery in the Departments of Antiquities, British Museum from Google Books: http://books.google.com/books?id=M2UEAAAAYAAJ

2. Robinson's Agora V from JSTOR: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1558-8610%281959%295%3C%3E1.0.CO%3B2-3

3. Lattara 6: http://www.lattara.net/LATTARAPUB/PUBLAT/LATTARA6/lattara6.html

4. K. Greene's AJA article on Early Roman lead glazed pottery: http://www.ajaonline.org/pdfs/111.4/AJA1114_Greene.pdf

5. Heath and Tekkök, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Pottery at Ilion (Troia): http://classics.uc.edu/troy/grbpottery/

6. Vessel from Çatalhoyuk (via Flickr): http://www.flickr.com/photos/catalhoyuk/971964416/

7. A Late Minoan III Pyxis from the Metropolitan Museum of Art: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ho/03/eus/hod_1999.423.htm

8. An undocumented ARS Hayes 70 bowl from the dealer Classical Numismatics Group: http://cngcoins.com/Coin.aspx?CoinID=86618

9. Fifteenth Century Mosque Lamp from Jerusalem now in the British Museum: http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/me/m/mosque_lamp.aspx

10. The Perseus Project Vase Catalog: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0043

11. Wikimedia Commons Image of a Greek Geometric Skyphos in the Louvre: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Skyphos_birds_Louvre_CA3822.jpg

12. Sagalassos from Pleiades: http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/639087

African Red Slip On Line

On a somewhat experimental basis, I have begun a page with links to examples of African Red-Slip at the mediterraneanceramics.org website. It uses DNIDs to refer to the specific pieces.

A Question About Images of Museum Objects

Museum visitors are increasingly bringing cameras into galleries, taking pictures and then publishing the resulting digital files under Creative Commons licenses or placing those files into the Public Domain.

An example: louvre.fr:CA+1814 is a Middle Geometric (800–750 BC) Jug from Attica. The photographer of the image on the linked page is Marie-Lan Nguyen and many more examples of her work can be seen on Wikimedia Commons.

The page for her image of louvre.fr:CA+1814 has the following text: "I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide."

This is fantastic and I'm happy to recognize Ms. Nguyen as a personal hero.

I did a little bit of looking on the Louvre website but didn't see any publicly available information about in-gallery photography. In contrast, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has an easy-to-find policy. It reads in part:

Still photography is permitted for private, noncommercial use only in the Museum's galleries devoted to the permanent collection. Photographs cannot be published, sold, reproduced, transferred, distributed, or otherwise commercially exploited in any manner whatsoever.

I am not a lawyer but it's not clear that the availability of this photo on flickr does not violate these terms. It's not commercial use but it is reproduction and/or distribution. The image is of the Met's Proto-Attic Neck Amphora by the Nettos Painter, one of its great treasures, and I'm particularly pleased to see it because I couldn't find a description of that object on the site. I.e., flickr-user mharrsch (aka Mary Harrsch) is filling a gap in the visual documentation of ancient Mediterranean material culture.

But can she do this? I'd love to know because I'd love to be confident that this and similarly produced images are going to remain available and that I and others really can download, store and reuse them for non-commercial purposes.

David Gill on Princeton and Italy

David Gill's Looting Matters blog has been providing excellent coverage of Princeton's agreement to return ownership of certain vases to Italy.

While you're there, be sure to click-through on the images as some of them are very high resolution.