Housing in the Ancient Mediterranean World

Material and Textual Approaches

J. A. Baird, April Pudsey

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781108960663
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

One of the greatest benefits of studying the ancient Greek and Roman past is the ability to utilise different forms of evidence, in particular both written and archaeological sources. The contributors to this volume employ this evidence to examine ancient housing, and what might be learned of identities, families, and societies, but they also use it as a methodological locus from which to interrogate the complex relationship between different types of sources. Chapters range from the recreation of the house as it was conceived in Homeric poetry, to the decipherment of a painted Greek lekythos to build up a picture of household activities, to the conjuring of the sensorial experience of a house in Pompeii. Together, they present a rich tapestry which demonstrates what can be gained for our understanding of ancient housing from examining the interplay between the words of ancient texts and the walls of archaeological evidence.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Between Words and Walls: Material and Textual Approaches to Housing in the Graeco-Roman World
• 1 Kinship 'In the Halls': Poetry and the Archaeology of Early Greek Housing
• 2 Domesticating the Ancient House: The Archaeology of a False Analogy
• 3 Mind the Gap: Reuniting Words and Walls in the Study of the Classical Greek House
• 4 A Family Affair: The Household Use of Attic lekythoi
• 5 Textiles in Alkestis' thalamos
• 6 Architectural Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of Architecture: Athens and Macedon in the Mid-4th Century bce
• 7 The Reconstruction of an Agricultural Landscape: Seeking the Farmstead
• 8 Mudbricks and Papyri from the Desert Sand: Housing in the Ptolemaic and Roman Fayum
• 9 Housing and Community: Structures in Houses and Kinship in Roman Tebtynis
• 10 The Elusive vestibulum
• 11 Living in the Liminal: Lares Compitales Shrines, Freedmen and Identity in Delos
• 12 Experiencing Sense, Place and Space in the Roman Villa
• 13 Houses and Time: Material Memory at Dura-Europos
• 14 Spaces of Desire: Houses, Households and Social Reproduction in the Roman World
• 15 A Response: 'Using the Material and Written Sources' Revisited
• Index