The Latin inscriptions in the Kelsey Museum are among the best primary sources we have for documenting the lives of the lower classes in the Roman world. They provide unique evidence of the details of Roman daily life, including beliefs, occupations, families, and attitudes toward death. The 400 entries in this volume include all of the Latin inscriptions on stone or metal in the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan; they represent the largest, and arguably the most important, collection of Latin inscriptions in the Western Hemisphere. The collection is notable not just for its size but for the fact that almost all the inscriptions were acquired by purchase for their scholarly and educational value to the members of the university community. Because of this, the collection is also an important testimony to a seminal phase in the development of the study of Classics at the University of Michigan. For the first time ever, this project makes the Latin inscriptions of the Kelsey available in one volume and has provided an opportunity to reexamine some texts that have not been edited in over a century. The commentaries for this edition have benefited from a wealth of recent scholarship resulting in some amended readings and reidentification of texts. Steven L. Tuck is Assistant Professor of Classics at Miami University of Ohio. The Kelsey Museum Studies series, edited by University of Michigan professors Elaine Gazda, Margaret Cool Root, and John Pedley, is designed to publish unusual material in the Museum's collections, together with reports of current and past archaeological expeditions sponsored by the University of Michigan.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Francis W. Kelsey began to amass a large collection of artifacts from ancient sites across the Mediterranean, with an emphasis on Imperial Rome, to broaden the teaching of antiquity at the University of Michigan. Among the objects now housed in the museum that bears his name is a collection of seven hundred colorful stones dating to the Roman period, one of the largest and most varied collections of Roman decorative stones outside Europe. These pieces were obtained as archaeological artifacts, mostly architectural, with many deriving from well-known ancient buildings, such as the Baths of Diocletian in Rome and the Palace of Herod in Jericho, allowing for new interpretations of their architectural decoration and design. Chapters trace the formation of the collection, study the archaeology of the artifacts, and detail the history of each stone and its study with a comprehensive bibliography. In keeping with the nature of the collection, Roman Decorative Stone Collections focuses on archaeological contexts and object biographies, from the stones' first use to their eventual display in the Kelsey Museum. Entries are accompanied by rich photographs detailing the stones' appearances, environmental factors, and their collectors. The fully illustrated catalog includes essays deriving from Kelsey's original notes on sources, buildings, sites, and dealers. As the first formal catalog of these items, Roman Decorative Stone Collections is an accessible resource of Roman archaeology, antiquities, and the decorative arts.

This book advances our understanding of the place of Latin inscriptions in the Roman world. It enables readers, especially those new to the subject, to appreciate both the potential and the limitations of inscriptions as historical source material, by considering the diversity of epigraphic culture in the Roman world and how it has been transmitted to the twenty-first century. The first chapter offers an epigraphic sample drawn from the Bay of Naples, illustrating the dynamic epigraphic culture of that region. The second explores in detail the nature of epigraphic culture in the Roman world, probing the limitations of traditional ways of dividing up inscriptions into different categories, and offering examples of how epigraphic culture developed in different geographical, social and religious contexts. It examines the 'life-cycle' of inscriptions - how they were produced, viewed, reused and destroyed. Finally, the third provides guidance on deciphering inscriptions face-to-face and handling specialist epigraphic publications.

Scholars working in a number of disciplines – archaeologists, classicists, epigraphers, papyrologists, Assyriologists, Egyptologists, Mayanists, philologists, and ancient historians of all stripes – routinely engage with ancient textual sources that are either material remains from the archaeological record or historical products of other connections between the ancient world and our own. Examining the archaeology-text nexus from multiple perspectives, contributors to this volume discuss current theoretical and practical problems that have grown out of their work at the boundary of the division between archaeology and the study of early inscriptions. In 12 representative case-studies drawn from research in Asia, Africa, the Mediterranean, and Mesoamerica, scholars use various lenses to critically examine the interface between archaeology and the study of ancient texts, rethink the fragmentation of their various specialized disciplines, and illustrate the best in current approaches to contextual analysis. The collection of essays also highlights recent trends in the development of documentation and dissemination technologies, engages with the ethical and intellectual quandaries presented by ancient inscriptions that lack archaeological context, and sets out to find profitable future directions for interdisciplinary research.

A catalogue of the largest known collection of brick stamps outside Italy

"One of nine volumes published ... to celebrate the Eleventh International Congress of Greek and Latin Epigraphy at Rome in 1997, [it] ... attempts to register all ancient Greek and Latin inscriptions in museum, university, and private collections in the United States. " -- Back cover.