Ancient funerary reliefs are full of representations of writing materials and instruments, the interpretation of which can help us better understand the phenomenon of ancient literacy. The eight studies in this volume enrich our knowledge of Roman writing with many new aspects and detailed observations.

References to the past play a significant role on many levels in both modern and ancient societies. What societies choose to remember and how they do it can be seen in relation to their social, religious, and moral world view. Ancient societies invested heavily in remembrance, and the memory of remarkable individuals and significant events was deliberately perpetuated through both literature and material culture. The papers in this volume discuss the topic of the deliberate creation of memory in relation to both literary and material evidence from the Graeco-Roman world. They range in time from the Greek Archaic period to Late Antiquity. A major aim of the collection as a whole is an attempt to cast light on the relationship between an individual’s gender and social status and the existence of opportunities for ensuring that he or she would be remembered after death.

This volume gathers contributions from scholars from a variety of disciplines to provide a comprehensive assessment of the importance of dogs through history. There is a focus on the necessity of an ‘interdisciplinary perspective’ to fully understand the fundamental role that dogs have played in our past.

This book focuses on the material practice of ancient literacy through a contextual examination of Roman writing equipment.

This volumepresents acollection of essays on different aspects of Roman sarcophagi. These varied approaches will produce fresh insights into a subject which is receiving increased interest in English-language scholarship, with a new awareness of the important contribution that sarcophagi can make to the study of the social use and production of Roman art. The book will therefore be a timely addition to existing literature. Metropolitan sarcophagi are the main focus of the volume, which will cover a wide time range from the first century AD to post classical periods (including early Christian sarcophagi and post-classical reception). Other papers will look at aspects of viewing and representation, iconography, and marble analysis. There will be an Introduction written by the co-editors.

The Roman period witnessed massive changes in the human-material environment, from monumentalised cityscapes to standardised low-value artefacts like pottery. This book explores new perspectives to understand this Roman ‘object boom’ and its impact on Roman history. In particular, the book’s international contributors question the traditional dominance of ‘representation’ in Roman archaeology, whereby objects have come to stand for social phenomena such as status, facets of group identity, or notions like Romanisation and economic growth. Drawing upon the recent material turn in anthropology and related disciplines, the essays in this volume examine what it means to materialise Roman history, focusing on the question of what objects do in history, rather than what they represent. In challenging the dominance of representation, and exploring themes such as the impact of standardisation and the role of material agency, Materialising Roman History is essential reading for anyone studying material culture from the Roman world (and beyond).

This book uses five case-studies to set ancient technical knowledge in its political, social and intellectual context.