The Hellenistic, Roman, and Medieval Glass from Cosa continues the exemplary record of publication by the American Academy in Rome on important classes of materials recovered in excavation from one of the principal archaeological sites of Roman Italy. Over 15,000 fragments of glass tableware, ranging in date from the mid-second century BCE to the early fifth century CE, were found at Cosa, a small town in Etruria (modern Tuscany). Cosa's products were chiefly exported to North Africa and Europe, but its influence was felt throughout the Mediterranean world. The research and analysis presented here are the work of the late David Frederick Grose, who began this project when no other city site excavations in Italy focused on ancient glass. He confirmed that the Roman glass industry began to emerge in the Julio-Claudian era, beginning in the principate of Augustus. His study traces the evolution of manufacturing techniques from core-formed vessels to free blown glass, and it documents changes in taste and style that were characteristic of the western glass industry throughout its long history. At the time of Grose's unexpected passing, his study was complete but not yet published. Nevertheless, the reputation of his work in this area has done much to establish the value and importance of excavating and researching Cosa's glass. This volume, arranged and edited by R.T. Scott, makes Grose's essential scholarship on the subject available for the first time.

A landmark contribution to our knowledge of the Roman glass industry in the Western Mediterranean

Economic circularity is the ability of a society to reduce waste by recycling, reusing, and repairing raw materials and finished products. This concept has gained momentum in academia, in part due to contemporary environmental concerns. Although the blurry conceptual boundaries of this term are open to a wide array of interpretations, the scholarly community generally perceives circular economy as a convenient umbrella definition that encompasses a vast array of regenerative and preservative processes. Despite the recent surge of interest, economic circularity has not been fully addressed as a macrophenomenon by historical and archaeological studies. The limitations of data and the relatively new formulation of targeted research questions mean that several processes and agents involved in ancient circular economies are still invisible to the eye of modern scholarship. Examples include forms of curation, maintenance, and repair, which must have had an influence on the economic systems of premodern societies but are rarely accounted for. Moreover, the people behind these processes, such as collectors and scavengers, are rarely investigated and poorly understood. Even better-studied mechanisms, like reuse and recycling, are not explored to their full potential within the broader picture of ancient urban economies. This volume stems from a conference held at Moesgaard Museum supported by the Carlsberg Foundation and the Centre for Urban Networks Evolutions (UrbNet) at Aarhus University. To enhance our understanding of circular economic processes, the contributions in this volume aim to expand the framework of the discussion by exploring circular economy over the longue durée and by integrating an interdisciplinary perspective. Furthermore, the volume wants to give prominence to classes of material, processes, agents, and methodologies generally overlooked or ignored in modern scholarship.

This long-awaited volume presents the work of Elizabeth Lyding Will on the important group of transport amphoras found at Cosa. This town has been widely recognized as a prototypical colony of the later Roman Republic and a source for trade with Gaul and Spain, so this publication of its finds has important implications for archaeologists and historians of the ancient world. Will’s initial work was on Latin amphora-stamps in the eastern Mediterranean, and through the 1960s and 1970s she developed an amphora typology based on materials found in the region and at Cosa. What has not been appreciated is that this typology was not limited to stamped Republican amphoras but also included unstamped vessels, such as imperial Spanish, African, and eastern amphoras dating as late as the fifth century CE. This book shows that Will was far ahead of her time in documenting the Mediterranean trade in commodities carried in amphoras: her work not only provides a record of the amphoras found on the town-site of Cosa, but also includes a comparison between the finds from the port and the town. At the time of Will’s death, her manuscript consisted of a typed catalogue of the amphora stamps from Cosa and an equal number of unstamped vessels, but was missing important elements. On the basis of extensive notes and photographs, Kathleen Warner Slane has reviewed and updated the manuscript, adding type descriptions and footnotes to materials that have appeared since Will’s death as well as a framing introduction and conclusions. Appendices highlight an Augustan amphora dump on the Arx and add a catalogue of the Greek amphora stamps found at Cosa. Cosa: The Roman and Greek Amphoras will be of interest to scholars and students of Rome and its system of colonies, and also to those interested in Greek and Roman archaeology and trade in the ancient world.

This important new volume examines archaeological evidence of Roman colonization of the Middle Republican period. Themes of land use, ethnic accommodation and displacement, colonial identity, and administrative schemes are also highlighted. In delving deeply into the uniqueness of select colonial contexts, these essays invite a novel discussion on the phenomenon of colonialism in the political landscape of Rome’s early expansion. Roman urbanism of the Middle Republican period brought to the Italian peninsula fundamental changes, an important example of which, highlighted by a wealth of studies, is the ebullience of a dense network of colonies, as well as a mix of senatorial tactics and individual initiatives that underpinned their foundation. Whether Latin, Roman, or Maritimae, colonies created a new mesh of communities and imposed a new topography; more subtly, they signified the mechanisms of the rising hegemony. This book brings to the fore the diversity, agendas, and overall impact of a “settlement device” that changed the Italian landscape and introduced a new idea of Roman town.

The recycling and reuse of materials and objects were extensive in the past, but have rarely been embedded into models of the economy; even more rarely has any attempt been made to address the scale of these practices. Recent developments, including the use of large datasets, computational modelling, and high-resolution analytical chemistry are increasingly offering the means to reconstruct recycling and reuse, and even to approach the thorny issue of quantification. This volume is the first to bring together these new approaches, and the first to present a consideration of recycling and reuse in the Roman economy, taking into account a range of materials and using a variety of methodological approaches. It presents integrated, cross-referential evidence for the recycling and reuse of textiles, papyrus, statuary and building materials, amphorae, metals, and glass, and examines significant questions about organization, value, and the social meaning of recycling.

This volume shows the pervasiveness over a millennium and a half of the little-studied phenomenon of multi-tier intertextuality, whether as ‘linear’ window reference – where author C simultaneously imitates or alludes to a text by author A and its imitation by author B – or as multi-directional imitative clusters. It begins with essays on classical literature from Homer to the high Roman empire, where the feature first becomes prominent; then comes late antiquity, a lively area of research at present; and, after a series of essays on European neo-Latin literature from Petrarch to 1600, another area where developments are moving rapidly, the volume concludes with early modern vernacular literatures (Italian, French, Portuguese and English). Most papers concern verse, but prose is not ignored. The introduction to the volume discusses the relevant methodological issues. An Afterword outlines the critical history of ‘window reference’ and includes a short essay by Professor Richard Thomas, of Harvard University, who coined the term in the 1980s.