[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
After the editor’s introduction to the volume and an introductory essay on ancient objecthood, seven chapters survey ancient southeast European objecthood: Technology, Economic Objects, Everyday Objects, Art, Architecture, Bodily Objects, and Object Worlds. The authors, aspiring to both “an authoritative summing up … and a provocation for future work” (xiii), offer a periodized cultural history from antiquity to the “modern age,” how objects (here meaning artifacts) shaped human lives as well as how humans invented, refined, and shaped objects. Fifty-three well-chosen illustrations and statistical tables (e.g., 4.3, of Athenian cooking devices and their contexts) enliven and support the texts.
Osborne’s introduction acknowledges uncertainty about what such a history entails and presented his authors with “a minimal task description” (xv) including “the agency of the object” and its producers and consumers’ “cultural expectations.” Whereas texts supply tenuous scripts without their performance, only disembodied ghosts of reality (Taylor 149), objects and structures supply immediate contact with the lives of the past, some feel for the spatial relationship of people active in them, inter-subjectivity of an undefined sort. Things without descriptions or directions, however, may become puzzling hunks of wire and plastic, or of metal and wood.[1]
Osborne instructs readers to “Forget politics or economics; forget studies of inequality or imperialism” (xvi), but the authors do not forget such pressures, since they shaped every object’s imputed agency. This collection does not get tripped up by “Thing Theory,” Bill Brown’s famous distinctions between objects and things or by abstruse objections to the theory posed by non-things.[2] Authors confront embeddedness and “entanglement” (Arjun Appadurai’s introduction to things’ “social life”) of imperished artifacts, unlike organic commodities, e.g., food and clothing (for the most part).[3] Even here, fortunately, non-perishable coins and amphorae survive as avatars or ghosts of former contents (e.g., wine, oil, garum), so we are not left empty-handed.
Osborne’s introduction surveys the ancient conceptualized status of artificed objects, a category not well served by Plato or even Aristotle. Pliny’s anomalous Natural History marks a Roman advance: the stories attached to things embed them in human activity, but the industrious admiral’s hodge-podge becomes wearisome. Standardization of certain potteries and statue-types rendered things cheaper though they are less communicative of their owners and dedicatees.
Courtney Ann Roby’s chapter on “Technologies” is more theory-driven than expected. We know very little about the training and incentives of technicians (whether surveyors or astrologers) or their techniques, except from inferences from the archaeological record (e.g., Roman roads). The “still lives” of their instrumentaria found on gravestones are metaphors for their careers, their identities (cf. 172).
In her chapter “Economic Objects,” Jennifer Gates-Foster selects items of “entanglement” in economic relationships extending from (69) Herodotos’ Amasis and his golden piss-pot (2.172) to coinage and terra sigillata. Tangible artifacts themselves—as beliefs evolve and devolve—can be valued and exchanged, misconstrued, transferred or consumed, and modified in worth. The dubious Egyptian tale of the ignoble successor, after his own reversal of fortune, repurposes the Pharaonic gold composing a profane piss-pot in order to produce a revered statue of a deity and a laugh at it. The story exemplifies paradoxical meanings that one mass or object can convey over time or to different audiences. Coins’ meanings extend beyond their original fixed value in weight and material. Their bullion, the legends, and the images established identity and promoted social cohesion (75). The very ubiquity of Athenian owls or Roman Imperial denarii attest the power and dependability of the issuing authority (75). And one person’s coin was another person’s amulet, magical powers quite apart from its buying capacity. Apotropaic potency of the image in life might transfer to one’s burial in death, in graves (72). Thereafter, the chapter becomes more abstract. Sigillate pottery, such as Arretine and “Samian” wares, and their progeny serve as indexes of the “experience of plenty” in Italy and then in Gaul and Africa, retaining remarkable similarity, “essential homogeneity” (83) for centuries. As vehicles of consumption, these bowls participated in a “discourse of consumption practices” (80), also described as “performance of social status.”[4]
Lin Foxhall’s survey of extraordinarily ordinary subjects, “everyday objects,” compels greater attention. The very definition of “everyday” poses problems, and she oft notices the absence of some reasonably posited but easily decomposing objects. When someone deposited or dropped wooden spoons and woolen textiles in Italian soil—not in preserving Egyptian sands or Danish peat bogs or Vesuvian ash—it rotted and disappeared. Indeed, your “everyday objects” that have survived usually belonged to the elite (86), not to your slave. Aristotle’s now notorious “living tool” served your supper with or from it. And an object’s values and meanings change over its life cycle—a party-busted fancy drinking cup might be recycled as political “post-its,” a.k.a. ostraka. Tools, loom weights, and personal items rarely figure in Greek household assemblages, because they were carried away, but, even though they had small inherent value (92), they could have sentimental meaning or supply necessities. Fire-related objects, for cooking, light, and heat are also rarer than expected. Although I disagree that “most people did not do a great deal in the dark” (100), Foxhall provides surprising statistics for how few oil lamps, cheap or pricey, archaeologists have dug up in houses. The versatility and utility of other ceramic objects, as well as their fractured durability, explain their ubiquity in the archaeological record. Forks, spoons, and table-knives are uncommon, but various explanations address this absence. Textiles were expensive, and the poor may have bedded themselves in their few clothes.
Miguel John Versluys interrogates “Art.” Revered and damaged images—even mutilated or “killed” artifacts and weapons (cf. 163)—testify to presumed former agency. Design, material, and object biography create agency (120). Arrival from elsewhere increases an object’s value. The Prima Porta Augustus (still known from 150+/- copies) provides complex political messages, of which propaganda for Roman power is but one (131-33).
Rabun Taylor’s “Architecture” reminds us that not all objects can be carried in, off, or away. Buildings, enclosed spaces, centers of activity like the Roman Forum and the Palatine, or Wall Street and Ebbets Field (and the ghost of the last, 150), possess cultural power. Places built for people possess and shape “cultural potentialities” (137). They too can be transactional, as the sponsorship and gift of a temple or stoa in Hellenistic Ionia, the sale of a farmstead (such as that at Vari in Attika), or the Flavians’ construction of a colossal amphitheater. Men can repurpose objects, even ruins such as the remains of the old Athena temple in Athens reconceived as a testimony to Persian impiety, a blackened war shrine. The repurposing of the Doric Athena temple in Syracuse turned it into a Christian cathedral (142-4). Buildings serve to redistribute people and assets, also vegetables and knowledge. The land itself serving urban traffic and the spaces in between fountains, aqueducts, bridges, and tenements form part of social economics. Structures remain cultural commodities even when no longer bartered, traded, mortgaged, or repurposed. Pompey’s theater, reopened this year to the tourist public, was its investor’s property until his death. Its namesake and prestige value induced the Senate to hold meetings within and to assassinate therein the murdered patron’s ferocious enemy. When Romans walked the interior, they legitimated its patron. Columns and arches provide a fetish (145) that embodies the “builder’s” spirit. The elites responsible for the Romanizing architectures of Gaul and Spain, of Syria and North Africa, advertised their wealth, increased their prestige, but, only perhaps, pledged their allegiance to the ruling power. Buildings invited and snared locals and visitors and always protected them from harsh Mediterranean suns and rain showers with rhythmic colonnades and roofed shops, the style of their styloi (158, columns). Structures for performances, the theater then and now, assemble people for edification, entertainment, sport, also legislative and honorific events. Such animated foci of energies, dreams, and ambition (150) never lost certain seating hierarchies of social status, gender, class, and legal privilege. In brief, built space, “buildings, were [also] objects to think with” (149).
Caroline Vout explores “Bodily Objects,” both goods deemed necessary to the living and those required or offered to the dead—“distinct, if overlapping, categories” (163). Also survivors perpetuated iconic attributes of real and mythic persons in their material images, such as Phrasikleia’s grave-marker (164-68). Tombs, inscriptions, and other visible mementos remain to remind the living, while henceforth invisible “grave goods” comfort the dead or help them transition to another world. Before burial these things were displays and stores of wealth, even “barricades” against crowds for Byzantine potentates like Theodora (174).
Ann Kuttner contributes the last, ambitious chapter on “Object Worlds.” She wishes to discover the uniqueness of these specific ancient cultures’ “visual paideia.” After we jump through a few hoops of the hylonoetic and metaplasticity (186) integrating brain, body, and culture, we emerge into a clearer field of particular things mostly fashioned by hand rather than by recent machines of mass production. Satisfaction from recognition, participation, and sensation affect buyers and owners of souvenirs. Ritual objects promote group solidarity, givers and receivers of gifts bond and recall exchange when seeing or remembering the precious bowl or sash. Martial’s collection of Apophoreta, “thing-poems,” record tools and jewels, times and places, craftsmanship and heft, from and to whom (191-93). Kuttner fruitfully marks our ignorance of the emotional processes of “ritual[s][5] of votive deposition” (204).
These contributors to “the material turn” are concerned with consumption more than means of production and supply routes. The private objects of Trimalchio, Petronius’ conspicuous consumer and performer of social status, deserve more attention. Public consumption of water from fountains and private pipes would be welcome. Cyclopean walls were visible to all, tangible demonstrations of bygone power. Osborne rightly observes that ancient historians often ignore objects, things not obviously germane to political and military history. He recalls Thucydides’ nearly comic description of the Segestans’ feeble valuables fraud to indicate wealth that they did not possess (6.46 on p.16). The centrality of materiality (“stuff”) for understanding every kind of ancient self becomes important to current scholarship beyond archaeologists.[6]
The coverage is impressive though some possibilities remain. Even clay, apples, spice plants, and birds, too, often become objects, whether of human utility, sentiment, admiration, or veneration. Invidious were it to list other artifacts that deserve discussion, such as papyrus and maps, e.g., Aristagoras’ portable bronze image (Hdt. 5.49) or Rome’s monstrous marble plan (Osborne, p.6). Pliny’s thirty-seven books of twenty thousand facts collected from 473 authorities’ two thousand volumes in his misnomered Natural History (HN praef. 17) exhibit how learned writers can slip the rails surveying objects objectively. Like this book, and even more necessarily for his burdened dedicatee, Pliny’s vast object-set sported its own indexes dedicated to his boon companion, Titus Vespasian’s convenience.
Bloomsbury Academic has launched many books in their “A Cultural History of X” series, including already Alcohol, Color, Comedy, Death, Horror, Shopping, Youth, etc. The infinite potential demands a clearer definition of the “cultural” in “cultural history.”[7]
Authors and Titles
- Objecthood, Robin Osborne
- Technology, Courtney Ann Roby
- Economic Objects, Jennifer Gates
- Everyday Objects, Lin Foxhall
- Art, Miguel John Versluys
- Architecture, Rabun Taylor
- Bodily Objects, Caroline Vout
- Object Worlds, Ann Kuttner
Notes
[1] Expecting that certain instructive publications have not been noted in BMCR, I mention Horace Miner’s mouth rite in “Body Ritual among the Nacirema,” American Anthropologist, vol. 58 (1956), 503-507; Robert Nathan’s The Weans (New York 1971), recording a word deciphered as “plastric,” and David Macauley’s Motel of the Mysteries (New York 1979), where archaeologists of 4022 CE puzzle over toilet bowls, interpreted to be house altars.
[2] Bill Brown (2013). Other Things. Chicago
[3] Arjun Appdurai, ed. (1986). The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge.
[4] This chapter puzzled this reader. Which categories of made things were not commodified? Many pieces of the “true cross” have been merchandized—sold and bought—symbolic and real capital with a vengeance
[5] The singular “ritual,” and the stenographic hyphenate “Greco-Roman” (204) are woefully inadequate for the infinite ways Minoans, Cypriotes, Spartans, Ptolemaic Greek Egyptians, Etruscans, Gauls, and Mauretanians buried their dead.
[6] A weird repeated misprint for the letter π in the Greek (206 n.4) mars an otherwise well produced book.
[7] Hesiod obscurely refers to an “oak and a rock” proverb (?, Theog. 35)—things in nature, not culture.