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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Materiality of Roman Architecture: What Do the Monuments Stand For?

The Materiality of Roman Architecture: What Do the Monuments Stand For?

Rajala, Ulla
Emanuelsson-Paulson, Therese

Paperback

ArchaeologyAncient RomeArchitecture History

PREORDER - Expected ship date March 31, 2027

ISBN13: 9798888572719
Publisher: Oxbow Books Limited
Published: Mar 31 2027
Pages: 240
Language: English
Monuments and Roman architecture mediate group identity and external relations through sensory urban landscapes, decoration, and symbolic power.

What and how do monuments communicate? This book explores the mediating role of Roman architecture. Objects mediate between people in a range of ways, and in so doing are essential for the consolidation and expression of group identity and external relations. In recent archaeological and interdisciplinary discussions, objects have been given agency but the extent to which such 'material turn' would help Roman archaeology has been questioned. In these collected essays, using examples that range across the Roman provinces, we show that materiality is useful as a concept for the study of monuments.

Roman towns were full of buildings, creating different kinds of urban landscapes that affected people's senses. Roman architecture could be grandiose and massive, full of decorations and friezes. Monuments stood for something and they conveyed different ideas and messages. But whose messages did they communicate and what was their reception? Do they still stand for something? And can we always understand their messages? In this book we interpret and reinterpret pre-Roman and Roman monuments in the core and periphery of the Roman Empire. In addition, the assessment of their reception in the later periods is explored.

Contributions consider topics such as the symbolic manifestation of social and political power and ideology through the style and decoration of monuments in and around the Roman fora, the adoption of Greek style columnated buildings in pre-Roman Sicily and of Roman-style architecture by local elites in post-Conquest Gaul; the meaning(s) behind the imposition of the Odeion of Agrippa on the Athenian Agora; the extended political communication represented by Hadrianic honorary arches; and the imperial messaging inherent in the use of particular types of marble in public buildings.

Even if the materiality of Roman art and architecture has been discussed before, monuments per se have not been placed in the centre of attention and their meanings have not been explored. The papers presented here discuss both how the monuments have been understood in their cultural setting and the time they were built in, and how they have been interpreted by other cultures or in later time periods. These papers provide an important and timely review of new directions in the current study of monuments in Roman archaeology.

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