Search Results (15)

The Roman public library of Timgad (Algeria) constituted the study object of several extensive research works, particularly during the French colonial era. Following a virtual restitution-focused research work, this investigation aims to quantitatively characterize the daylighting conditions inside Timgad Public Library. Here, it must be remembered that the luminous environment inside libraries is a main design parameter and a main environmentalfactor. In addition, it must be highlighted that the Timgad region’s luminous climate differs from where Rome’s designers and builders practiced. Hence, at a first step, a comparison is carried out between the precepts of Vitruvius, the pioneer of ancient Roman architecture, and the outcomes of previous studies related to Roman libraries. Then, as a second step, a double approach combining both 3D geometric modeling and numerical simulation using Radiance (2.0Beta) software. These simulations are mainly elaborated for the case of the large reading room, including most of the building’s main activities—consulting, reading, and storing books. Finally, this inner luminous environment’s characterization highlights that the Timgad Roman antic library was not uniformly daylit and suggests that its use varied spatially and temporally with respect to this environmental parameter. Full article

In 44 BC, Julius Caesar established Colonia Laus Iulia Corinthiensis, strategically reviving Corinth to dominate Isthmian trade routes and extend Rome’s commercial influence eastwards. At the centre of the colony lies Temple E, an enigmatic structure with an unidentified associated cult. This study investigates the architectural characteristics of Temple E, focusing on the use of marble as the primary building material. Petrographic analysis, elemental chemical profiling (Mn, Mg, Fe, Sr, Y, V, Cd, La, Ce, Yb, U), and isotopic measurements (δ¹⁸O ‰, δ¹³C ‰) are employed to analyse marble samples from the surrounding region, exploring sourcing and construction practices. Statistical comparisons with ancient quarry databases indicate a strong reliance on locally sourced Doliana marble, underscoring the economic significance of regional quarries and suggesting the existence of a local workshop dedicated to architectural production in Roman Corinth. By integrating geological and archaeometric approaches, this study highlights Corinth’s pivotal role in the regional marble trade and its broader economic importance during the Roman Imperial period. The findings emphasise the use of local resources, illustrating a flourishing marble-working industry and enhancing our understanding of the relationship between local materials and Roman architectural practices. Full article

Portugal’s architecture reflects a rich history influenced by Roman, Moorish, Neoclassical and Romantic styles, with the 20th century marked by Art Deco and colonial influences. Regional styles vary, with white-painted buildings commonly experiencing color changes due to biofilm formation. Visually striking are the red-colored biological patinascommon in the coastal areas. A survey of 120 historical buildings affected by bio-colonization helps to understand the reasons for the patinas’ growing, which beyond natural factors, is often linked to construction defects. A characterization of four samples utilizes Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) to identify the microorganisms composing the red biofilm, while the SEM-EDS, FTIR-ATR and XRD techniques provide further insights into the biofilm and substrate features. The comprehensive data of biochemical characterization indicate a wide variety of microorganisms, including bacteria and fungi, some of which exhibit potential as producers of a UV-tolerant red/yellow pigment (carotenoid) responsible for the macroscopic coloration of bio-colonization. Full article

The ancient Roman town of Turris Libisonis was located on the northern coast of Sardinia and was known in the past as an important naval port. Located in the Gulf of Asinara, it was a Roman colony from the 1st century BCE and became one of the richest towns on the island. Among the archaeological finds in the area, the cippus exhibited in the Antiquarium Turritano is of great interest for its well-preserved traces of polychromy. The artefact dates back to the early Imperial Age and could have had a funerary or votive function. The artefact was first examined using a portable and non-invasive protocol involving multi-band imaging (MBI), portable X-ray fluorescence (p-XRF), portable FT-IR in external reflectance mode (ER FT-IR) and Raman spectroscopy. After this initial examination, a few microfragments were collected and investigated by optical microscopy (OM), X-ray powder diffraction (XRPD), Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy in ATR mode (ATR FT-IR) and micro-ATR mode (μATR FT-IR) and Scanning Electron Microscopy/Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy (SEM-EDS) to improve our knowledge and characterize the materials and to determine their provenience. The results contribute to a better understanding of the provenance of materials and shed light on pigments on stone and their use outside the Italian peninsula and, in particular, Roman Sardinia. Full article

Paul refers to peace twice in Phil. 4:7 and 4:9. This paper argues that the peace of God is a prefiguration of the eschatological peace to come in God’s world. It is be proposed that as Philippians is dealing with a social order (i.e., that of life in Christ) that is distinct from the dominant social order of the Roman empire or that of the colony of Philippi, political implications are at the very least a corollary of what Paul is writing to the Christ devotees in this city. The main points that will be argued are that peace is best understood as a key dimension for God’s upcoming new world that is already present “in Christ”. The Philippian community is called upon to stand firm in Christ (Phil. 4:1), which is, due to devotional and ethical practices, to result in the experience of God’s peace or the God of peace. This must be understood as both a present and a future reality. Accordingly, the Philippian community can be seen as prefiguring God’s future world by inhabiting this world now already in their communal life. Full article

Fluctuations in the size of taurine cattle (Bos taurus) have been regularly demonstrated using archaeozoological data from across time and space in Europe, and have been linked to cultural, social and economic changes, but little is known about whether phenotypic change is accompanied by changes in genetic diversity. Here, we performed PCR-typed analysis of the partial mtDNA d-loop fragments of 99 cattle from the Neolithic to Early Medieval times from a number of different sites across Switzerland, combining newly presented data with previously published data (n = 20). We found that most cattle included (84) were members of the common European macro-haplogroup T3. However, cattle belonging to the haplogroups T1, T2, Q and P were identified as early as the Neolithic period, before 2690 cal. BCE. The highest diversity was found in the Neolithic period, during the 1st century CE and during the 7th–8th centuries CE. Bottleneck phases with low genetic diversity were detected during the Late Iron Age and from the fifth to the seventh century CE. Based on the F_ST values, Horgen, Corded Ware and cattle populations from the seventh to the ninth century CE were plotted away from the clusters of all other populations. The periods with larger-sized cattle correspond with those of high mtDNA d-loop diversity. Phenotype and genotype both appear to respond to the same socio-economic and cultural processes. Full article

Phoenicians were probably the first eastern Mediterranean population to establish long-distance connections with the West, namely the Iberian Peninsula, from the final Bronze to the early Iron Age. For a long time, these colonies all over the Mediterranean Sea directly depended on an important city administration, Gadir, the most important metropolis in the Western Mediterranean. Modern archaeological excavations were discovered in Cadiz (Spain), the ancient city of Gadir, as well as possible Phoenician burial places. The purpose of the present work is the molecular study of 16 individuals, (V–IV millennium B.C, V A.D.) from several burial places found in Cadiz, attempting to disclose their maternal biogeographical ancestry. Furthermore, the determination of a possible biological link between two individuals found buried together was also an objective of this investigation. Of all the 16 analyzed individuals, eight of them produced positive results. Three main lineages were found: HV0, H and L3b. In general, the results support an Eastern origin for this set of individuals, reinforcing the theory of a Phoenician origin. Due to their historical period, in some cases, it was not possible to discard a Roman origin. Finally, the maternal kinship between two individuals found buried together was discarded. Full article

The Roman villa of Pisões (Beja, Portugal) was part of the Lusitanian colony of Pax Iulia. This place stands out for the predominance of the water element in several structures of the villa, highlighting the balneum and the large natatio, one of the largest known in Roman Hispania. The records of the initial excavations that took place beginning in 1967 do not allow the establishment of clear functionalities of the villa. The University of Évora, the owner of the site, conceived an action plan for the requalification and enhancement of the archaeological site. One of the tasks aims to investigate the site using applied geophysics. This work analyses the landscape directly related to the villa, given that it is in the flooded area of a river with a Roman containment dam. It is uncertain whether the water supply comes from this structure or other nearby springs. The use of ground-penetrating radar, combined with unmanned aerial vehicles, all integrated in a geographic information system, allows us to determine the location of underground water connections and create a topographic model with high resolution. Considering all the information, we propose a model for water transport inside the villa and estimate the location of the water supply. Full article

In 1953, officials of the Roman Catholic Mission (RCM) Church in Benin City, Nigeria, requested schoolgirls of Benin–Edo ethnic origin at the local Convent Primary School preparing for baptism to bring their fiancés to school as a condition for baptism. The demand for the presentation of their fiancé was the first time such a condition for baptism was given to young teenage girls since the establishment of the RCM in Benin City in 1923. The condition and demand affected the girls’ relationship with the RCM denomination. In examining and historicizing this episode, this paper asks and answers the following questions: Why did the local RCM officials change their policy to demand fiancés as a condition for the baptism of schoolgirls of Benin–Edo origin? How did the policy affect schoolgirls, particularly their relations with the Catholic faith, and their response? This paper uses archival documents, personal interviews with some former Convent school girls and Catholic church members, and written sources to find answers to these questions and reconstruct the history of women’s education under the RCM in Benin City Parish under colonial rule. Full article

Civilizations have been able to bloom because of the way they have been historically associated with water resources, especially in seeking strategies to ensure a supply to diverse sectors that require them. Thus, challenges in satisfying water demand are shaped by the particular epoch and geographical area. In this sense, Roman engineering represents a new view of waterworks construction. Above all, it concerns building arched structures to convey water from supply sources to cities; even the hydraulic technology developed by Romans would transcend beyond the time this empire ruled the world. Consequently, this paper shows a brief outlook of some hydraulic systems in Asia, Europe and America settled thousands of years ago. Additionally, a historiographic approach is made for several aqueducts built within the limits that currently constitute the state of Zacatecas during colonial times and independent Mexico in order to evaluate their transcendence for mining, agriculture, and cattle. In addition to the allusion to historical context, the main goal has been to evaluate the hydraulic design of eight olden aqueducts based on current engineering approaches, with the purpose of typifying coincidences between constructive procedures inherited from Roman culture and those used by Spanish conquerors to erect similar civil works in this region. Full article

In this article, I place the Leontocephaline from the Villa Albani on the axis of time of the Mithraic Saturn/Kronos prototype. Entangled in that prototype are astrology, concepts of death, and time perceptions. As a symbolic choice, its style reflects politico-religious and cultural colonial appropriation by Rome’s elite of the Severan period and demonstrates a syncretistic complexity adapted to Roman esthetic values. By surveying these issues and identifying the iconographic changes the statue has undergone, I reveal the elements of that colonial appropriation. The movement of the serpents and the astrological reliefs on the body depict Western philosophical concepts of the movement of the soul between the constellations after death and the unbounded (circular) nature of Aionic time entangled with Eastern concepts of the procession of time and Leontocephalic divinities. Full article

This essay utilizes Helen Tiffin’s idea of canonical counter-discourse to read the Medusa poems of Shara McCallum and Dorothea Smartt, two female Caribbean poets. Essentially, canonical counter-discourse involves authors rewriting works or giving voice to peripheral/silenced characters from the literary canon to challenge inequalities upheld by power structures such as imperialism and patriarchy. McCallum’s and Smartt’s poems represent Medusa to reflect their own concerns as women of color from Jamaica and Barbados, respectively. McCallum’s “Madwoman as Rasta Medusa” aligns the titular character from her book Madwoman with Medusa to express Madwoman’s righteous anger at the “wanton” and “gravalicious” ways of a Babylon addressed in second person. Smartt’s series of Medusa poems from Connecting Medium explore the pain of hair and skin treatments Black women endure to try and meet Euro-centric beauty standards, as well as the struggles of immigrants, particularly people of color. Both poets claim Medusa as kindred, empowering Medusa as a figure with agency—which she is denied in the Greco-Roman sources—and simultaneously legitimizing both Caribbean literature and the poets’ feminist and post-colonial protests by linking them to the cultural capital of the classics. Full article

In the colonial era, many Spanish missionaries in the Andes sought a total temporal and cultural break between the pagan past and desired a Christian future of indigenous Andeans. Discussions of Christian conversion in the modern-day Andes have often echoed this line of thinking, portraying conversion—whether to Protestantism or to Roman Catholicism—as an event of radical discontinuity, and mapping the rupture of conversion onto the rupture of the Spanish invasion and subsequent evangelisation of the Americas. In doing so, however, scholars have often portrayed Catholicism as a veneer over the ‘authentic’ Andes—which was assumed to not be Catholic, and indeed could never be. Recently, however, in the south-central Peruvian Andean parish of Talavera—under the guidance of a first generation of an indigenous Catholic priesthood, made up entirely of men born and raised in the local area—discourses surrounding conversion portray the past as a source of continuity rather than discontinuity with Catholicism. Drawing from historical and ethnographic sources, this article demonstrates that although conversion has been and continues to be an important point of reference in contemporary Roman Catholicism in the Andes, the question of what people convert from has shifted. Today, the Andes are spoken of as already inherently and profoundly Catholic; conversion, in the sense of the need to make the Andes ‘really’ Catholic, is considered long accomplished. As the article discusses, in a national context where Catholicism is dominant and ubiquitous to the point of hegemony, this is an inherently political stance which runs counter to longstanding harmful stereotypes of indigenous Andeans as not ‘real’ Catholics and thus unable to be ‘real’ Peruvians. Full article

The primary objective of this study is to leverage the integration of surface mapping data derived from optical, radar, and historic topographical studies with archaeological sampling to identify ancient settlement areas in the Northern Nile Delta, Egypt. This study employed the following methods: digitization of topographic maps, band indices techniques on optical data, the creation of a 3D model from SRTM data, and Sentinel-1 interferometric wide swath (IW) analysis. This type of study is particularly relevant to the search for evidence of otherwise hidden ancient settlements. Due to its geographical situation and the fertility of the Nile, Egypt witnessed the autochthonous development of predynastic and dynastic civilizations, as well as an extensive history of external influences due to Greek, Roman, Coptic, Islamic, and Colonial-era interventions. Excavation work at Buto (Tell el-Fara’in) in 2017–18, carried out by the Kafrelsheikh University (KFS) in cooperation with the Ministry of Antiquities, demonstrated that remote sensing data offers considerable promise as a tool for developing regional settlement studies and excavation strategies. This study integrates the mission work in Buto with the satellite imagery in and around the area of the excavation. The results of the initial Buto area research serve as a methodological model to expand the study area to the North Delta with the goal of detecting the extent of the ancient kingdoms of Buto and Sakha. The results of this research include the creation of a composite historical database using ancient references and early topographical maps (1722, 1941, 1950, and 1997), Optical Corona (1965), Landsat MSS (Multispectral Scanner System) (1973, 1978, and 1988), TM (Thematic Mapper) (2005) data, and Radar SRTM (2014) and Sentinel1 (2018 and 2019) data. The data in this study have been analyzed using the ArcMap, Envi, and SNAP software. The results from the current investigation highlight the rapid changes in the land use/land cover in the last century in which many ancient sites were lost due to agriculture and urban development. Three potential settlement areas have been identified with the Sentinel1 Radar data, and have been integrated with the early maps. These discoveries will help develop excavation strategies aimed at elucidating the ancient settlement dynamics and history of the region during the next phase of research. Full article

Metaphors move—and displace—people. This paper starts from this premise, focusing on how elites have deployed metaphors of water and waste to form a rhetorical consensus around the displacement of non-elite citizens in ancient Roman contexts, with reference to similar discourses in the contemporary Global North and Brazil. The notion of ‘domestic displacement’—the forced movement of citizens within their own sovereign territory—elucidates how these metaphors were used by elite citizens, such as Cicero, to mark out non-elite citizens for removal from the city of Rome through colonisation programmes. In the elite discourse of the late Republican and early Augustan periods, physical proximity to and figurative equation with the refuse of the city repeatedly signals the low social and legal status of potential colonists, while a corresponding metaphor of ‘draining’ expresses the elite desire to displace these groups to colonial sites. The material outcome of these metaphors emerges in the non-elite demographic texture of Julius Caesar’s colonists, many of whom were drawn from the plebs urbana and freedmen. An elite rationale, detectable in the writings of Cicero, Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and others, underpins the notion of Roman colonisation as a mechanism of displacement. On this view, the colony served to alleviate the founding city—Rome—of its surplus population, politically volatile elements, and socially marginalised citizens, and in so doing, populate the margins of its empire too. Romulus’ asylum, read anew as an Alban colony, serves as one prototype for this model of colonisation and offers a contrast to recent readings that have deployed the asylum as an ethical example for contemporary immigration and asylum seeker policy. The invocation of Romulus’ asylum in 19th century debates about the Australian penal colonies further illustrates the dangers of appropriating the asylum towards an ethics of virtue. At its core, this paper drills down into the question of Roman colonists’ volition, considering the evidence for their voluntary and involuntary movement to a colonial site and challenging the current understanding of this movement as a straightforward, series of voluntary ‘mass migrations’. In recognising the agency wielded by non-elite citizens as prospective colonists, this paper contends that Roman colonisation, when understood as a form of domestic displacement, opens up another avenue for coming to grips with the dynamics of ‘popular’ politics in the Republican period. Full article