BMCR 2009.03.05, Luke Lavan, Objects in Context, Objects in Use

Luke Lavan, Ellen Swift, Toon Putzeys (ed.), Objects in Context,
Objects in Use: Material Spatiality in Late Antiquity. Late Antique
Archaeology, v. 5.  Leiden/Boston:  Brill, 2007.  Pp. viii, 741.  ISBN
9789004165502.  $204.00.

Reviewed by Stefanie Hoss, Small Finds Archaeology Nijmegen (NL)
([email protected])
Word count:  2687 words
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To read a print-formatted version of this review, see
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2009/2009-03-05.html
To comment on this review, see
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Table of Contents
(http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/toc/fy0804/2008005090.html)

The book under review is the result of an eponymous conference held at
Oxford in 2004 and promotes the study of material spatiality in Late
Antiquity. Material spatiality tries to reconstruct ancient reality
(e.g., the use of certain rooms) by looking at the use of the objects
found in defined spaces. Social change (and thus the famous transition
of Late Antiquity) manifested itself not only by changes at the top
trickling down, but also by the small changes in the daily habits of
common people (p. 659). In the introduction, the editors argue
convincingly, that this opens up new ways to try to understand the
nature of the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (p. 25).

The book is made up of two distinctive parts, the first comprising an
introduction and seven bibliographical essays written by the editors
and the second consisting of eighteen conference articles by different
authors on a variety of subjects. It is both an introduction into a
method relatively new in the context of Mediterranean Late Antique
archaeology as well as a collection of the work done in this field up
to date and it succeeds admirably in both. It is a good starting point
to discover interesting new ideas and methods of analyzing finds as
well as an invaluable resource for further reading. Because it is
necessary to have an understanding of the way material objects are used
in both antiquity and archaeology to understand the study of material
spatiality, the book will be most useful to advanced students and
researchers.

As the book has 25 articles in all, a review of every single one at
length would far exceed the allocated space and reviewing only a
selection seems somewhat unfair. I will proceed by reviewing the
articles of each section together, beginning with the introduction and
bibliographical essays and continuing with the six thematic sections.
For a list of the authors and their articles see table of contents.

The first part is written by the editors in varying combinations. In
the introduction, the authors give an extensive overview of the
possibilities and methods of material spatiality in Late Antique period
excavations, with a focus on the Eastern Mediterranean. They introduce
the field and define an agenda to make the contextual analysis of
objects found in future excavations possible. This agenda begins with
the demand to change the focus of research in the Eastern Mediterranean
from buildings towards objects, continues with a description of the
fieldwork and documentation techniques necessary to record the objects
as exactly as possible in their findspot as well as the post-excavation
analysis and publication procedure needed to make a contextual analysis
possible. While this seems excessive for researchers familiar with the
archaeology of Central and Western Europe, the state of research is
somewhat different in the Eastern Mediterranean, vindicating this
thorough approach. The observations  made are very useful and the many
examples cited help to understand how the methods described could be
implemented at a given excavation.

As a whole, the introduction is very solid, covering all the essential
aspects with the necessary caveats and making a good case for the
interdisciplinary 'soft' interpretation of the available data and the
visual reconstruction of the antique situation. As a further benefit,
the contributions of the second part of the book are cited as examples
whenever appropriate and the work of other researchers in this young
field is also often referred to.

The six bibliographical essays following the introduction aim to give
an overview of the research done in the field up to date. They are
split into different elements of urban space; namely domestic,
productive, commercial, political, social, and religious space. The
authors acknowledge from the start that the varied nature of these
contexts makes for very varied sources of evidence, with some essays
concentrating on literary sources while others mainly cite
stratigraphical evidence (45). Each essay gives an introduction into
the subject, followed by an extensive bibliography divided into
different aspects, which include both obvious and more obscure elements
of the urban space. The latter part will be immensely useful to both
newcomers and established researchers on the subject but could have
been made more accessible by allowing more space for the entries by
giving each entry its own line. One has to suspect page (i.e.,
financial) constraints here. However, the form does not lessen the
value of the content.

The first of the thematic sections on domestic space has three
articles, starting with a methodological one on the Urban Villa in
Sagalassos. Toon Putzeys et al. introduce a three-step-method to
"detect patterns within found assemblages in order to classify human
habitation" (p. 206). The thorough and well-argued approach of the
article gives an idea of the possibilities of including all finds into
the analysis and the statistical methods necessary to make it work.

The second article is an analysis of the urban development of six
houses on the mound of Pella (Jordan). With the help of the 'snapshot'
assemblages of the AD 749 earthquake, which caused many human and
animal deaths and ensured a fairly undisturbed material record, Alan
Walmsley reconstructs the structural arrangement of the ground floor of
the houses.

The third article is less concerned with spatiality and more with
magical practices, as it is a study of apotropaic mosaic images and
amulets found in the tri-conch house in Butrint and the tri-conch
church in nearby Antigoneia. John Mitchell here gives an very
interesting overview of the magical imagery in Late Antiquity and
provides some definite dates which demonstrate this habit to have
started (at the very least in Butrint) during the late 4th century.

The section on vessels combines two analyses of (mainly) dining and
drinking vessels with a study on several well-hoards. Joanita Vroom
takes the pictorial representations of objects used in Late Antique
dining as a starting point to understand the use of the archaeological
finds of vessels. The author establishes a change from individual bowls
or plates to large, communal dishes in Late Antiquity and a likelihood
that the same is true for drinking vessels.

In her article on the decoration of vessels, Ellen Swift examines the
correlation of the decoration with the function and use of objects of
conspicuous consumption in social contexts. She formulates five
principles which govern the decoration of objects and proceeds to give
examples of the principles drawing (mainly) on vessels used in
connection with formal dining. Her arguments are clearly set out and
very convincing, especially through the judicious use of
anthropological theory.

In the third article, Sauro Gelichi re-examines the finds of eight
well-hoards found in the space of 150 years in the Modena region. These
share seven recurring types of objects, which surprisingly include
farming tools and local cooking pots. In an older publication, the same
author surmised that the objects were purposefully hidden. Having had
doubts about this conclusion, he here compares the assemblages with
roughly contemporary rubbish deposits from the rural settlement of
Castelecchio di Reno, but has to conclude that the two assemblages
differ markedly as well.

The section on shops and workshops has two articles examining excavated
shops in Dura Europos and Skythopolis respectively and one on an
unusual workshop in Xanthos. Jennifer Baird's re-examines the shops of
Dura with the help of a database filled with the field object register
and other excavation records of the Yale excavation between the World
Wars. In contrast, Elias Khamis in his article on Skythopolis presents
the result of a modern excavation. In both instances, the artefact
assemblages are often inconclusive, but for different reasons. In
Skythopolis, the shops were continually used from the early Roman to
the Umayyad periods and could only provide information on their last
phase before destruction. While this is of course also true for Dura,
the methods of the time of the excavation further limited the artefacts
that might have provided insights into the precise merchandise sold at
the shops. Whereas the analysis of the Dura shops demonstrates the
possibilities of studying older excavations with the help of databases,
both authors make good use of the available architectural and artefact
information to present a picture that gives a good idea of the shared
traits of shops in each city.

The third article on Xanthos is an architectural analysis of an
isolated one-room structure containing a large oven and six basins.
Anne-Marie Manie\re Le/ve^que explores several hypotheses (workshop,
fullonica, thermopolium) and concludes that it was used for storing
perishable foodstuffs (perhaps beans) and cooking both. The author ably
demonstrates here how a very close and detailed study of the
architectural remains can be helpful to determine the use of such an
unusual building with no parallels.

Only two articles make up the section on dress, the first of which is
an overview of the secular attire (dress and accessories) of different
social groups in Late Antiquity, from the emperor himself down to
ordinary people. In this lucid and very readable account, Maria Parani
describes how attire was used in the changing society of Late Antiquity
to demark class and station in life and construct an individual's
identity.

The following article by Mary Harlow further illuminates this point. In
her study of the rhetoric of female dress in the letters of Jerome, she
can demonstrate that because of the rigid nature of dress proprieties,
the literary use of dress was shorthand to reflect on the character of
a person or group. Jerome uses different attires to praise and condemn
female behaviour. As is to be expected of a heretic, he condemns
expensive and ostentatious clothes, revealing the body and using
make-up or false hair. More surprisingly, he also criticizes women who
dress modestly in cheap and rough clothes, suspecting them of secret
pride in their asceticism.

In the section on religious space all articles are dealing with
churches and three of the four revolve around the objects found within
a church. Be/atrice Caseau's first article uses the inventories of
churches to try to reconstruct the objects used within a church which
do not appear in the archaeological record. While Caseau has
documentary evidence as her starting point, Vincent Michel uses
archaeological finds to investigate the functions of church annexe
rooms in Palestine. In his opinion, specific furniture and furnishings
(especially cupboards) discovered in annexe rooms with direct access to
the church, point to the use of these rooms as diakonikon (dean's
room). A diakonikon was used for the preparation of the Eucharist and
storage of liturgical objects and vestments as well as the treasure of
the church, which in addition to liturgical objects could include money
and relics.

The third article by Zbigniew Fiema studies the artefact assemblage in
room I of Petra church, which was destroyed by fire. Fiema is able to
reconstruct that the room had been used as a storage place for a family
archive and for other valuable, but seldom used objects. With the help
of the exact find spots of the artefacts, Fiema can also partly
reconstruct the likely progression of the destruction fire. The first
three articles each use a different method to try to reconstruct the
same sort of space and the result is especially convincing in
combination. Because the space is explored from three different
directions--the documentary evidence, the combined archaeological
evidence from several churches and the specific archaeological evidence
of a single room--the articles complete each other and thus give an
even better impression of church contents that they would have standing
on their own.

The last article of the section deals with the non-liturgical objects
in healing sanctuaries. In this (her second article), Be/atrice Caseau
uses the literary evidence of miracle stories to vividly describe the
daily proceedings at a healing sanctuary, where quite a lot of people
could be searching relief from their afflictions, often staying days or
years. Because ordinary objects often played an important role in
miracle stories, the author here opens a treasure trove of descriptions
of ordinary objects present in sanctuaries as well as glimpses at their
use and significance.

In the last section on military space, Andrew Gardner describes the
change in both the use of space and artefacts in some Late Roman forts
in Britain and Belgium. The material indicates, that while some
traditions persisted (e. g. the eating of pork), others changed and
became more local. The article resembles an iceberg in that it has a
large and (at first reading) largely unseen theoretical background
which nevertheless is able to spark new thoughts on the nature of
social change and the best way to archaeologically detect it.

The remaining two articles are on the same sites, namely the city of
Nicopolis and the nearby fort of Dichin in Bulgaria. Andrew Poulter
demonstrates with the help of several sites within theses two complexes
how the artefact assemblage can assist with the interpretation of both
the use and destruction phase of contexts. Pam Grinter illustrates how
the accurate record of sampling for plant remains can help to
differentiate the storage spaces of different crops, allowing various
interesting interpretations.

To conclude, the book as a whole is a good example of how to introduce
an approach that is yet relatively unknown to a special field. While
similar approaches have been used in Early Roman archaeology in the
Northwestern provinces for some time now, it is still quite new to the
study of the late antique central and eastern Mediterranean. As the
book includes both a bibliography of the work done up to now as well as
a selection of very diverse practical examples, it gives the newcomer
to this interpretational technique a starting point from which to
further explore the world of material spatiality and the seasoned
researcher new food for thought besides a very useful source of
comparative studies in the bibliography.

As to the errors, some redundant word repetitions and typos as well as
some misspellings were noticed, none of which hindered the
understanding of the text. Considering the frequency of about one error
found per hundred pages, the book may be described as admirably edited.


Table of Contents

Introduction:
L. Lavan, E. Swift, T. Putzeys, Material Spatiality in Late Antiquity:
Sources, Approaches and Field Methods.
Bibliographical Essays:
L. Lavan, T. Putzeys, Material Spatiality in Late Antiquity: An
Introduction to the Bibliography.
T. Putzeys, Domestic Space in Late Antiquity.
T. Putzeys, Productive Space in Late Antiquity.
T. Putzeys, L. Lavan, Commercial Space in Late Antiquity.
L. Lavan, Political Space in Late Antiquity.
L. Lavan, Social Space in Late Antiquity.
L. Lavan, Religious Space in Late Antiquity.
Domestic Space:
T. Putzeys, M. Waelkens, J. Poblome, W. van Neer, B. de Cupere, T. van
Thuyne, N. Kellens, Contextual Analysis in Sagalassos.
A. Walmsley, Households at Pella, Jordan: Domestic Destruction Deposits
of the Mid-8th century.
J. Mitchell, Keeping the Demons out of the House: the Archaeology of
Apotropaic Strategy and Practice in Late Antique Butrint
Vessels in context:
J. Vroom, The Archaeology of Late Antique Dining Habits in the Eastern
Mediterranean: A Preliminary Study of the Evidence.
S. Gelichi, The Modena Well-hoards: Rural Domestic Artefact Assemblages
in Late Antiquity.
E. Swift, Decorated Vessels: The Function of Decoration in Late
Antiquity.
Shops and Workshops.
J. Baird, Shopping, Eating and Drinking in Dura Europos: Reconstructing
Context.
E. Khamis, The Shops of Skythopolis in Context.
A.-M. Manie\re Le/ve^que, An Unusual Structure on the Lycian Acropolis
at Xanthos.
Dress:
M. Parani, Defining Personal Space: Dress and Accessories in Late
Antiquity.
M. Harlow, The Impossible Art of Dressing to Please: Jerome and the
Rhetoric of the Dress.
Religious Space:
B. Caseau, Objects in Churches: The Testimony of Inventories.
V. Michel, Furniture, Fixtures, and Fittings in Churches:
Archaeological Evidence from Palestine (4th-8th c.) and the Role of the
Diakonikon.
Z. Fiema, Storing in the Church: Artefacts in Room I of Petra Church.
B. Caseau, Ordinary Objects in Christian Healing Sanctuaries.
Military Space:
A. Gardner, Soldiers and Spaces: Daily Life in Late Roman Forts.
A. Poulter, Interpreting Finds in Contexts: Nicopolis and Dichin
Revisited.
P. Grinter, Grappling with the Granary: Context issues at Dichin.