Art Archaeology Of The Roman World

Mark D. Fullerton blends the art of the Roman period with its history of political intrigue, military and religious ideologies, and intercultural interaction. The book not only explores the art of Rome itself but also that of the Roman provinces, including Syria, Egypt, Algeria, Greece and the British Isles, showing how Roman art drew from and influenced the wider ancient world.Each of the book's four parts opens with a timeline and historical overview, allowing the reader to better understand how the art relates to the political and social lives of the people of ancient Rome. Individual chapters begin with a map of Rome, illustrating how the city changed over centuries of rebuilding and reimagining.With an introduction, 'What Is Roman about Roman Art?', and 'Materials and Techniques' features on the artistic innovations introduced by the Romans, such as concrete, linear and atmospheric perspective, and mosaic, the book explores how Roman influences still affect the art and architectural world today.

Publisher Description

This new survey makes sense of Roman art by placing works in their full historical context--showing students not only how but also why art was used in Roman society and politics (such as wealthy Romans sponsoring public projects to promote themselves). The book breaks new ground by devoting chapters to art from the provinces, rather than focusing solely on Rome itself. Mark Fullerton provides the most in-depth look at Roman art from across the empire, connecting Roman art to the Mediterranean and the wider world.

First edition published in 1998 by Oxford University Press with the title Imperial Rome and Christian triumph: the art of the Roman Empire, AD 100-450.

Explores the problems for studying art and religion in Eurasia arising from ancestral, colonial and post-colonial biases in historiography.

Roman Archaeology for Historians provides students of Roman history with a guide to the contribution of archaeology to the study of their subject. It discusses the issues with the use of material and textual evidence to explain the Roman past, and the importance of viewing this evidence in context. It also surveys the different approaches to the archaeological material of the period and examines key themes that have shaped Roman archaeology. At the heart of the book lies the question of how archaeological material can be interpreted and its relevance for the study of ancient history. It includes discussion of the study of landscape change, urban topography, the economy, the nature of cities, new approaches to skeletal evidence and artefacts in museums. Along the way, readers gain access to new findings and key sites - many of which have not been discussed in English before and many, for which, access may only be gained from technical reports. Roman Archaeology for Historians provides an accessible guide to the development of archaeology as a discipline and how the use of archaeological evidence of the Roman world can enrich the study of ancient history, while at the same time encouraging the integration of material evidence into the study of the period’s history. This work is a key resource for students of ancient history, and for those studying the archaeology of the Roman period.

This book provides a new account of the urbanism of the Roman world between 100 BC and AD 300. To do so, it draws on a combination of textual sources and archaeological material to provide a new catalogue of cities, calculates new estimates of their areas and uses a range of population densities to estimate their populations.

This book examines the rich corpus of mosaics created in Crete during the Roman and Late Antique eras. It provides essential information on the style, iconography and chronology of the material, as well as discussion of the craftspeople who created them and the technologies they used. The contextualized mosaic evidence also reveals a new understanding of Roman and Late Antique Crete. It helps shed light on the processes by which Crete became part of the Roman Empire, its subsequent Christianization and the pivotal role the island played in the Mediterranean network of societies during these periods. This book provides an original approach to the study of mosaics and an innovative method of presenting a diachronic view of provincial Cretan society.