Athens: Material Culture Approaches to the Classical City

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
• Convenor: to be confirmed
• Assessment: a 5000-5500-word essay (100%)

Throughout much of the archaic and classical periods, Athens was the foremost city of the Aegean region, famed for its power and creativity. Most modern studies of the city are traditional in the sense that they explore its archaeological and textual legacies in terms of the light they shed on its citizens' skills and intellectual achievements. The aim of this course is to challenge the marginalisation of objects in current literature by focusing on how humans and materials co-produced each other in classical Athens.

We will critically review recent works in materiality and material culture studies and examine the opportunities they present for understanding the work which different types of resource (from clay to metals and marble) and artefact (such as clothes, furniture, coins, and measuring pots) performed in different contexts of production, exchange and consumption.

Indicative Module content

• Introduction: thinking with things
• Body, clothing, identity
• Pots and pans: another look at the symposium
• Home furnishings: storage and luxury consumption
• Inscribed gifts and the construction of personhood
• Standardisation and metrology
• Money and the illusion of autonomy
• Public archives: making and displaying decrees
• State burial and collective memory
• Monumental memory culture on the Acropolis

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

• show an awareness of contemporary archaeological theory and practice
• understand the range of skills and techniques required for collating and comparing corpora of objects across typological boundaries, and interpret them in terms of social practices
• demonstrate an understanding of the methodologies used in the analysis and interpretation of contextual and morphological data
• demonstrate familiarity with the terminology and methodology of archaeology, its intellectual foundations, and the epistemological constraints they impose on the discipline
• carry out effective evaluations of information, data, documentation and material remains.