No description available.

No description available.

Thesis advisor: Dennis Hale / After a six year legislative drafting process President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act into law on June 8, 1906. The bill protected archeological sites, but also allowed the President to declare national monuments of federal lands covering "objects of historic and scientific interest" Roosevelt interpreted the act broadly and made it into one of the most important pieces of conservation legislation in the history of the UInited States. The paper discusses how and why Roosevelt interpreted the act in this way and what impact it had on future presidents, notably Franklin Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2004. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

Developing the idea of an ‘object biography’, as defined by Kopytoff (1986), this thesis challenges a fixed, static concept of antiquities and their present meanings by focusing on the routes they travel through space and time as they circulate through the hands of unauthorised finders, dealers and collectors. The research has been carried out in India, focusing on the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. As a non-Western country with a period of colonial history, India is an ideal location to explore not just the diversity and mutability of these meanings but also the tensions between authorized and divergent viewpoints regarding the value and management of the past. My methodology has drawn on theoretical models from the social sciences that approach the production of meaning in and through material culture as an organic and on-going process of human-object relations. Through a process of qualitative surveying using purposive sampling and semi-structured interviews, two distinct object case studies have been devised and investigated: the circulation of structural and household antiques from the 19th and 20th century houses of the Nagarathar Chettiars, and the excavation of coins, beads, jewellery and figurines in the riverbeds of Tamil Nadu and their subsequent sale, collection and circulation. In the course of fieldwork I have recorded over 55 hours of interactions with 107 respondents in locations across Tamil Nadu, as well as Bangalore, Mumbai, Jodhpur and London. I have supported this data with photographs, fieldnotes, and internet sources. In my analysis of this data I have argued that many people in Tamil Nadu and South India feel a sense of distance and alienation from the world of ‘heritage’ as defined and managed by the government, while at the same time people are engaged in their own processes of meaning-making through the old objects they engage with and circulate on a daily basis. The objects studied in this thesis are not seen as pertaining to the ‘sleeping’ realm of antiquities and authorized heritage, but to the ‘waking’ realm of active circulation, use and transformation. Furthermore, in the variety of ways that people engage with and transform these objects we can see the negotiation of relationships with the past and identities in the present at a time of rapid social and economic change in India.

Despite a renewed interest in scholarship about archaic warfare, hoplites, Homeric society, and several other related areas, archery in Archaic Greece has managed to escape comprehensive study for half a century. Scholarship on the subject stands in urgent need of update and revision. Certain erroneous beliefs about archery have become canonical and are dangerous impediments to academic progress in those areas of study that require an accurate and nuanced understanding of archers or archery. I conclude that, contrary to popular opinion, there was no point in Greek history when the bow was not used. Rather, it was used in a variety of ways to support, supplement, and complement heavily armed infantrymen. Although archery could be effective, especially against horses and light-armed men, the bow was not as effective against heavily armed infantrymen for the simple reason that arrows would not often have been able to penetrate Greek armor. This factor did not, however, mean that the bow was impotent or "the feeble weapon of a worthless man." My study of wounds, their treatment, infection, and the potential use of arrow toxins adds a fruitful and previously unexplored perspective on the risks involved with facing an archer and some of the psychological considerations of doing so. In a form of warfare wherein armies were so heavily dependent upon morale and so easily compromised by fear, an arrow was a weapon of terror. Moreover, dying six days after a battle of tetanus did not accord with the hoplites' ideal of a `beautiful death' - one of the prospects that fortified a warrior as he girded himself for what was surely a horrifying ordeal. I also argue that the identity of archers changed over time. Early on, warriors might use a variety of weapons and the bow might have been used by just about anyone. Later, with the advent of the hoplite phalanx, archers became light-armed specialists. While convention holds that these archers were Scythian or Cretan mercenaries, I prove that there is no compelling reason to believe that this was so. The archers were Greek and likely derived from the lower classes of citizens. Moreover, despite its ideological demotion among the elite, the bow did not carry an actively negative association until the Persian Wars in the early 5th century B.C.E. In sum, the treatment of archery in the Archaic period is considerably more nuanced than many scholars have allowed.

This dissertation explores what images of ghosts in Roman art can reveal about the very limits of representation and the act of seeing itself. My approach differs from that of many previous studies on the supernatural, therefore, in that it ultimately has little to do with the question of whether or not the ancients were truly convinced that ghosts exist. While not discounting the importance of belief, I am interested rather in how modalities of belief (or unbelief) developed within a prescribed framework of possibilities--particularly with regard to the historical transformation of ideas about the nature of vision and representation--in which images played a crucial role. While much work has been done on aspects of death that touch upon the supernatural in discrete areas of research on folklore, magic, religion, or theater, for example, the ghost itself has never been the focus of a synthetic study in Roman art. This project is therefore intended to cut across these discussions to arrive at a more rounded picture of how the Romans went on living with the dead.

This dissertation explores the ethics and norms associated with contracting in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt as a contribution to the institutional study of ancient contract and its relationship to the economic history of the Roman world. Although ancient contracts in the Hellenistic tradition (i.e., non-Roman law contracts) have been studied rigorously from a legal perspective, there has been no systematic study of contract as an economic institution in the eastern half of the ancient Mediterranean. The first three chapters argue that such a study is a historical desideratum and seek to establish the theoretical and methodological basis and scope of such a project. Theoretically, the most decisive factor in determining the nature, extent, and success of contract as an economic institution is actual enforcement, as opposed to mere legal "enforceability." While the modern (Western) state has been justly credited with having had a transformative effect on contract by publishing clear rules (i.e., contract law) and providing effective "third-party" enforcement, even modern contracts depend on the enforcement activities of the individual parties and the power of social norms. Historically, there is no question that the ancient state, Rome included, was less invested and less effective in its support and promotion of private contracting than its modern counterparts. Ethics and norms therefore played a larger and more important role in ancient contracting than they have in the last century and as such need to be studied in their own right. The nature of the project also argues for Egypt being the primary locus of study, since the papyri afford us the most complete access to ancient individuals and organizations using contracts to organize transactions. After the theoretical and methodological discussion, there follow explorations of several important social values and norms with respect to contracting in Graeco-Roman Egypt, including trust (pistis), "respect" (eugnōmosynē), and "breach." The results show how "personal" contracting was and reveal some of the ways in which individuals bridged the inevitable "trust gaps" in their efforts to build credible commitments with those outside the immediate circle of their trusted intimates. It also illuminates the discourse of reputation, a key lever in ancient contract formation and enforcement. Finally, the notion of breach is shown to have become both more common and to have evolved conceptually in written contracts over time. It is argued that these changes in the idea and drafting of breach should be interpreted in light of a larger pattern of historical and legal development spanning the second century BCE to the second century CE, a period which witnessed an increasing "moralization" of contract, itself an adaptation to an enforcement regime heavily dependent on ethics and norms. The last chapter offers a synthesis of the findings and a prospectus of the next phase of the project, which turns to the role of the state, arguing that it was generally more effective and activist than the current opinion allows.

The impact of Roman power on the pre-existing administrative and economic systems of the conquered provinces has been a significant issue of scholarly debate for decades. In the last two decades attention has shifted from the idea of Romanization as a top-down phenomenon to a much more articulated process, in which the element of cultural interaction between the conquering power and the conquered populations was central and led to the creation of locally hybrid cultural forms. This dissertation analyzes the ways in which local cultures and identities interacted with Roman ones in the years between Attalus III’s testament and the end of the Flavian age. I chose to focus my research on these centuries as they include four key moments for the Provincia Asia: 1) the moment of its institution in 129/6 BC with the related issues due to Aristonicus’ rebellion and the necessity of establishing effective provincial administrative and economic structures; 2) the years between the Mithridatic wars and Caesar, when the province spiraled into debt and the Asian monetary system had to adapt to the extra taxation requested by Sulla and then to the change in the role of the societates publicanorum, who were deprived of the farming of the decuma by Caesar; 3) the years of the Civil War between Antony and Octavian and its aftermath, which gave increasing importance to the conventus and to the introduction of Roman currency into the province, both in the circulating monetary pool and as an account unit; 4) the post-Augustan age, which saw an increasing standardization in the ‘local’ monetary systems of the province, with respect to both silver and bronze coinage, and the final ‘victory’ of the conventus over the pre-existing administrative structures, as shown by the fact that even municipal taxation and local cults were by then organized according to the conventus system. The model of ‘middle-ground imperialism’ is useful for understanding the process of progressive standardization of Asian administrative structures and monetary system, not as a top-down process but rather as a bilateral interaction between Roman and local cultures, as I have shown in the case of the progressive standardization of Asian provincial administrative structures (Chapters 1 and 2) and monetary systems (Chapters 3, 4, 5, 6). According to this research the transformative age for the Romanization of the Provincia Asia was not the Augustan Age, but the Second Triumviral Age. The main heuristic tools for drafting the picture of the administrative and economic life of Provincia Asia are a database of Asian civic issues (both silver and bronze) between 133 BC and AD 96 that I have constructed out of the data in BMC, SNG Copenhagen and SNG Deutschlands – van Aulock (for pre-Antonian issues) and in RPC I-II (from Mark Antony up to the Flavians), and three epigraphic databases that include the epigraphic attestations of denarii, assaria and drachmae in the province of Asia between the 2nd century BC and the 2nd century AD, for a total of 372 inscriptions. All these databases are included here as Appendices (I – X).

This dissertation explores how antiquity and some of its early modern admirers understand the notion of certainty, especially as it is theorized in Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, a first-century educational manual for the aspiring orator that defines certainty in terms of consensus. As part of a larger discussion of argumentative strategies, Quintilian turns to the “nature of all arguments,” which he defines as “reasoning which lends credence to what is doubtful by means of what is certain” (ratio per ea quae certa sunt fidem dubiis adferens: quae natura est omnium argumentorum, V.10.8). These certainties, he later specifies, include not matters of scientific demonstration or objective fact, but the agreements of various communities: the laws of cities, local customs, and other forms of consensus. As the foundation of persuasive rhetoric, these consensus-based certainties situate argumentation as the practice of crafting agreements rather than demonstrating necessary conclusions. Taking as its point of departure Quintilian's novel understanding of certainty, this study looks to some of Quintilian's intellectual forebears as well as his later readers to show how his work is both a nexus of earlier intellectual developments as well as an important inspiration for later accounts of certainty, even into the early modern period. After illustrating in the first chapters of this dissertation how Quintilian's manual incorporates elements from Aristotelian notions of dialectic and rhetoric as well as from Ciceronian skeptical approaches to epistemology, I show how Quintilian's curriculum for the orator shapes the thought of Italian humanists, especially that of Lorenzo Valla (1406–1457), a reformer of scholastic logic and dialectic, and Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), an influential Neapolitan jurist. Adopting Quintilian's rendering of certainty as a matter of agreements and conventions, these later authors elaborate their own novel approaches to various fields—including law, language, and logic—through this ancient understanding of certum. Contrary to modern notions of certainty as objective or scientific fact, Quintilian's humanist readers continue to root this concept in consensus, both within the courtroom and without.

No description available.