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CLOSEThrough a critical integration of archaeological and purely historical approaches—sometimes enriched by the fruitful use of tools from the natural sciences—research of the Section focuses not only on the technical achievements of ancient societies (material culture), but also on their intellectual creations (intangible culture and ideas), which developed in parallel with the former. This category includes studies of artifacts—such as sculptures, ceramics, and wall paintings—more specific themes such as color and the archaeology of daily life, as well as the study of cultural identities and interconnections, often through modern methodological approaches like that of cultural transfers.
Cultural connections and identities
Mobility in the ancient world, driven by various factors, brought peoples into contact and often into a process of osmosis, creating networks of intercultural relations and fostering the development of new collective or individual identities. Through war, conquest, trade, and other occasions for peaceful or non-peaceful interaction, goods, techniques, innovations, knowledge, artworks, ideas, beliefs, and cults circulated—shaping individuals, communities, and entire peoples.
Representations: Iconographic and Archaeometric Approaches
This research area focuses on the interdisciplinary study of painting and sculpture in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, combining archaeology, art history, and the natural and physical sciences. By interweaving traditional iconographic and iconological analysis with innovative diagnostic and analytical methods and advanced digital technologies, the projects in this entity approach and highlight the arts of painting and sculpture in their rich polyvalence, as carriers of technical expertise, aesthetic values, and ideological and social norms.
The archaeology of daily life and death
This research area focuses on the study of material remains, iconography, and written sources relating to three fundamental spheres of human life in antiquity: the sphere of daily life, the sphere of religious practice, and the sphere of funerary customs. The common thread among the individual projects is the study of the material dimension, of the practices, and of the symbolic expressions connected to private, domestic life; to worship and the organisation and furnishing of sacred spaces; to the performance of funerary rites; to the spatial politics and landscapes of life, death, and memory.
Main page image: Macedonian tomb of Potidaia, painted marble burial bed