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.

The individual projects draw on data from a wide range of archaeological contexts, chronological horizons, and geographical areas across the Mediterranean basin and the Near East. They focus on telling categories of finds and key archaeological sites and case studies. Particular areas of emphasis include: the study of exchange networks and cultural interactions in the Mediterranean during the first millennium BCE, as reflected especially in topography and burial practices from the Iberian peninsula to Phoenicia; the study of furniture and textiles from domestic, funerary, and cultic assemblages from the Classical through to the Roman Imperial period; the iconographic, epigraphic, typological, and technical analysis of funerary monuments in Macedonia and Thrace from the Archaic through to the Roman Imperial period; the study of the sculptures of a monumental Roman tomb in cosmopolitan ancient Zeugma/Seleukeia on the Euphrates.

These studies adopt multiperspectival approaches and contribute to reconstructing multiple dimensions of the human experience in the ancient world. They shed light on patterns of increased mobility of people, goods, and ideas in antiquity; aspects of everyday life; expressions of individual taste; glimpses of luxury and opulence, as well as evidence of deprivation; aspects of standardised ritual behaviour and the structured social management of death, including codified social and gender roles; but also on the personal negotiation of life’s persistent challenges, one’s relationship with the divine, and the violent and inescapable reality of death—narratives that often elude traditional, narrowly defined archaeological accounts.