Amos Anderson lecture, Wednesday 12th June 2024
Institutum Romanum Finlandiae
In painted tombs in Campania and Lucania in the fourth century BCE, men and women appear in roles that reflect indigenous, pre-Roman social norms, and their clothing is a valuable tool for exploring identities and self-presentation. Female clothing types are particularly distinctive, and they act as a distinguishing marker from community to community in the region. These funerary portraits enable us to understand how women, whose activities were rooted in the domestic and familial sphere, played a significant role in preserving gendered and ethnic identities displayed through traditional dress. Men, in the ritorno del guerriero scenes, on the other hand, wear tunics that were broadly similar everywhere in the region, but the numerous differences in colours and patterns indicate that there was scope for personalisation on an individual basis in the dress of the male warrior. In general, the depiction of men and women in decorated textiles demonstrate the value of studying clothing as expressions of fine-grained identities on a local, rather than a national level.
Maureen Carroll is Chair in Roman Archaeology at the University of York. Her key research interests are various practices associated with death, burial, and funerary commemoration, and she has published widely on related themes. Her book “Infancy and Earliest Childhood in the Roman World” (2018) is an important contribution to the study of death in antiquity, childhood, and family dynamics. After leading a British team on a multinational EU project (DressID) on Roman textiles and clothing, she currently is conducting a research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, on Dress and Identity in Early Roman Southwest Italy that focuses on portraits in tomb paintings of the 4th century BCE. Her most recent archaeological fieldwork was carried out at the Roman imperial estate at Vagnari in Puglia.
AMOS ANDERSON LECTURES
The Amos Anderson lectures are held every year by distinguished Finnish or foreign researchers on subjects related to the activities of the Finnish Institute. The lectures are organized in honor of the founding father of Institutum Romanum Finlandiae Amos Anderson (1878-1961) and are funded by the Finnish foundation Föreningen Konstsamfundet.