Artifacts, or objects recovered from archaeological contexts, are often all we have left to understand the people of the ancient world. They are therefore critical in accessing the people that populated Ancient Greece and Rome, and for establishing their cares and concerns in day-to-day life. This webpage presents the results of a project using the artifacts of the Van Buren Antiquities Collection, curated by the Department of Classical Languages and Literatures at Smith College, as a starting point for investigating the daily life of the Greek, Etruscan, and Roman worlds. Artifacts were selected and carefully researched to produce an “object biography” detailing the manufacture, use, reuse, discard, and re-discovery of these items, tracing their stories across time and space from manufacture to acquisition by Smith College. The goal of this project is to use the objects and their stories to access and understand the more ephemeral lives of the people who produced, used, and often cherished them.

A timeline format was initially selected to emphasize changes in the use and perceptions of artifacts over time, and the projects here are displayed using Timeline JS. Noteworthy also is the journey across space that these objects undergo, underscoring the importance of “object itineraries” as defined by Rosemary Joyce and Susan Gillespie (2015). The narratives presented are a combination of traditional research and a more personal imagining of the people who may have been involved with the objects at each step in their biographies. This creative retelling of possible scenarios of use and discard was intended to access more intimate moments in the object histories, which are so often unrecoverable, even in ideal archaeological circumstances–let alone with unprovenanced antiquities collections. This approach was supplemented by standard documentation techniques, including measuring, drawing, photography, and creation of 3D models. Reasonable comparanda were identified, and these objects facilitated in the reconstruction of the histories of the objects in the Van Buren Collection. Both the objects and contextual social histories of the ancient Mediterranean were carefully researched in order to construct these narratives.

The site is organized to give access both to the timelines and to a more formalized write-up of the research that went into creating them. Links to the individual artifacts studied for this project are provided in the menu above. It should be noted that the timelines represent one of many possible biographies for the objects, and are focused on presenting likely relationships between the objects and the people whose lives they may have touched. The narratives provide additional detail for these creative object stories, along with a “behind the scenes” discussion of the research that shaped the stories.

The work presented here is the product of original research, and credit is due to the students. Special thanks go to Smith College Educational Technology Services and the Imaging Center, without whom this project would not have been possible.