Cover Page

Mediterranean Families in Antiquity

Households, Extended Families, and Domestic Space

 

Edited by

Sabine R. Huebner and Geoffrey Nathan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

logo.gif

List of Contributors

Xurxo M. Ayán Vila is a postdoctoral researcher at the Built Heritage Research Group, University of the Basque Country (Spain) since 2014. He is specialist on Archaeology of Iron Age domestic space and Archaeology of Architecture. He has published the volume Iron Age House, Family and Community in the Northwestern Iberian Peninsula (2012) and is the director of several archaeological projects on Galician Celtic hillforts.

Irene Barbiera is a researcher in Historical Demography in the Department of Statistical Sciences at the University of Padua. She has published widely on funerary archaeology, gender and family history, early medieval demography, and migrations and has also written Changing Lands in Changing Memories. Migration and Identity during the Lombard Invasions (2005) which was awarded the Otto von Hessen Prize.

Anna Lucille Boozer researches the migration of peoples, goods, and ideas across the borders of imperially controlled regions in order to understand how ordinary people experienced the Roman Empire. She is excavating a Roman city in the Western Desert of Egypt as part of the Amheida Project and co-directs MAP: The Meroe Archival Project in Sudan. Her publications include articles and books on imperialism, memory, daily life, frontiers, migration, domestic architecture, and the life course. She is an Assistant Professor at Baruch College, City University of New York.

Maria Castiglioni is a Professor of Demography in the Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Padua. Her research interests are family history and intergenerational relations. She has published Fare famiglia. Un secolo di cambiamenti (with M. Barbagli and G. Dalla Zuanna) (Bologna, 2014) and “Spread of Cohabitation and Proximity between Kin in Contemporary Italy,” Journal of Family History, 1–23, 2014 (with G. Dalla Zuanna).

Gianpiero Dalla Zuanna is Professor in Demography in the Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Padua. Since March 2013 he has been a Senator of the Republic of Italy. He has written many books and essays on historical demography, mainly involving the Italian population during the Middle Ages and the population of Veneto (North-east Italy) during the nineteenth century.

Leslie Preston Day is Emerita Professor of Classics at Wabash College. She is co-director of the excavations of Early Iron Age sites at Kavousi in eastern Crete and has authored three volumes on the small, twelfth-century BCE settlement at Vronda, which is organized around households, as well as a study of the contemporary site at Karphi. She is currently working on the publication of the cemeteries at Vronda, which show evidence of family structures of the tenth to eighth centuries BCE. She has also co-authored reports of excavations at Pella and the Decapolis in Jordan and has co-edited a series of papers on American archaeology on Crete, in addition to numerous articles on aspects of her excavations.

Kai Haase read Ancient History, Classical Archaeology, and Byzantine Studies at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster where he is currently writing there his doctoral dissertation in Ancient History on “Transformationsprozesse in Strukturmerkmalen römischer Provinzherrschaft in Nordafrika in der Zeit des 3. und 4. Jh. n. Chr.”

Sabine R. Huebner is Professor of Ancient History at Basel University. Her research focuses on Roman social history, the ancient family, early Christianity, Late Antiquity, and Roman and Byzantine Egypt. She is the author of Der Klerus in der Gesellschaft des spätantiken Kleinasiens (Stuttgart 2005), The Family in Roman Egypt (Cambridge 2013), and Der Sohn des Zimmermanns (Leiden-New York 2016) and the co-editor of Growing up Fatherless in Antiquity (Cambridge 2009), the Encyclopedia of Ancient History (Oxford 2012) and Inheritance, Law and Religions in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds (Paris 2014).

Peter Keegan is an Associate Professor in Roman History at Macquarie University. His research ranges from sexuality and body history to the spatial dynamics of social relations in urban and periurban contexts and the epigraphy of ephemeral graffiti and death. His recent publications include Inscriptions in the Private Sphere in the Greco-Roman World, Graffiti in Antiquity, Roles for Women and Men in Roman Epigraphic Culture, and Written Space in the Latin West 200 BC–AD 300.

Christian Laes is Professor of Latin and Ancient History at the University of Antwerp and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Tampere. He has published five monographs and over 70 international contributions on Roman and Late Antique socio-cultural history.

Matteo Manfredini is an Associate Professor of Demography in the Department of Life Sciences, University of Parma. He is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Italian Society of Historical Demography. He has published over 60 papers on many scientific journals and significant volumes concerning demographic systems and family history of past populations.

Fiona McHardy is Principal Lecturer in Greek Literature and Culture at the University of Roehampton in London. She is author of Revenge in Ancient Greek Culture (2008, Duckworth); and co-editor of Women’s Influence on Classical Civilization (2004, Routledge); Lost Dramas of Classical Athens (2005, Exeter); From Abortion to Pederasty: Addressing Difficult Topics in the Classics Classroom (2014, Ohio) and Revenge and Gender from Classical to Renaissance Literature (forthcoming, Edinburgh). She is currently working on a co-authored book Gender Violence in Ancient Greece with Susan Deacy for Bloomsbury and is co-editor of a series on Intersectionality in Antiquity with Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz for Edinburgh University Press.

Geoffrey Nathan is Honorary Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales. He is author of the critically acclaimed The Family in Late Antiquity: The Rise of Christianity and the Endurance of Tradition (2000). He has published on a number of topics related to late ancient social and gender history, and is currently writing a monograph on refugees in Late Antiquity. This is his second edited volume.

David Noy is the author or co-author of five volumes of Jewish inscriptions. He has published widely on Roman life and death, and on the Jews in the Roman Empire, and has also written Foreigners at Rome: Citizens and Strangers (2000) and Dr Johnson’s Friend and Robert Adam’s Client Topham Beauclerk (2016). He is an Associate Lecturer and Honorary Associate in the Arts Faculty, Open University.

Helmut Schwaiger is a Research Assistant at the Austrian Archaeological Institute/Austrian Academy of Sciences. He was involved in several excavation projects in Austria, Italy, Egypt, and started working in Turkey in 2002. Since then he has been involved in archaeological missions in Limyra, Andriake, Antiochia, and at the Dülük Baba Tepesi/Doliche but his main focus lies in Ephesus where he participated in different excavation projects. Since 2012 he has led the archaeological investigation of the Late Antique Residence south of the church of Mary. He has published articles on domestic material culture and architecture from the Classical to the Late Antique period.

Roland Steinacher is currently a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung at the Freie Universität Berlin and Privatdozent at the University of Vienna. He is the author of Die Vandalen. Aufstieg und Fall eines Barbarenreichs (Stuttgart, 2016) and edited together with Guido M. Berndt Arianism. Roman Heresy and Barbarian Creed (Farnham, 2014). He is writing a book on the Pannonian area in Late Antiquity as well as his dissertation on names and identities in medieval Eastern Europe for publication. He has published articles on early modern scholarship, Roman Africa, and the transformation of the Roman World.

Mona Tokarek LaFosse is Assistant Professor of Christian Scriptures and Sacred Texts at Waterloo Lutheran Seminary, a federated college of Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. She is also Vice President of the Canadian Society of Patristic Studies. She completed her PhD in Religious Studies at the Centre for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto in 2011. A revised version of her dissertation is under consideration for publication by a university press.

Emily Varto is an Associate Professor of Greek History in the Department of Classics at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She has published on kinship and social organization, genealogy, housing, and archaic poetry, as well as the reception of the classics in nineteenth-century anthropology. She is currently editing a volume on classics and early anthropology for Brill’s Companions to Classical Reception series and working on a monograph on kinship and the early Greek polis.

Ville Vuolanto is Lecturer in History at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Tampere. He has written a number of articles and chapters on children and family dynamics in Roman, early Christian, and early medieval contexts, and is the author of Children and Ascetisism in Late Antiquity. Continuity, Family Dynamics and the Rise of Christianity (2015).

Foreword and Acknowledgments

In late 2010, in an online conversation, Sabine Huebner and Geoff Nathan were discussing the now classic 1984 article by Richard Saller and Brent Shaw, “Tombstones and Roman family relations in the Principate: civilians, soldiers and slaves” (Journal of Roman Studies 74: 124–56). Given challenges to its conclusions (and methodology) that the nuclear family model was predominant form of kin grouping in the Roman Empire, both Nathan and Huebner thought that issues of extended family versus the nuclear family and household might bear a broader examination in the pre-modern Mediterranean world.

From that initial discussion, a conference was held at the Max-Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany on 14–15 June, 2012. The parameters of the conference were deliberately left broad: “The Mediterranean Family from Antiquity to Early Modern Times.” The 15 papers given were varied in terms of subject, methodology, source material, time period and geographical area.

When the organizers decided that the conference papers might be successfully turned into an edited volume, they substantially reorganized the nature of the studies. Less than half of the original papers from the conference remain in much expanded and edited form, and a number of new papers were commissioned to give the collection complete coverage of all major geographic regions in the Mediterranean. The decision was also to focus exclusively on the ancient world, from the early Iron Age to Late Antiquity. One of the major themes of the collection considers the so-called “Mediterranean Family” model as it functioned in antiquity. Hence the title of this collected volume. A broad range of specific topics and methodological approaches remain.

The editors would like to thank the Max-Planck-Institute for hosting the conference and sponsoring it with a generous grant.

We would also like to especially acknowledge several scholars who produced excellent material concerning the post-Classical Mediterranean family, but whose contributions could not be included due to a decision by the publishers that this volume should focus exclusively on the ancient world. It was an extremely difficult decision to make, especially since the quality of these papers were some of the strongest.

We would further like to thank those scholars whose contributions appear in this volume. Their hard work and patience through the editing and production process has been the very example of scholastic collegiality.

Finally, our thanks go to the anonymous readers who provided much valuable advice regarding individual contributions as well the overall composition of the volume.

Sabine R. Huebner, Basel and Geoffrey Nathan, Sydney
25 October 2015

Part I
Introduction