Barbara E. Borg
My interest in contextual and topographical approaches to the ancient world was shaped significantly by my experience during a 12-month travel grant from the German Archaeological Institute. After completing my PhD in 1990, it allowed me to travel to archaeological sites and museums all around the Mediterranean. Suddenly everything fell into place: materials and subjects I had studied individually and separately became part of coherent cultures and lived ancient experiences. Later applying this approach to Roman funerary culture has allowed me to not only offer more comprehensive descriptions of ancient practices, but also to change considerably our understanding of their meaning and of the insights they provide us into social structures such as class relations and the role of the family.
A three-year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship allowed me to test a new approach that turned out to become a kind of proof-of-concept study for IN-ROME. My project ‘Mapping the social history of Rome: a topographical approach to action and interaction in an ancient mega-city’ explored two interconnected methodological strands. The first one drew on concepts of Microhistory as the intensive and detailed study of a small area or limited group of people, but with the intent to answer (rather than just illustrate) more general (or even macro-historical) questions. While, so far, such research had been largely limited to historical enquiries of early modern and later periods due to the richness of documentary sources, my project drew instead on the widest possible range of evidence including, crucially, archaeological and epigraphical, to reach the critical level of source volume.
The second one, which has led to the concept of IN-ROME, proposed that topographical structures and patterns of activities can be translated into social ones by considering the real-life experience of physical proximity or distance between the people who carried out these activities. The project, which centred on an area of about four square miles around the third mile of the via Appia, yielded exciting results for the relationship between people of different religions and ethnicities, and for the development of early Christian cults within non-Christian surroundings in particular, which are currently being prepared for publication.
e-mail: barbara.borg@sns.it
Further information
orcid id: 0000-0002-5671-0672
Deposited publications available on ResearchGate and Academia
Selected publications:
- The Late Antique funerary landscape of Rome: 3rd to 4th c. A.D., in: L. Lavan (ed.), Burial and memorial in Late Antiquity. Late Antique Archaeology Suppl. (Leiden: Brill 2022 in press).
- Peter and Paul ad catacumbas: a pozzolana mine reconsidered, in: N. Zimmermann – T. Fröhlich (eds.), The economy of death: new research on collective burial spaces in Rome from the late republic to the late roman time. Archaeology and Economy in the Ancient World – Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Classical Archaeology vol. 38: The Economy of Death (Heidelberg: Propylaeum 2022) 45-58. DOI: 10.11588/propylaeum.894.c11634
- Mortal gods: divine associations of humans as an urban and neighbourhood phenomenon, in: Religion in the Roman Empire 6, 2020, 159-80 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2021). DOI: 10.1628/rre-2020-0012
- Does religion matter? Life, death, and interaction in the Roman suburbium, in: V. Gasparini et al. (eds), Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World: Approaching Religious Transformations from Archaeology, History and Classics (Berlin: de Gruyter 2020), 405-434. DOI: 10.1515/9783110557596-020
- Herodes Atticus in Rome: The Triopion reconsidered, in: C. M. Draycott, R. Raja, K. Welch, and W. T. Wootton (eds.), Visual Histories of the Classical World. Essays in Honour of R.R.R. Smith (Turnhout: Brepols 2019), 317-30.
- Roman tombs and the art of commemoration: contextual approaches to funerary customs in the second century CE (CUP 2019). DOI: 10.1017/9781108690904
- Crisis and ambition: tombs and burial customs in third-century CE Rome (OUP 2013).
