Listen to Anthro.mp3
Greek Ceramics with Claire (the sequel!)
Did you like our episode on Ancient Greek Ceramics? Want to learn more about anthropological interdisciplinary work? Listen in to hear Claire and Sarah chat about ceramics, with emphasis on Claire’s thesis research, and more information about field schools and a bunch of the academic experiences available to undergraduates here at UMass!
Sources
- Garland, Robert. The Greek Way of Death. Cornell University Press, 2001.
- Oakley, John Howard. Picturing Death in Classical Athens: The Evidence of the White Lekythoi. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
- https://harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/289346?position=3
Other
Pompeii Artistic Landscape Project Website: palp.art
Pompeii Bibliography and Mapping Project Website: https://websites.umass.edu/pbmp/
Transcript:
Claire: Hello friends, and welcome back to anthro.mp3! We’re students from UMass who love anthropology. AnthroHub is a website we help run that’s full of “all things anthro”. Make sure to check it out to look at some incredible blog posts and creative works made by students from our school and others. My name is Claire, and I’ll be one of your hosts for today’s episode!
Sarah: And I’m Sarah! I’ll be your other host for today.
Claire: Sarah’s one of our newest members here on the podcast, so before we get started, I’d love for her to introduce herself!
Sarah: Hi I’m Sarah! I’m a neuroscience and anthropology major, though anthropology is definitely my favorite. In terms of picking a favorite field of anthropology, I feel like that’s like that’s like the hardest question ever. I have to choose in between biological and cultural, so maybe biocultural? I really love all things anthropology so it’s hard to pick something in specific, but I’m super excited to be here.
Claire: We’re excited to have you. We also have another new member here today, behind all the wires and tech stuff. Nikolai, would you mind coming up to the mic to introduce yourself as well?
Nikolai: Hi I’m Nikolai, also an anthropology major obviously, but with a biology minor. I would say my favorite subfield is, again, really to figure out, probably anything but linguistics. No shade to linguistics, but the other three are so much more interesting to me. And yeah!
Claire: Well thank you very much. It is very exciting to have so many new people joining the podcast this semester! Especially since a lot of the voices y’all already know are graduating soon… but keep an ear out for a special episode about that!
Today is an episode I’m really excited about! Since our last episode on ceramics and classics, I’ve continued on with my interdisciplinary study and really gone full tilt into my thesis!
Sarah: So what exactly is your thesis on?
Claire: It’s actually in the classics department, not the anthropology department. Heart breaking I know. But the more that I’ve worked on it, the more of an anthropological view I’ve taken on it, and it has really turned more and more interdisciplinary by the day! A phenomenon that I don’t find uncommon, the further I go into my studies. My thesis began on general research on the Philippides collection, which was a donation of Greek artifacts to the school that I chatted about a bit with Emily and Yueming on our previous episode. Then, I grew enamored with the Attic White – Ground lekythoi in the collection.
Sarah: Attic White – Ground lekythoi … we talked about those a bit too, the history of them and the general information regarding them. But it wouldn’t hurt to have a refresher. ‘Lekythoi’ is the plural of the word ‘lekythos’. A lekythos is a form of ancient Greek ceramic vase, and there’s a couple different forms of lekythoi, but they were all used for the same general purpose: to hold and pour oil. In situations like the Olympic Games, a small one holding perfumed oil was given as prizes to winning competitors.
Claire: They would use these small perfumed oils in a similar way to how we use modern day deodorant or perfume. It was common to see athletes patting some onto their skin before or after events or practices to help with body odor.
Sarah: We also see them being used to pour this perfumed oil onto brides, or onto the ground in front of soldiers departing for war as an offering. The pouring out of liquid onto the ground or onto an altar or something similar was called a libation, and was an offering to the gods in order to request their favor. If you were to take a cross section of a lekythos, you’d notice that many, arguably most of them had smaller internal containers to hold oil. This was simply because it was less expensive as opposed to filling the entire thing.
Claire: Around the end of the sixth century B.C.E, which stands for ‘before common era’, we start to see lekythoi showing up in tombs, as grave goods and funerary gifts. Particularly in the Classical period, which roughly spans the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, we see the Attic white-ground style of lekythos start to come to light. These sometimes show images of funerary scenes and ritual upon them, though many of them also only have patterns and basic iconography upon them. I’ll talk more about some of these images later.
Sarah: ‘Attic’ is a term that refers to the geographic region the clay used to create a vessel comes from. The region of Attica is a peninsula that encircles Athens, most notably.
Claire: ‘White-Ground’ refers to the style of decoration where the body of the ceramic piece is completely painted white, and figures are glazed over top in various colors and glazes. This style is most commonly seen on lekythoi and typically found in tombs and grave sites. Like we briefly mentioned, these lekythoi were only ever really produced within the Greek classical period, at least to our knowledge, and mainly between the years of 500 and 400 BCE. One of the main theorists I’m referring a lot to through the research portion of my thesis is Robert Garland, a professor from Colgate who wrote a delightful book, which you can find info about in the show notes of this episode. Garland notes that, when looking at the quantity of vessels we’ve discovered, white-ground lekythoi were most popular for grave gifts around 460-410 BCE. So that’s the breakdown of the term regarding the main vessel I’m studying for my thesis. My research centers around funerary scenes on the lekythoi. If you want to hear more about patterned white-ground lekythoi, which I focused heavily on in my internship exhibit, definitely check out our prior episode. But today, we’ll be talking mainly about scenes including people regarding funerary ritual.
Claire: The more I looked at these funerary scenes on the lekythoi, the more I recognized some patterns regarding the subjects. Women were often pictured carrying gifts or mourning at funerary stele (or gravemarkers). This is where my cultural anthropology training really began to start ringing in the back of my head. I decided to take a feminist lens on the study, and to focus on women as custodians of memory in the Greek classical era. Robert Garland sums it up pretty well: on white-ground lekythoi, it is common to see “grievers, invariably women, carry[ing] baskets”.
Sarah: Baskets?
Claire: Yeah!! Women would carry baskets full of gifts to the grave. Some are depicted full of wreaths and lekythoi. And these scenes were painted onto the white-ground lekythoi. So, the grave gifts themselves depicted the mourners in action. One could argue that white-ground lekythoi aren’t necessarily snap shots of particular and real moments of grief – though many of these scenes did likely happen, the images on the vessels are more a representation of what the ritual is meant to do or achieve. Women, these grievers on the vessels, are responsible for the act of remembrance – which in this case, doesn’t just mean to remember something. It means to make something manifest through memory. Through ritual, the women make something present. Tombs were places to communicate and where the dead were sensitive to the living. That’s what the lekythos is showing viewers. Women’s responsibility was not to remember the deceased, but rather to make them present. And that’s what I’m studying.
Sarah: That’s really interesting! Are lekythoi the only vessels you’re studying?
Claire: At first, yeah, lekythoi were the only vessels I was studying. But then I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole. There was one lekythos with a woman on it who was holding some vessel I didn’t recognize. It wasn’t a basket. It kinda looked like a candle. My advisor and I debated for a while over what it could be, and we left that meeting with it still being a mystery. adlib about the time spent in the library.
I finally found one piece that had a similar image on it (when we compare objects to a subject, we call those comparative objects ‘comparanda’). I finally figured out that the item she was holding was an exaleiptron. This made me wonder what other grave goods were depicted on lekythoi, and that’s where I am in my research right now. I’m still focusing on the lekythoi, because they’re what show women’s place within systems of commemoration.
Sarah: Is it an honors thesis?
Claire: The Pompeii Bibliography and Mapping Project (PBMP) maps the landscape of publications about Pompeii onto the space of the ancient city itself. The online GIS will also permit users to make custom maps from standardized data online as well as offering the core files for download, reinterpretation and/or advanced analyses.
Claire: The Pompeii Artistic Landscape Project is an online resource that supports site-wide discovery, mapping, analysis, and sharing of information about Pompeian artworks in their architectural and urban contexts. It is an annotated map that connects pictures of different artworks around Pompeii to locations within the city and makes it easy for users to access, navigate, and analyze information about the rich urban landscape.
Sarah: Thank you all for tuning in to our show today. Another thanks to our team members and our collaborators with AnthroHub, especially our tech crew. To stay connected, you can find us on Instagram @anthro.mp3. You can also find our sources, transcripts of each episode, and more in our AnthroHub show notes. I was one of your hosts today, Sarah, joined by our other host, Claire, and our tech crew. If you haven’t already listened to it, definitely check out the precursor to this, episode 22 on Ancient Greek Ceramics. Keep an eye out on our instagram for future updates on shows, specials and events. Catch us next time, and have a great day, friends.