| الوصف: |
At a key location within the Comitium of Rome’sForum Romanumlies a collection of stone monuments of significant antiquity. Known as the Lapis Niger, they have become, to use a phrase of recent vogue, a synecdoche. The black stone pavement from which the grouping takes its name has acquired a role as a collective term for the monuments which it covers, just as they, in turn, are often referred to as Lapis Niger. the part standing for the whole. The history of twentieth-century scholarship of these parts has though been characterised, indeed overshadowed, by one aspect of one element of the group – the archaic inscription on one of the stone monuments, the cippus. This paper contends that this monolithic approach has precluded a full appreciation of the significance of both the cippus and the assemblage as a whole, and instead proposes a new approach based on phenomenology, landscape archaeology and the object’s own materiality. A decade ago, Andrew Jones called for a new approach to materials-based analysis so as to breach the dichotomy between theoretical archaeologists and science-based archaeologists. He argued for a ‘symmetrical form of analysis that focuses not only on the description and characterisation of the material properties of artefacts but also how those material properties intervene in the social lives of people’ (Jones, 2004: 335). With this in mind, a more complex, nuanced view is herein advocated; that the entanglement of multiple materials, perspectives, histories, taphonomies and qualities can be explored to arrive at a fuller understanding of the Lapis Niger and its role in shaping and being shaped by early Rome. |
