Timing Death: Questioning the chronology of Romano- British figural funerary reliefs
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-03-19

Romano-British tombstones form part of a complex visual culture that emerged from several interactions and represent a new form of commemoration that came out of Rome's conquest of Britain. Attempts to explain the varying appearance of these images most often have their basis in models of cultural interaction, or questions of skill. I will argue that none of these are good enough answers to my question. Factoring time into this is difficult as tombstones are often dated by style, which is in turn explained by the passage of time. The notion of transition seems to demand that we establish a chronology, but what if we can't? What if neither cultural contact nor time serves as a sufficient explanation for these images? My approach here is to return to the images themselves and what they were supposed to do: commemorate people. I will examine the artistic strategies used, primarily in the representation of the body, in order to determine their possible effects in a commemorative context. By investigating the motivations behind these images in terms of cultural contact, time, and context, it is hoped that we will gain some insight into what hybridity and transition looked like in Romano-British funerary imagery. 

Hanneke Reijnierse-Salisbury (Cambridge University)