Art and Archaeology of Civic Identity

Every urban community in the Greco-Roman world presented itself in a specific way to other communities and to foreign entities. Looking at coins, public monuments, programmatic sculpture, and epigraphic and textual evidence, we will address different concerns related to the formation and propagation of civic identities. Comparative material from other historical periods and theoretical and anthropological literature on group identity, social cohesion, and empire will contextualize the visual and archaeological evidence. Prerequisites: three previous courses in Archaeology and the Ancient World.