AIA Lecturer: Mireille Lee

Archaeology provides important evidence for ancient Greek dress, which was essential to the construction of social identities.  Although no complete garments survive, preserved fragments of silk and embroideries indicate the elite status of the wearer.  Jewelry, dress fasteners, toilet implements, perfume vessels, cosmetics, and mirrors are also important indicators of status and gender.  The visual sources, including sculpture and vase-painting, depict men and women performing various dress practices.  Although some practices, such as bathing and the use of perfumes, are common to both genders, others are specific to either men or women.  The visual sources demonstrate other aspects of identity: age and social role are often indicated by hairstyle, whereas ethnicity is also conveyed by means of garments and body-modifications. Although dress is often considered a mundane aspect of culture, I argue that dress provides unique insight into ancient Greek ideologies.

Mirrors are so ubiquitous in our own culture, we tend to take them for granted. But mirrors are highly significant in many cultures: as symbols of status, beauty, and vanity; as instruments of duplicity, prophesy, and magic; as windows into the soul. Although ancient Greek mirrors have attracted the attention of scholars and collectors for over a century, their significance in Greek society remain poorly understood.  This lecture explores ancient Greek mirrors from their earliest appearance in the seventh century BCE through the Hellenistic period.  I argue that mirrors were complex objects that were essential for the construction of feminine identity in ancient Greece.

“Although people have collected antiquities since antiquity, public awareness of the illegal antiquities market is a relatively recent development. Thanks to the efforts of archaeologists, investigative journalists, cultural heritage lawyers, governmental officials, and many others, we now know the extent of the illegal antiquities network, and the damage it has caused to archaeological sites and monuments worldwide. While efforts have been made to curb the market in the US and internationally, the problem of undocumented antiquities held in US collections remains. Recent high-profile returns of objects known to have been trafficked by Giacomo Medici, Gianfranco Becchnina, and others, have raised questions about other objects that might be subject to restitution. But provenance research on objects in extant collections has been extremely slow: currently only a handful of US museums employ full-time researchers dedicated to antiquities. And because few colleges and universities teach provenance, and those that do focus primarily on Nazi-era thefts, antiquities researchers mostly learn on the job.

Given the tremendous need for provenance research on undocumented antiquities, the non-profit Foundation for Ethical Stewardship for Cultural Heritage (FESCH) has created the Mediterranean Antiquities Provenance Research Alliance (MAPRA). MAPRA brings together academics, museum professionals, and data scientists, all with expertise in the ancient Mediterranean, to develop a provenance protocol specific to antiquities. The protocol is designed to be used by students working with academic collections, in order to train the next generation of provenance researchers. In the next phase of the project, we will create a database of antiquities in academic collections, a vast but largely unknown corpus. Ultimately, the goal of MAPRA is to identify these objects to their countries of origin, and facilitate legal, ethical, and fair solutions to their stewardship.”