Affiliation: Harvard University
Margaret M. Andrews is an Assistant Professor of Classics in the Department of the Classics at Harvard University. She received an A.B. in Classics from Princeton University in 2005 and a Ph.D. in 2015 in the Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research combines approaches from the fields of ancient history and archaeology. She is particularly interested in ancient urban environments and their diachronic occupation. Her first book, The Subura: Landscape and Ideology in Rome from ca. 850 BCE to ca. 850 CE, focuses on a neighborhood of ancient Rome notorious for its squalid conditions. Meg has carried out archaeological fieldwork in North Carolina, Athens, Rome, and several other Italian locations. She now co-directs the Falerii Novi Project in the Middle Tiber Valley north of Rome.
This lecture analyzes how the legendary story of the “Rape of the Sabines” was used to construct a network of sacred sites conveying the value of feminine virtue across Rome’s eastern hills in the Republican period. It presents the archaeological and historical evidence for each of the sites and argues that they all pertained to a different aspect of the female lifecycle with respect to marriage and reproduction. The sites would have been linked to each other and to the narrative of the “Rape of the Sabines” during the early third century BCE, when M’. Curius Dentatus triumphed over these peoples. This was a period when Rome’s eastern hills were experiencing rapid population growth and urban development, as indicated by Dentatus’ subsequent construction of the Aqua Anio here. I argue that Dentatus and other residents of this area used the “Rape of the Sabines” and the network of female shrines to incorporate this part of the growing city and the newly-conquered Sabines into Rome’s mythological past. This moment in Rome’s development demonstrates the active role that Rome’s residents played in shaping not only the physical expansion of this area of the city but also its significance in Rome’s past and present.
This lecture presents the results of an ongoing 5-year campaign of excavation in the Roman town of Falerii Novi in the Middle Tiber Valley north of Rome. The Falerii Novi Project, which began in 2021, has undertaken the first scientific excavations in a city famously founded after Romans sacked the nearby Faliscan city of Falerii Veteres and relocated its residents in 241 BCE. The partial urban plan of the site has been spectacularly revealed by geophysical remote sensing, but our excavations are providing a refined chronology for the town’s occupation, which was much more enduring than previously assumed; surprising evidence for patterns of trade, economic activity, and environmental interactions; and a comprehensive analysis of the city’s residential fabric. Instead of focusing on the city’s monumental and civic structures, as is often the case for urban investigations, our research questions are aimed at understanding processes of urban development from the bottom up. We have therefore focused on mundane spaces, such as shops, houses, and roadside bars, to provide a more complete picture of Roman urbanism beyond elite and administrative spaces. The project is arguably the most methodologically diverse investigation of a Roman town to date.
