Art and Social Identities in Late Antiquity

We would like to thank everyone who participated in our session “Approaches to Workshops in Roman Art” on Saturday 5 January 2008 at the 109th Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America. We would especially like to thank our guest speaker Martin Henig and our two discussants, Lea Stirling and Diane Conlin, whose responses provided much food for thought.

The session consisted of five papers that focused on various issues relating to the study of workshops in Roman art: How can a workshop be defined and identified from the available epigraphic and archaeological sources? How were workshop traditions and characteristics reflected in the style and craftsmanship of sculpture, mosaics and other media? What was the physical context of Roman art production and what can be inferred about workshop organization and infrastructure? What do we know about workshop organization and the training of artisans? And how does the production of art in the Roman period relate to its social context? These are just some of the questions that were tackled by the individual contributions that took up case studies in several different media, including sculpture in the round, sarcophagi, and mosaics.

The first paper, “Sculptural Workshops during the Later Roman Period” by Niels Hannestad introduced some of the session’s main themes and discusses how workshops can be approached through studies across different media. “Workshops, Artists and Patrons in Roman Britain” by Martin Henig presented a case study in the identification of workshops in a provincial setting and demonstrated the variety of different craft traditions in a regional context. “Adaptable Craftsmen: The Production of Sculpture and Sarcophagi in the Late Roman Empire” by Stine Birk Toft investigated issues related to workshop organization and the working methods of sculptors. “Identifying Mosaic Workshops – an Eastern perspective” by session co-organizer Birte Poulsen turned to the identification of mosaic workshops in the eastern part of the Mediterranean and the problems involved herein. The final paper, “Workshops and Artisans in Roman Art: An Anthropological Approach” by session co-organizer Troels Myrup Kristensen discussed the potential contribution of anthropological studies to our understanding of Roman workshop organization. We hope that the five papers as a whole gave just a small overview of current approaches to the question of workshops in Roman art and perhaps even provided for the identification of new approaches to be taken in the future.