Keimêlia: Objects Curated in the Ancient Mediterranean (8Th-5Th Centuries B.C.)
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University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2016 Keimêlia: Objects Curated In The Ancient Mediterranean (8th-5th Centuries B.c.) Amanda S. Reiterman University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Ancient History, Greek and Roman through Late Antiquity Commons, and the History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons Recommended Citation Reiterman, Amanda S., "Keimêlia: Objects Curated In The Ancient Mediterranean (8th-5th Centuries B.c.)" (2016). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2545. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2545 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2545 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Keimêlia: Objects Curated In The Ancient Mediterranean (8th-5th Centuries B.c.) Abstract Archaeologists occasionally encounter artifacts that might be described as “curated” in antiquity either because these objects significantly predate the other items in their assemblage or exhibit ancient repairs. While easily overlooked or dismissed as residual, these anomalous artifacts have the potential to inform us about the intimate relationships between people and things in antiquity and ancient attitudes toward the past. This dissertation develops an interdisciplinary approach to identifying and interpreting such artifacts, referred to here by their ancient Greek name—keim�lia, meaning valued things that were kept or stored for extended periods. The corpus of keim�lia gathered for this investigation is drawn primarily from 8th to 5th century B.C. contexts across the Mediterranean, and encompassing the Greek heartland, colonies, and non-Greek communities. This broad chronological and geographic scope reveals a spectrum of behaviors toward old or damaged objects in diverse cultural contexts. The idiosyncratic nature of keim�lia and their uses requires that they be evaluated qualitatively rather than quantitatively. Case studies focusing on individual keim�lia explore how archaeologists might disentangle the motives for ancient curation (e.g. function, economics, aesthetics, and sentiment) and recognize the nuanced roles of keim�lia as companion objects, mementoes, heirlooms, entangled objects, antiques, and found objects. Comparative archaeology, ethnographic research, and modern consumer studies place keim�lia within a larger framework by illuminating cross-cultural parallels in the attributes of objects from the past and their uses, including the assignment of magical or mythic significance ot things from remote antiquity, the recurrent association of children with older objects, and the frequent curation of non-local or rare objects. These intersections suggest that the potential meanings of objects from the past—as talismans, mechanisms for articulating layers of a person or group’s identity, and mnemonic apparatuses—are related to different types of distance: temporal, cultural, and interpersonal. Although portable objects have been largely neglected in the recent wave of scholarship examining memory in the ancient Mediterranean, the study of keim�lia indicates that people here did, in fact, use objects to map their personal histories and to negotiate the place of that past in their present. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Art & Archaeology of Mediterranean World First Advisor Ann B. Brownlee Keywords Curation, Heirlooms, Memory, The Past Subject Categories Ancient History, Greek and Roman through Late Antiquity | History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2545 KEIMÊLIA: OBJECTS CURATED IN THE ANCIENT MEDITERRANEAN (8th-5th CENTURIES B.C.) Amanda S. Reiterman A DISSERTATION in Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2016 Supervisor of Dissertation ____________________ Ann Blair Brownlee, Adjunct Assistant Professor of the History of Art Graduate Group Chairperson ____________________ Thomas F. Tartaron, Associate Professor of Classical Studies Dissertation Committee: Ann Blair Brownlee, Adjunct Assistant Professor of the History of Art Ann Kuttner, Associate Professor of History of Art Thomas F. Tartaron, Associate Professor of Classical Studies ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am deeply indebted to the members of my committee, for commenting thoughtfully on this dissertation at all stages. I am especially grateful to: Ann Brownlee, for believing in this project from the very beginning, for helping me find paths through its many challenges, and for encouraging me at each step during our weekly conversations. Many of the ideas presented here developed through our discussions of topics as small as a single pot or as large as recent debates on object ontologies and memory practice. To Ann Kuttner, for her great generosity with her time and vast knowledge. Through our many stimulating conversations over coffee, in her office, and by phone, she consistently opened my eyes to new ways of looking at this material. I thank her especially for turning my sights to the archaeology of emotion and for offering me so many tools for embracing ambiguous or difficult data. To Tom Tartaron, for his challenging questions on the drafts of my chapters, especially in matters of anthropological theory. In my coursework at Penn, I took no fewer than five of his seminars, which laid the foundation for the present project by encouraging an approach that engages critically with interdisciplinary sources. I thank AAMW and the Kolb Foundation for their financial support, and Darlene Jackson, for guiding me through all of the administrative matters of the AAMW program and the filing of this dissertation. Early findings from this project were presented at the 7th Penn-Leiden Colloquium on Ancient Values. The audience there, the editors of the conference volume James Ker and Christoph Pieper, and the anonymous reviewers of my chapter helped me to refine many of the ideas presented here. ii Prof. Dimitris Paleothodoros very kindly shared an unpublished draft of an article that includes several examples of keimêlia which I had not encountered, and he has since alerted me to others. I am grateful to Kate Harrell, Michael MacKinnon, Gina Borromeo, Mary Hollinshead, Lisa Tom, and Paula Artal-Isbrand, for their friendship and moral support, which was especially important since I was writing so far from my home institution. My parents offered their encouragement throughout. I am especially thankful to my mother who took care of Annika in the final phases so that I could focus on writing. Finally, my husband Dave has supported me in every way imaginable. When you focus so much on small things—a mended ceramic cup, the date of a single tomb, chasing down a reference—it can be easy to lose sight of the big things. And when you focus too much on the big things—the enormity of a dissertation, for example—you can lose track of the little steps that that comprise the journey and make it so pleasant. He and our little family of Annika and Quincy helped me maintain perspective throughout. I thank him from the bottom of my heart, or—as he taught me to say—from my eyes, the two of them. iii ABSTRACT KEIMÊLIA: OBJECTS CURATED IN THE ANCIENT MEDITERRANEAN (8th-5th CENTURIES B.C.) Amanda S. Reiterman Ann Blair Brownlee Archaeologists occasionally encounter artifacts that might be described as “curated” in antiquity either because these objects significantly predate the other items in their assemblage or exhibit ancient repairs. While easily overlooked or dismissed as residual, these anomalous artifacts have the potential to inform us about the intimate relationships between people and things in antiquity and ancient attitudes toward the past. This dissertation develops an interdisciplinary approach to identifying and interpreting such artifacts, referred to here by their ancient Greek name—keimêlia, meaning valued things that were kept or stored for extended periods. The corpus of keimêlia gathered for this investigation is drawn primarily from 8th to 5th century B.C. contexts across the Mediterranean, and encompassing the Greek heartland, colonies, and non-Greek communities. This broad chronological and geographic scope reveals a spectrum of behaviors toward old or damaged objects in diverse cultural contexts. The idiosyncratic nature of keimêlia and their uses requires that they be evaluated qualitatively rather than quantitatively. Case studies focusing on individual keimêlia explore how archaeologists might disentangle the motives for ancient curation (e.g. function, economics, aesthetics, and sentiment) and recognize the nuanced roles of keimêlia as companion objects, mementoes, heirlooms, entangled objects, antiques, and found objects. Comparative archaeology, ethnographic research, and modern consumer studies place keimêlia within iv a larger framework by illuminating cross-cultural parallels in the attributes of objects from the past and their uses, including the assignment of magical or mythic significance to things from remote antiquity, the recurrent association of children with older objects, and the frequent curation of non-local or rare objects. These intersections suggest that the potential meanings of objects from the past—as talismans, mechanisms for