The Antefixa Project: Recovering Lost Craft Communities in Ancient Italy

FAIN: RZ-300093-24

New York University (New York, NY 10012-1019)
John Hopkins (Project Director: November 2023 to present)

Research and content development leading to a website on craft practices and knowledge on the Italic peninsula between the years 500 and 250 BCE.  (36 months)

The Antefixa Project seeks funding for a Scholarly Digital Project that will document and explain the contributions of a diverse artistic community in the Italic peninsula between ca. 500 and 75 BCE. This period saw the emergence of Rome as a violent force, which appropriated artisanal and religious practices through conquest. Specialized artisanal knowledge and contribution was lost in this process. Our project applies humanistic, digital, computational and scientific methods to the archaeological remains of sacred sculpture to recover this world of work. Our team is composed of an art historian/archaeologist, a material scientist, a computational imaging specialist, an anthropologist, consultants and collaborators. This application is for the first phase of an expandable project, which lends itself to a digital publication; dissemination will be through a website that visualizes geo-spatial and temporal data and presents a library of object types and interpretive essays.