Italian archaeological toponymy

It has occurred to me, observing the writing of some colleagues and people-on-the-internet (not naming names) that the different ways of referring to the names of archaeological sites in Italy are not always terribly clear, so here’s a little informal write-up.

A definition: a comune is an administrative unit, a municipality, that constitutes a town or city.

One thing to note right off the bat is that the names of ancient cities and settlements don’t always correspond to those of modern ones. Notable, for instance, is the fact that ancient Capua and modern Capua are in different places. In the early middle ages, the inhabitants of ancient Capua moved to the nearby city of Casilinum,(1) and when they moved they took their toponym with them, such that Casilinum became Capua. After the unification of Italy in 1861, there was a need to disambiguate homonymous comuni within what was now one state, and the city of Santa Maria Maggiore, which had grown on the site of the ancient Capua, was renamed Santa Maria Capua Vetere (“St. Mary Old Capua”) to distinguish it from both the S. Maria Maggiore in Piemonte and the new Capua.(2)

Fondo. In topographical contexts, this means “property” or “plot,” and it takes its name from the landowner. Sites that enter the archaeological literature with the name of a fondo usually fossilize that toponym even if the land changes hands afterwards. A famous example here is the important extraurban sanctuary of ancient Capua that was discovered (and devastated by uncontrolled looting) on the property of Carlo Patturelli, the Fondo Patturelli. (Today this lies within the comune of Curti.)

Frazione, literally “fraction”, “hamlet, district.” A frazione is an administrative subdivision of a comune, and usually corresponds to a village in the territory of a comune.

The ubiquitous loc. The little loc. that you often run across in the Italian archaeological literature stands for località, “locality, locale, place.” This is often a less-formal toponym, sort of like a nickname but for places. (In some regions this might be called a vocabolo or contrada, both of which can also be used to designate a rural road or series of roads.)

There can be multiple levels of località. For instance, the Lucanian sanctuary of Mefitis just east of Potenza in Basilicata goes by several modern names (we don’t know it’s ancient name with certainty), perhaps most commonly “Rossano di Vaglio.” In this case, Vaglio is the name of the comune, and Rossano is a locality within the comune. More specifically, the site can be located as “Vaglio, loc. Macchia di Rossano,” with Macchia being an even more specific locality within the broader hamlet of Rossano. The nearby settlement site within the bounds of Vaglio is called Serra: Serra di Vaglio, or Vaglio loc. Serra.

Sometimes the località might refer to the archaeological remains themselves.

One of my favorites is the site of the temple of Mercury in ancient Falerii, modern Civita Castellana, at loc. Sassi Caduti, which literally means “fallen rocks” but always makes me think “diva down!”

Nota bene there could be strange toponymical customs in the north of the country with which I’m not familiar. Proceed at your own risk!

 

1 Casilinum had been ancient Capua’s river harbor and thereby access to the sea. The ancient levels here are very deeply buried by sediment, and every once in a while I think about the possibility of finding the undisturbed port of an ancient Etruscan city down there, on the order of a Pyrgi or a Gravisca.

2 the English language Wikipedia is a mess on this issue; maybe one of these days I’ll get around to sorting it

The lithic turn

This began as a claim, that stones are microcosmic ruins. (“Rocks” would have worked better alliteratively, but in my professional jargon there’s a precise definitional difference: rock becomes stone at the quarry face, and anyway there’s a nice consonance with the nasal finishes of stones and ruins. I don’t mean that you can smell them, but of course under the right conditions you can.)

 That stones are microcosmic ruins. And not because the classic ruin is built of stone (though reinforced concrete is an up-and-comer), but because all the temporality is condensed. You’ve got the human-made thing, you’ve got the visible signs of impermanence, you’ve got impermanence that nevertheless outstrips any single mortal lifespan, usually.

 The basic Latin word for stone is lapis. That evolved into Italian lapide, which usually means a tombstone.

 What got me thinking about it was walking down the street, across the piazza, all paved with a greenish-grey and softish stone that I don’t know well yet*, having only recently arrived in Pisa; and it’s recommenced raining here today, so all the pitting and the concavities worn by the passage of feet are accentuated, playing the role of a thousand dirty mirrors. *(It’s so-called pietra serena, the stonecutters’ term for a variety of macigno, which was formed about 23 million years ago.)

 What got me thinking about it was a book review I’m behind in finishing, a review of a book about stone. Actually, those are both excuses: I’m almost always thinking about stones and time. Rocks and time. Unless it’s pots and time. World enough and.

 But reviewing this particular book, I was called to read again, for the umpteenth time, with newer but not younger eyes, a passage from the elder Pliny (HN 36.166): tofus aedificiis inutilis est mortalitate mollitia, “tuff is useless for construction because of its mortality, its softness.” Latin mortalitas, even if rare classically, is the ability and the necessity to die, mortality. Even a rock can die. Because of its softness, mollitia.

 Tuff can die; but it can also be born. Vitruvius (2.6.1) et ibi quod nascitur tofus exsurgens, “and the tuff which is born there rising up”- sure, nascor can have the sense of “arise, be produced, be found,” but its basic meaning is to be born.

 All rocks are born, all rocks will die. The softer tuffs are one of the rare examples where both can happen at a more-or-less human scale. There are softish stones, like the Pisan pietra serena sandstone pavers that got us started, that can be visibly eroded by human passage, but they took much longer (maybe hundreds of thousands of years) to become stone. Or there are lavas that can harden during a single day’s eruption. The streets of Naples are largely paved with hard, resistant blocks from flows like these from Vesuvius that reached the sea.

 Both in Pisa and in Naples, pavers bear the linear marks put there by stonecutters to keep you from slipping, chiseled in, tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap (I don’t yet know what sound the Pisan pavers make when cut), but they wear away. You wear them away. These are tallymarks in reverse: you can keep a sort of time by noting their disappearance. Actually, that’s not true. You can’t keep time.

 

 Postscript

Walking home, I passed the Tower, and the Cathedral, and the Baptistery, all done up in their (mostly) marble. Marble is a harder rock, and these are harder stones, not local: in the middle ages, with their fleet, the Pisans commandeered great quantities of marble from the ruins of Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber. Of course, the marble was scarcely local to Ostia, either, and for some of it shipping up to Pisa was a sort of homecoming, to just about within eyeshot of the great white scars in the mountains about Carrara, above the ancient town of Luna that gave its name, for a time, to the stone. But in geologic time there is no homeland, no moment of origin. Quarrytime is just a rite of passage, wherein rock is turned to stone. The marble around Carrara “formed”—a temporally-fuzzy coming-into-being—a very very long time ago. A slow process that turned those ancient, ancient seabeds first into limestone, about 200 million years ago and then, with pressure, into marble, about 20 million years ago. And the ocean then is the ocean now.

Museum Capsule Reviews (and thoughts) 3: Venosa

The beginning of the first gallery

Yesterday I visited the Museo Archeologico Nazionale "Mario Torelli" in Venosa for the first time. I'd heard good things about it, and it lived up to the hype. 

I usually don't go in much for interactives, touch screens, and the like, but as I'd been advised that they were well done here, I gave them a go. I don't know how they fare with the general public (I saw no one else in the museum during the three or so hours I spent there on a Saturday morning), but I did find them useful in communicating information in more depth than was presented in the wall panels, and the occasional animations were interesting (I was surprised to see that the fellow holding the survey rod for the Roman gromaticus was wearing a Samnite tunic and belt, though on further reflection maybe I shouldn't be surprised; the Grand Bargain was played out also at this scale... While we're on the subject of screens and Samnites, I did notice an image of the famous tomb painting of returning warriors from Nola misattributed to Paestum). There were subtle noises from the screens, but fortunately nothing overly grating.

Samnite on the left

The museum in Venosa is conceived as a unit with the archaeological museum of Melfi, with the latter concentrating on the pre-Roman archaeology of the area, while the former begins just prior to the arrival of the Romans and continues through to the early modern period.

One aspect of the wall panels that I found peculiar was the frequent inclusion of a photograph of an artifact that was displayed in a case immediately beside it. I suppose this could aid accessibility?

There are some stand-out artifacts for the student of Roman Italy, such as the inscribed stones from Bantia interpreted by the museum's honorand Mario Torelli as a templum augurale, and the small fragment of the Tabula Bantina that isn't in Naples (in Venosa the Oscan side of the tablet is given pride of place, though the Latin side can be observed, albeit very partially hidden by the supports; this contrasts with the principal fragment's installation in Naples, which displays the—from my point of view—less interesting Latin side, with the Oscan side totally unobservable against the wall).

Tabula Bantina, Venosa fragment, Latin side

The whole historic center of Venosa is dotted with Roman-period spolia, and the castle that houses the museum is no exception. At one point in the Imperial gallery, a couple of bits of spolia, totally unmentioned, can be seen in the wall behind a musealized and labeled inscription. This seems like a missed opportunity to draw connections between the exhibit and its host structure, as well as to talk about the process of spoliation and reuse so locally evident:

Silent spolia

It's refreshing to see the exhibit continue through to the early modern period. At least here, there's some connection with the castle, two cannon barrels punctuating the end of the exhibit. A lot more I could say, but I have to get up early tomorrow morning; back to fieldwork at Rossano di Vaglio.

The most beautiful of worlds? (or, sarma police)

Because today was part of a long weekend in Naples—yesterday was the feast of San Gennaro, the city's patron, known among other things for the miracle (officially speaking, "just" a prodigy, per the Church) of the liquification of his reliquary blood, which I witnessed in the cathedral—the school building shut a bit earlier than usual. So, on my way home along Spaccanapoli, I stopped and got a gelato. Since the side gate to Santa Chiara, where I usually enjoy my gelato, was closed, I continued on to Piazza del Gesù, where a small crowd was gathered round for some minor television personality talking with passers-by on camera. I eavesdropped in hopes of overhearing who exactly it was while I ate my foresta and fiordilatte, without real success (overhearing, that is; eating was a great success). When that got old I turned and headed for the little bookshop in the corner of the piazza, Dante & Descartes, to browse the offerings and say hi to Giancarlo the libraio. I picked up Louise Glück's Averno and the first of Elena Ferrante's L'amica geniale—I read them all some time ago in English, but I've been meaning to read them in Italian, especially now that I've been living in Naples for a few years.

Giancarlo mentioned that shortly there'd be a book presentation, a sort of epistolary novel of dialogue between two women in Venice, so I decided to stick around. It was a fun discussion between the two interlocutors and the author, which convinced me to add another book to my stack (Bruceremo by Caterina Serra). The book's epigraph is attributed to Heraclitus:

Il più bello dei mondi non è che un mucchio di rifiuti gettati a caso ("The most beautiful of worlds is nothing but a randomly tossed heap of trash")

Not remembering this particular Heraclitean fragment, and curious about its potentially archaeological reception, I looked it up, Diels 124. Diels' Greek text reads σάρμα εἰκῆ κεχυμένον. Σάρμα is a very rare word, attested in the fragmentary comic poet Rhinthon and, possibly, in this fragment of Heraclitus; the noun derived from the verb σαίρω "to sweep, clean," hence σάρμα would be "sweepings": "sweepings piled up (κεχυμένον) at random (εἰκῆ)."

The textual tradition, however, is messier than this. Like the rest of the so-called Pre-Socratics, we don't have any complete surviving text of Heraclitus. This particular fragment is found in Theophrastus' \so-called Metaphysics, and the manuscript tradition transmits σὰρξ εἰκῇ κεχυμένων, which is seemingly grammatically problematic in a few ways and so has been subject to various emendations, among them Diels's σάρμα... κεχυμένον. Similar is the conjecture σάρον, another noun related to σαίρω meaning "sweepings, rubbish" but rather better attested than σάρμα. Another option is that of Most, followed by few, σωρῶν εἰκῇ κεχυμένων positing a form of σωρός "heap": "just like the most beautiful of the heaps piled at random [is] the world-order." 

But the manuscripts of Theophrastus transmit σὰρξ: flesh.

"Σὰρξ is universally attested: all the Greek manuscripts and the Arabic (Ψ) and Latin (Λ) translations have it, so that if it is indeed erroneous it would be one of the primitive errors of the Neoplatonic archetype manuscript. With few exceptions, all scholars have thought it untenable and emended it,  mostly with a word that means “a heap or a pile [of sweepings]... However, what is untenable is this emendation, because it presents the wrong comparison and ruins the point that Theophrastus is trying to make" (Gutas, p. 328).

"Flesh" though art, and unto "flesh" thou shalt return... 

Gutas's streamlined version of this passage of Theophrastus, taking into account the various traditions: "for example, Heraclitus should have realized the absurdity of his own statement when he said that the human body, made up of elements “poured out at random” (i.e., by random and indeterminate first principles), is nevertheless the most beautiful arrangement of such elements." (You will have to go read Gutas's extensive commentary for translating κόσμος as "arrangement" rather than "world" or "universe.")

Another perfectly good, evocative, slightly mysterious pre-Socratic aphorism ruined by philology...

(As usual, there's more that I intended to say here, but the night is getting away from me, and I already don't know where I got the energy to write this all in the first place. And the role that the pre-Socratics play for the non-specialist—and I mean the non-specialist in the pre-Socratics—as a sort of mystical mists of mystery will have to wait for a future post.)

Gutas, Dimitri, ed. 2010. Theophrastus On First Principles: (known as his Metaphysics) : Greek Text and Medieval Arabic Translation. Philosophia Antiqua. Leiden: Brill.

The Quantity of Antiquity

Prompted by a passage in Maurizio Bettini's 2023 Chi ha paura dei Greci e dei Romani? Dialogo e cancel culture (my broader thoughts on which I reserve for another time and place), I wanted to put down a few thoughts on the amount of stuff that survives from the ancient world, at least in an impressionistic manner. Ideally I'd like to put together something more rigorous (that means something has numbers...), but perfect is the enemy of the done.

Bettini's work is measured and dialectic and ill reduces to quotation of an isolated passage; just a phrase, then, will have to do here, the more so since his larger point is of no concern here. He refers to la pesantezza, chiamiamola pure cosalità (p. 84; "the weightiness, we could even call it the thingness") of the accumulated mass of texts, structures, artifacts, and traces that remain from  the Greco-Roman past. (In all of this I have the impression of retracing things put better by others previously.)

How much of ancient Mediterranean antiquity "survives" until the present day? There are different classes of material, clearly. The literary texts that we know, overwhelmingly via a continuous manuscript tradition, are many, though relatively few compared with what we know once existed, thanks to citations of titles in surviving texts, for example. This number is unlikely to ever change by any significant number, even if the work being done on the eponymous materials from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum is very promising.

Material culture, that is artifacts, that is stuff--bones, stones, and, overwhelmingly, broken pieces of pottery, among others--is another story. Here again what "survives" is probably a very small percentage of what once existed. The metric that is always rattling around in my brain is the Panathenaic 1%, which was, as far as I know, first put together by Martin Bentz (but I would be happy to be corrected). In short, Panathenaic amphoras were produced for the victors of the Panathenaic games at Athens. Because we know the frequency of the games etc., we know in theory how many Panathenaic amphoras should have been produced in antiquity. If we compare this with the number of such amphoras known archaeologically, we get a figure of about 1%. Of course, this is a different kind of 1% than with literary texts. This number could change (and is changing) as a consequence of ongoing archaeological excavation. But it at least gives us an order of magnitude for the proportion of a particular class of ancient ceramics that are presently known and knowable to Science. 

(What about the other 99%? While it is often said that ceramics break but are otherwise almost indestructible, and there is some truth to this, this is not the whole story. While the Romans were great offenders, in that the socio-economics of empire led to the production of immense quantities of ceramics, these same dynamics also contributed to the spread (not the invention—that pre-dates the Roman use) of waterproof pavements made using ground-up potsherds—the usual name for such pavements is the Italian cocciopesto, which literally means "ground-up potsherds"—the production of which must have pulverized unquantifiable* tons of pottery, sparing future ceramicists from having to catalog them. Of course, a lot of this terracotta dust probably also came from bricks or rooftiles, whose destruction is less generally mourned [sorry, Phil].
* anything and everything is quantifiable if you're willing to fudge a bit. Actually, Vitruvius in Book 7 gives recipes for various kinds of pavements, one for instance calling for three parts of potsherd to one part lime. The problem would be to calculate how much ceramic material all the many such pavements consumed...)

So, only one percent! A discipline founded upon loss. At the same time, many archaeological storerooms have reached critical mass. The sheer number of artifacts deriving from excavations (or, to a much lesser degree, surface finds, whether stray or due to regular archaeological survey) is immense, and strains the resources of already underfunded museums and archaeological superintendencies. I don't think those outside of archaeology (nor many within it, especially those coming from, say, North American backgrounds) really appreciate just how much stuff there is. (This is where a bit of numbers, which is to say rigor, would be helpful.) More studies of materials from depositi would be ideal (of course, meanwhile, there's an "overproduction" of PhDs relative to the declining number of positions available in academia.)

(Some excavations have turned to a form of catch-and-release, where the materials are given a rapid study, and those from which little further information can be gleaned, due to their nature, state of preservation, or context of origin, are quietly and secretly disposed of, or simply used as backfill for excavation trenches.)

I have more to say but this turns out to already have gone on a bit long.

But why? And thieving some joy

I mean, obviously, the project is too big. It's incomplete, and incompletable. It's anachronistic, a one-man band in an era of collaborative symphonic orchestrations, big linked data.

I can't compete with Arachne, for instance (or the whole ensemble of iDAI)--how could I? I can't compete with the Beazley Archive for pottery. I can't compete with Digital LIMC for illustrating Classical mythology. I can't compete with the Catalogo generale dei Beni Culturali (see, in particular, the currently 376172 results in Beni archeologici!) for the sites and artifacts of Italy. I'm sure I'm forgetting other projects of this ilk; it's late. (Edited to add: Wikimedia Commons! I can only bow in awe... and meanwhile mutter that there aren't enough cross-cutting boxes)

Why continue? Well, it's my own form of madness. I hear from many of you that you find it helpful, and I'm very glad for that. It does encourage me to keep going! But at root I would probably be doing it anyhow, to scratch my own peculiar itches, which have a lot to do with adding context to absolutely everything--sorting everything into little (and not-so-little) boxes. The great thing is that they can each go into multiple boxes! I can cross disciplinary, chronological, and geographical boundaries when and where I feel like it.

What's more, for certain classes of material, I can compete with Arachne; for example, they only have nine photos of Genucilia plates; where I've got, as of this writing, 76 such photos (and there are more on the way, Leah and Laura!). Now, the Catalogo Generale returns 108 results for Genucilia. Maddeningly, however, the majority of these include only photos of the profile of the plates (not even profile drawings, except in rare cases). My brother in Bacchus, no one is looking for side-views of Genucilia plates, at least not to the exclusion of the tondo decoration.

Further, hoo boy, the Catalogo Generale has a clunky interface. And if I want to see other artifacts with the same provenance as a given Genucilia plate, I'm going to potentially get everything from the Neolithic to the 1950s. That could be cool for some people, but it's not what I'm looking for. I can also see other artifacts from the same chronological range (here we're limited to half-century spans, which is probably realistic for a big archaeological database). You can compare "349 a.C - 300 a.C" on the CatGen with "2nd half 4th c. BCE" on my Flickr. If you want to get a sense of Late Classical-very Early Hellenistic material culture, you might want to have a look at both! Of course, my results are going to skew slightly more monumental and flashy (though I do try to get some cookpots in where possible), because I'm limited to what makes its way into museum cases, whereas the CatGen in theory has access to all the archaeological storerooms of Italy, even if this dream is far from being realized as yet). But I can show you things from outside the national boundaries of Italy, even if they were originally found there. And ideally it should be easy to see monuments, sculpture, potsherds, and miniature terracottas cheek-by-jowl for a given time and place. Another benefit, from my point of view: conceptual categories such as "Ancient dance" or  "Funerary lions of antiquity"; (we can also have a little fun sometimes, as a treat).

Not to be forgotten: being able to license all the photos as Creative Commons! This is becoming more common with the big databases, but it's not universal.

There is also the possibility of being able to put together collections of photos for teaching purposes (albeit imaginary classes that it seems increasingly unlikely I will ever be able to teach). 

Other considerations: I'm not dependent on external funding (well, I am, to the extent that I still need to eat, access the internet, buy more backup storage, and keep the Flickr subscription renewing ad infinitum). I am, however, dependent on Flickr continuing to exist. There have been times in the past two decades when it hasn't looked good, but by golly they've scraped by and carried on. If something were to happen, I'm confident someone would build a place to go. In a sense, Flickr is just a frame to hang all the metadata on. (But I very much hope it sticks around as long as conceivably possible! Which of course leads me to another limitation--I have to stick around as long as conceivably possible. Now, if the human world is still chugging along for the foreseeable, I absolutely need to get this m(a/e)ss of photos and metadata into some kind of an institutional framework sooner or later. But that's not for this post.)

Autoarchaeology, or, retrointrospection

 Since I've been blogging again, I took some time to read back through my previous posts. I started this darn thing nearly 20 years ago, somehow... Anyway, I rediscovered a bit of my own past, namely the fact that my Flickr antiquity project actually predates my being on Flickr (I can't tell or remember if it predates Flickr itself, but it could).

It started with a website on  FreeWebTown.com, which no longer exists, neither the host nor my site, though it stuck around long enough to get scooped up by the Wayback Machine here. I called it "Emporical Images of the Ancient World," and it's really the same idea in nuce as my Flickr account, just that my interests have become slightly less parochial. As for the name, "I want it to be an emporion for the empirical study of Antiquity, hence the name."

As I wrote, no later than the summer of 2005,

The scope of this site is generally Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East in the pre-modern period. The focus is generally miltary equipment and representations, but is really limited only by my own whims, resources and abilities. The basis is my own collection of digital photographs, but this has been supplemented where necessary and/or desirable. *NOTE:* This site will never be "complete" or "finished." I envision it as a perpetual work-in-progress: it will change as I go new places, take new pictures, add new information and revise old information"

More on Flickr: tags and timelines

The Etruscan ritual calendar called the Tabula Capuana; see more here.

In addition to the collections approach detailed in yesterday's post, Flickr also allows up to 75 tags per photo. I try to use these in two ways. There a bunch of general tags to start out with, to help steer in people from search engines. Then there are more specific ones meant to be useful from within the site. Among these, along with things like material ("marble," "bronze," "ceramic") and culture (a concept to be problematized, for sure, but handy in a pinch; e.g. "Egyptian," "Greek," "Etruscan") are, in particular, the chronology tags.

For instance, a photo could have the following tags:

        "5th c. BCE" "early 5th c. BCE" "1st half 5th c. BCE" "1st quarter 5th c. BCE" "490s BCE" "480s BCE" "470s BCE"

Decades are generally the smallest temporal denomination possible (unless there's a coin or an inscription that allows precision to the year, but those are rarely going to be useful when searching for other things). Of course, different categories of material can be dated with different degrees of precision. There are some prehistoric artifacts that just get, say, a "3rd millennium BCE" tag. I don't bother when it's 1st millennium BCE or CE, but just go directly to centuries. Plenty of things only datable to the century.

I generally only add decade tags when the thing in question can be dated to within a quarter-century. 

For the time being, there's no good front-end to just browse by chrono-tags. You can click on them from existing photos, or plug them in using the following URL, substituting 470sBCE for the relevant unit (e.g., 5thcBCE, early5thcBCE, 1stHalf5thcBCE, 1stQuarter5thcBCE... not case-sensitive):

        https://www.flickr.com/search/?user_id=7945858%40N08&tags=470sBCE

If you want to combine the chrono-tags with other tags, just add them after a comma, like so:

        https://www.flickr.com/search/?user_id=7945858%40N08&tags=470sBCE,bronze

In addition to the material and culture tags above, I'll add the shape (hydria, column krater) for ceramics, figures depicted (Theseus or Artemis - this can get tricky for gods, since you're likely to end up with photos of their temples or sanctuaries; if you just want photos of representations of the deity, you may be better off using the Gods, heroes, and mythical creatures collection), or just what the thing is (grater, figurine). As the scope of the project has increasingly come to focus on Italy, I've tried to add most tags in both English and Italian (beyond any other locally-relevant languages). The chrono-tags are only in English, though; the 75-tag limit doesn't make it feasible otherwise.

Not immediately relevant to searching directly via Flickr, but I also want to mention here Pleiades machine-tags. These are a way of integrating photos in Flickr (not just mine!) with the ancient-world linked-data gazetteer that is Pleiades (you all already know about Pleiades, I hope). There are a couple of write-ups from back when these were first implemented, here and here, but in short: I can add a machine tag to a photo, let's say.: pleiades:findspot=432754 That code links to the site of Capua on Pleiades. There, on the right-hand sidebar, you'll see "132 other related photos" (more in the near future, probably!). Clicking on that will get you all of the photos on Flickr which have been tagged as either depicting Capua or as of artifacts with a findspot of Capua. If you're uploading photos of ancient stuff to Flickr, I recommend adding Pleiades machine tags! If not, if you leave your tags open, I might add them myself... 

(Ancientists reading this, I'd love to hear your thoughts on chronological definitions: I've got a pretty good idea of when the concept of the "early 5th c. BCE" begins, but when, in your mind, does it end? When does it become "mid 5th c. BCE"?  Also, I'd be interested to hear of other ways of dividing centuries. I once saw them divided by thirds in a museum in Germany. Absolute mad lads.)

A guide to using my Flickr resources using collections

It has often occurred to me over the past several years that the structure of my Flickr account (dedicated mostly to archaeological sites and artifacts from the ancient Mediterranean in its broadest sense) is probably somewhat opaque to most users. I imagine that, typically, if you've encountered it previously, it was a search result for some ancient type of thing or site you were googling. And that's great! That's part of the reason I try to get 100% of your daily tags and metadata into each photo (the Flickr 75-tag limit per photo is kind of a bummer, though). 

There are other ways, though. For some reason, Flickr makes it very hard to even learn of the existence of Collections, which are albums full of albums. A tiny bit of structured data for you! Anyway, they're available here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dandiffendale/collections

The first collection is "Topography," within which you will find sub-collections by country. The most thorough by far are Greece and Italy. (n.b. there are also several countries that I haven't visited, but which have produced artifacts that I've photographed elsewhere, so they have a collection, but are usually very skimpy in terms of uploaded photos.) Within each country are further nested sub-collections by region or state, and within each region are the albums. The principal types of topographic albums are Sites (usually titled with the ancient name(s), sometimes with a nod to the modern name) and Museums (these also include photos of a museum's permanent collection that I've photographed on display on loan somewhere else). Occasionally some non-ancient album has snuck in.

The next collection is "Subject/Object Types." This is a big one, and there are no sub-collections. For now, it's kind of a grab-bag of albums that haven't gotten structured elsewhere. These are albums based on type of thing or concept. A few examples (out of the current 194 albums within) include "Ancient architectural models," "Ancient molds," "Ancient slavery," "ELC votives," "Greek athletics," "Museum galleries," "Small bronzes." Ideally I have attempted to organize the contents of each album chronologically, oldest to most recent, but in practice this is rare.

Next collection: "Gods, heroes, and mythical creatures." As it says on the tin. If you don't see an album here of the figure you're looking for, it doesn't mean there isn't a relevant photo; I just might not have created a special folder yet.

Collection: "Ancient persons." A grab-bag of emperors and other personalities who had their picture taken more than once in antiquity. For now pretty sparsely populated--just give me another 50 years or so... 

Collection: "Animals." Within you will find albums collecting photos of different animals (as represented in ancient visual media, for the most part).

Collection: "Ceramics by type." A relatively recent creation. Different wares, classes, techniques. No structure as yet other than alphabetization. 

Collection: "Named vase-painters, groups, etc." Also recent. Also, a lot of the albums within will have photos of only a single pot attributed to the titular painter. Someday, maybe, they will get friends.

Collection: "Materials." Go here if you're looking for photos of something made out of a particular material (for example, bronze, or a particular kind of marble [though, again, marble sub-categories remain mostly aspirational]).

Collection: "Particular objects and contexts." The albums within are typically tomb-groups where I've photographed the contents individually, or particular artifacts/artworks that warrant multiple photos. There's no strict criterion, and I could probably create more of these albums.

Collection: "Exhibits." These are albums of galleries and artifacts displayed in special exhibits. Frustratingly, Flickr doesn't show you very much of the title of each from this page. 

Collection: "Historic collections." These are albums collecting artifacts that once formed part of a particular or well-known private collection, which are now either split among multiple museums or simply make up a relevant part of a single museum.

Collection: "Inscriptions." Epigrafiends go here: sub-collections of inscriptions divided by language.

Collection: "Sculptors and their traditions." Totally aspirational, mostly a holding tank for future albums. 

Collection: "Masonry styles." Another almost empty, aspirational collection.

There's no grand plan, there's only good intentions and fickle attentions... There are a few classes of material that I try to make a point of always uploading once I've photographed them, however; if you're dying of boredom, you could try to figure out what they are. And if structure isn't your thing, you can as always just dive into the photostream from the most recent uploads here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dandiffendale/

As always, if there's something you're looking for and don't see it on my Flickr account, feel free to drop me a line and ask. I have literally tens of thousands of photos taken but not "yet" uploaded. In particular, if there's an album with only a single photo in it, it's very likely that I have others of that category not yet edited.