Masters of the stone: The stonecutters' workshops and the rise of the late antique epigraphical cultures (third-fifth century AD)

Project Information

STONE-MASTERS

Grant agreement ID: 101040152

DOI

10.3030/101040152

EC signature date 31 January 2022

Start date 1 October 2022

End date 30 September 2027

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 499 625,00

EU contribution

€ 1 499 625,00

Coordinated by

UNIWERSYTET WARSZAWSKI
Poland

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - STONE-MASTERS (Masters of the stone: The stonecutters' workshops and the rise of the late antique epigraphical cultures (third-fifth century AD))

Reporting period: 2022-10-01 to 2025-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The STONE-MASTERS project aims at exploring and explaining one of the most startling problems in the global history of research on collective memory and commemorative practices, which is the transformation of Roman Imperial epigraphic traditions in the later third century C.E. and the subsequent rise of the so-called epigraphic cultures of Late Antiquity. It is the Romans who taught modern civilizations the habit of recording historical events and the lives of ordinary people in inscriptions on stone, often associated with statues. It was in the Roman Imperial period that inscriptions acquired a new status, becoming omnipresent in nearly all aspects of life, to such an extent that making inscriptions came to be considered as a focal and correlational aspect of the Roman ‘cultural package’. But then, between the third and fifth century C.E. many formerly thriving epigraphic genres were abandoned. The practice survived but it acquired a thoroughly new face in the place of the former, well-established traditions. The original forms of Roman epigraphical commemoration were taken up only by early modern antiquarians, which resulted in the birth of a Roman-like epigraphy in Renaissance Europe. Despite decades of research, we still cannot satisfactorily say why the entire Roman Commonwealth put to one side constitutive instruments of their collective memory. And our lack of understanding pertaining to this prevents us from ascertaining a full overview of the way societies remember, and why they can suddenly abandon effective ways of shaping the public perception of their own past.
In this project, the PI anticipates that the new face of Roman epigraphy was caused by the dissemination of changes in the elite’s approach to epigraphy through artisans’ workshops. Craftspersons and their ateliers were direct intermediaries between the processes which shaped Roman attitudes to epigraphy, and the very stones which we study today; and it is at this intersection where the PI expects to note the most profound changes.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During the first two years, the project teams achieved the following results:

1. Creation of a research questionnaire for the study of workshop affinities in epigraphy, a controlled vocabulary/ontology for Greek and Latin palaeography of the Roman period with: clear-cut definitions and classification of letters shapes, and their morphological groupings. The achievement was verified through talks at different conferences and feedback was collected.

2. Gathering 34 top-level researchers exploring different aspects of artisans’ workshops in antiquity, and organizing a common platform of the exchange of knowledge during our methodological conference. An edited volume with their contributions, which will certainly prove a major reference work for epigraphy, is now processed by the team and should appear in the first half of 2026 in the series “Studies on Byzantine Epigraphy” (Brepols).

3. Submitting so-far 9 publications with preliminary results of the project and several case studies (major publishing output of the project is designed to take place during the final years). Those with PIDs are already listed in the Continuous Reporting Tool.

4. Creation of the framework of the Digital Atlas of Workshops in Antiquity as an innovative digital analytical tool and data publishing platform.

5. Building a significant visibility of the project through:
a. organizing workshops/conferences, team talks at other conferences, organizing invited talks at seminars at the University of Warsaw, which involved, among others the PIs of several ERC grants;
b. award to the PI of the 2nd level prize of the “Polityka” journal (a major research prize in Poland); the PI also became the supervisor in a successful MSCA application;
c. invitation of the postdocs to join the steering committees of research societies and editorial boards.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Answering the key question will address one of the most troubling phenomena in the global history of collective memory and commemorative habits – a phenomenon which, if fully explained, may bring us to a most significant leap in our understanding of the changing concepts of public space, communities’ collective memory, experience of religion, and patterns of the public display of power. Assuming a new methodological lens will not only redefine the field but may entirely restructure our understanding of the way artisans disseminated elitist culture in the lower echelons of society.

The first two years of the project research brought significant breakthroughs in the field of methods of Greek and Latin epigraphy of the Roman period. The creation of the data patterns for collecting information allowing to identify the origin of inscriptions is an unprecedented procedure. No such complex set of guidelines had been offered before and positively underwent tests in a sandbox environment. The adopted form of a spreadsheet questionnaire makes these methods very accessible and easily reusable even by researchers who have no direct access to the project’s atlas or any significant digital resources.

Perhaps, an even more important breakthrough in the discipline of epigraphy is the creation of the palaeographical subset within these guidelines, laying down the foundations of the philosophy, instructions and controlled vocabularies/thesauri for the study of palaeography (letter shapes) in inscriptions. Previously, palaeographical conclusions and the so-called “dating of inscriptions based on palaeography” usually relied on the personal experience and intuition of individual researchers, rather than a systematic research approach. This, of course, led to many false conclusions in establishing the dates of inscriptions, repeated and multiplied in studies based on defective descriptions in the original editions. With the creation of a set and precisely defined controlled vocabulary, the project allows other researchers to embrace an unambiguous and very informative system of the palaeographical description in epigraphy.