The events organized during the project and the publication of the results will make it possible to question many clichés about the role of women, frequent in the scientific literature as well as in publications and exhibitions for the general public. Some of the scientific results of the project are the following. These are preliminary results that will have to be confirmed by adding and analysing many new objects to the database. The method and the tools being now well defined, it is now mainly a question of massifying the data.
Objects brought to the monuments are offerings, containers, ritual instruments, and more personal objects. Except for the military field, which was reserved for men in all its aspects, but which only really developed after 340 BC, all the ritual acts and offerings can be carried out by women, who are responsible for 61% of them. Although the differences are sometimes significant and indicate the great agency of women in the funerary context, it should be noted that men only represent a third of the offering bearers but play a central role in the rituals via the handling of the phiales, while women play many practical roles, particularly those linked to the provisioning.
The explosion of images and the gradual heroization of the deceased during the 4th century is accompanied by an increasingly prominent role of women in figured rituals. While the deceased is exalted and individualized, the men and especially the women who are surrounding him are multiplied and hard to distinguish, except in the representations of dramatic scenes in which the figures remain few and well identifiable.
The proportion of exclusively female scenes, 22% of the corpus, versus 4% for men, demonstrates the great autonomy of female figures in the funerary sphere and its representations, at least during ritual visits. Certain functions related to the military sphere can only be performed by men, but these are not indispensable and therefore do not limit the role of women very much. On the contrary, it is men who seem to venture into a field dominated by female skills. As in the case of the painted tombs of Paestum, the iconography here allows us to shed light on little-known aspects of ancient societies and the role that women played in them, as archaeological data and texts provide few indications. It remains to be verified whether this iconography offers a reliable reflection of ancient societies.
Due to the difficulties in setting up the exhibition with the secondments, it was decided to modify the project: the exhibition will be online, but highlighted within certain collections through the addition of panels and Qrcodes in the showcases of the museums. This “diffuse exhibition” will make it possible to propose a common thread between several museums.
Thanks to an amendment to the agreement with the Museo Nazionale di Matera, the museum will become the very first Italian national museum to disseminate images from its collections in full open access under the CC BY license, an important milestone for Italian cultural goods.
