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Households in Context: Preface and Acknowledgments

Households in Context
Preface and Acknowledgments

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Notes

table of contents
  1. Preface and Acknowledgments
  2. List of Contributors
  3. Note on Abbreviations
  4. Introduction: Houses, Households, and Homes: Toward an Archaeology of Dwelling
  5. Part I Households in Spatial Context: Settlements, Neighborhoods, and Urbanism
    1. 1. Egyptian Houses in Their Urban and Environmental Contexts: Some Case Studies of the Roman and Late Roman Periods
    2. 2. Neighborhood Networks: The Civic and Social Organization of Accessways in Ancient Karanis
    3. 3. The Tower Houses of the Hellenistic Period: A Solution to the Urban Pressure within Egyptian Towns and Villages
  6. Part II Households in Social Context: Families, Individuals, and Communities
    1. 4. The Papyrus Trail: Houses and Households in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt
    2. 5. Habitatio: Transfer of Houses and Rights of Residence in Roman Egypt
    3. 6. Unsafe Houses in Greco-Roman Egypt: Forms and Locations of Violence
  7. Part III Households in Practice: Production, Consumption, and Discard
    1. 7. Modes of Production and Reproduction in Roman-Era Egyptian Villages
    2. 8. Domestic Discard: The Making and Unmaking of Romano-Egyptian Houses
  8. Part IV Households in Cosmic Context: Religion and Ritual
    1. 9. Figurines and the Material Culture of Domestic Religion
    2. 10. The Supernatural Vulnerabilities of Domestic Space in Late Antique Egypt: Perspectives from the “Magical” Corpus
  9. Part V Expanding the Household: Dwelling Practices in Monastic and Military Contexts
    1. 11. Three Monks and a House: The Archaeology of Monastic Houses in Byzantine Egypt
    2. 12. Domestic Activities in Alternative Settings: The Ptolemaic Fort at Bi’r Samut, Egypt
  10. Afterwords: Perspectives from Pharaonic Egypt and the Greco-Roman World
    1. 1. Greco-Roman Households in Pharaonic Perspective
    2. 2. Contextualizing Houses, Households, and Homes in the Classical World and Beyond
  11. Index

Preface and Acknowledgments

This volume publishes the proceedings of a two-day international conference at Cornell University, “Better to Dwell in Your Own Small House”: Households of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt in Context (April 27–April 28, 2018), organized jointly by the coeditors of this book, Caitlín Barrett and Jennifer Carrington. Dorothy J. Thompson delivered the keynote presentation (published here as chapter 4). The current volume includes edited and revised versions of all of the papers presented at the conference, as well as two additional papers kindly contributed by Paola Davoli and David Frankfurter. The preparation of all of these papers for publication coincided with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and we are immensely grateful to all of our contributing authors for their dedication, resilience, and patience under the resulting challenging circumstances, which unavoidably lengthened the time between conference and publication.

This conference, and the present volume, could not have taken place without the help of many individuals and institutions. The Department of Classics at Cornell University was the primary institutional sponsor for the conference and provided essential funding. We also received generous grants from a number of cosponsors at Cornell: the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies (CIAMS); the Departments of Anthropology and Near Eastern Studies; the Religious Studies Program; the Archaeological Institute of America, Finger Lakes Chapter; the Cornell Society for the Humanities; and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. By enabling us to subsidize the travel expenses of our participants, this funding made it possible for the conference (and resulting volume) to bring together an international group of scholars. We are immensely grateful for this generous support.

We are equally grateful for the help of many individual colleagues. Four colleagues at Cornell agreed to serve as discussants for the panels: Adam Smith (responding to Panel 1, “Households in Spatial Context”), Jonathan Boyarin (responding to Panel 2, “Households in Social Context”), Dana Bardolph (responding to Panel 3, “Households in Practice”), and Astrid Van Oyen (responding to Panel 4, “Expanding the Household”). These four discussants offered thoughtful feedback and insightful observations that, we believe, have materially improved the resulting publication.

The Cornell Classics Department accounts coordinators—first Philip Rusher, then Jessica Smith—coordinated the travel plans and hotel arrangements for all of our speakers. Jessica also went above and beyond in negotiating with hotels, restaurants, and caterers all across Ithaca to ensure that the event would be successful. We thank Classics Department manager Keeley Boerman for overseeing the finances for the event, and undergraduate coordinator Linda Brown for helping with logistics. We are also very grateful to the graduate student volunteers, Salpi Bocchieriyan, Katie Guttman, and Elizabeth Proctor, who helped with registration, setup, and cleanup and generally kept everything running smoothly during the conference.

At Cornell University Press, we are very grateful to Bethany Wasik, the acquisitions editor, for her support of this project and her helpful feedback; to Karen Laun, the assistant managing editor, for shepherding this project to completion; to Jack Rummel, the copy editor, for the keen eye that he brought to the text; to Joyce Goldenstern, for preparing the index; and to Kristen Gregg and the marketing team, for helping put this volume out into the world. We are also immensely thankful to Bradley Ault and to the anonymous reviewers of this volume, both external and on the Cornell University Press editorial board and faculty board, for numerous constructive, thoughtful, and helpful comments on the manuscript.

Financial support for this publication came from grants generously awarded by the Hull Memorial Publication Fund of Cornell University and the von Bothmer Publication Fund of the Archaeological Institute of America. This funding has been put toward lowering the purchase price of the volume, and we are grateful for the opportunity to make this volume more widely accessible to those who wish to read it.

We would like to express our most sincere thanks to all of the authors in this volume for their varied and exciting contributions, which bring new perspectives to bear on households, dwelling, and daily experience in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt.

As is only fitting—for all publications, really, but especially one on the subject of households and families—we send our warmest thanks and love to our own families, who have supported us in this project as in everything.

Finally, we are deeply saddened to note that Ross Thomas passed away while this volume was in preparation. We thank his wife, Elisabeth O’Connell, for helping to review the text of his chapter and ensure that it is faithful to Ross’s wishes. We are honored to be able to include Ross’s work in this book, which we dedicate to his memory as a small tribute to a brilliant scholar, generous colleague, and kind friend.

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