ERC grant awarded to Pawel!

Written by Paweł Nowakowski on Monday, January 10, 2022

In January came the happy news that Pawel was awarded with an ERC Starting grant to start a new, parallel project, based at the Faculty of History of the University of Warsaw, which will explore the changes in the culture of commemoration at the close of the Roman Imperial period, and the influence which craftsmen, stonecutters who made inscriptions on stelae, buildings or tombstones, had on them.

See here for a provisional project website.

The aim of the research is to explain one of the most startling problems in the global history of research on the collective memory and the practice of commemoration, i.e. the transformation of the epigraphic traditions of the early Roman Empire, which began in the mid-third century and resulted in the rise of the so-called epigraphic cultures of Late Antiquity.

The conclusions will allow us to see in a new light the role of commonly available prefabricated goods, modelled on the changing objects of the elitist culture, in the broadly understood cultural change, and their producers – craftsmen, as the basic agents of vertical cultural transfer, adapting the culture of the elite to the needs of the middle and lower echelons of the society.

How do societies shape the memory of themselves?

During the Roman Empire, inscriptions, usually commemorating the lives or achievements of individual people, the construction of public buildings, or other events important for local communities, became a ubiquitous element of the landscape of cities, smaller centres or roadside cemeteries. It is even said that a penchant for inscriptions became one of the correlative elements of the Roman “cultural package” and one of the main determinants of “being Roman”.

However, in the third century C.E., this beautiful and old tradition which provided us with so many valuable sources for the social history of the Empire, was transformed. In some provinces, the number of inscriptions fell to a fraction of the previous number, elsewhere their shape, form, decorations, lettering used, and finally the circumstances of their commissioning completely changed. The ancient art of epigraphic commemoration was resurrected only by the Renaissance antiquarians and collectors, laying the foundations for the modern European epigraphic commemoration, traces of which we encounter all around us in today’s world.

Engaging debates about this transformation have been going on continuously since at least the 1980s, when the problem was fully noticed and defined, and when we realized its importance for the history of cultural memory. So far, however, no consent has been reached with regard to the reconstruction of its causes, course and effects. Historians observe the phenomenon, consider various explanations, but it still remains a mystery to us. There is certainly more to it than a simple correlation with the political and military crisis of the Roman Empire in the third century.

Stone masters

Pawel suggests that the transformation could have been driven by a refreshed understanding of the role of epigraphy and its forms in the middle and lower social strata. Stonecutters’ workshops dealing with the production of prefabricated inscriptions could be responsible for this. If so, then only an in-depth understanding of these environments can provide us with an understanding of the processes underpinning the entire transformation.

Today we have no doubt that in many regions it was stonecutters who advised average buyers – women and men, what form of inscription should be chosen from a limited dossier of ready-made shapes of plaques, decorations or dedicatory formulas, e.g. to commemorate a dear cousin, deceased wife or successful completion of construction. Some of such “product catalogues” (i.e. collections of formulas placed on commemorative plaques or on lintels of houses) have survived even in the form of manuscripts.

If it happened that the stonecutters simultaneously carried out special orders for the local aristocracy, they learned about the aristocrats’ taste in the culture of commemoration and trends in the elitist culture. They could then draw inspiration from them for their repertoire of inscriptions, offered to less wealthy buyers. Thus, they became a vital element of the vertical (“top-to-bottom”) cultural transfer, and at the same time a kind of a cultural filter, adjusting the high culture of the elite to the tastes of an ordinary buyer.

We can guess that the changes that have occurred in the culture of the elite, among others in connection with the removal of the senators from provincial administration and the command of military units, the spread of Christianity and the following “ostentatious humility”, changes in the culture of civic competition (agonistic culture) and other phenomena, influenced in very different ways the shape of inscriptions commemorating someone’s achievements. The disappearance of old, well-established career paths naturally had to lead to the emergence of new models of career descriptions, or even new models of civic virtue. Stonecutters, modelling their catalogues of products, made these novelties spread wider and wider, and probably did the same with generalized ways of thinking about what is worth commemorating and how to talk about their own and other people’s lives. As a result, the change reached people who have never had anything in common with the great state career or with foundations of magnificent buildings.

Explaining changes

This approach requires new research instruments. Researchers of epigraphy of the Roman Empire still have a small number of instruments at their disposal, allowing them to learn about the workshops involved in the production of inscriptions. In part, this is due to the fact that their attention was mainly drawn to other research strands: quantitative epigraphy (epigraphic curves), research on the self-presentation of people or groups displaying inscriptions, the visibility of inscriptions in the urban landscape or the “visual studies” and “culture of viewing”, very popular in recent years.

Meanwhile, Pawel intends to create a team which will develop the “Digital Atlas of Workshops in Epigraphy” – an advanced digital instrument for collecting the data on emerging and disappearing styles of decorations and lettering, stonemasons’ marks (ancient “logotypes” of workshops), signatures of stonecutters, stone trade routes, quarries active in Late Antiquity or any other markers, allowing the identification of both larger and smaller workshops dealing with the production of inscriptions.

The next phase of the project will be the construction of regional networks of workshops that will allow us to observe changing styles and environments which favoured them. An inspiration will surely be a careful adaptation of the workshop study methods developed for other crafts and periods – in particular for Greek vase painters of the archaic and classical period, and for the scribes and their scriptoria, whom we safely identify today as important “cultural mediators”.

The direction of work proposed by Pawel has a chance to redirect the attention of the entire community of researchers of ancient inscriptions from recipients and commissioners to the makers of the inscriptions – craftsmen and their workshops – as the basic agents of vertical cultural transfer. We can expect a significant increase in our knowledge of epigraphy as a cultural phenomenon, especially in the middle and lower strata, for use in the study of any epigraphic culture where professionals producing inscriptions are present. And finally, perhaps we will get an answer to the question of whether such transformations in the memory of societies can repeat themselves.