Materials, Materiality, and Knowledge: Science, Innovation, and Labour in Antiquity

Between 17–18 September 2026, Rubina Raja (Aarhus University) together with Nathanael Andrade (Binghamton University) and William Wootton (King's College London) organized the conference Materials, Materiality, and Knowledge: Science, Innovation, and Labour in Antiquity at the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in Copenhagen. This conference was the third conference within the framework of the Locally Crafted Empires project, headed by Rubina Raja and funded by a Semper Ardens Advanced Grant awarded in late 2024 by the Carlsberg Foundation.

The conference began with an introduction by Rubina Raja to the Locally Crafted Empires Project (LoCiS) and its aims to research local and regional entanglements, with a focus on locally produced portraits as well as the context within which the project will set its data compilation.

Caspar Meyer (Bard Graduate Centre) presented on the changing modes of making that were influenced by redistributing risk away from individual skill towards stabilized systems of production. He looked at how David Pye’s concept of the workmanship of risk could be used to understand labour in the ancient world. For his case study, he examined how workshops producing silver vessels and monumental sculpture managed risk by distributing it among workers and by exercising skilled judgements. His results indicate that risk avoidance pushes workmanship towards more organisational modes of work, opening the way for contract-work and unskilled workers.

Elizabeth A. Murphy (Florida State University) gave a talk on Roman period tools and how they work as both symbols of professional identity and mediators of making. The main objectives of Murphy’s research were three-fold: (1) contextualising trends in observed toolkits from Roman potters, (2) juxtaposing interpretations on the images of tools and the study of tools, (3) promoting social archaeology of workplaces and the material culture. Her talk focused on the visual arts and the actual objects left for us to study. She highlighted that tools could be used as status symbols, that specialised tools were often showcased, and that workers had a close relationship with their tools.

The presentation by Olympia Bobou and Rubina Raja (both Aarhus University) focused on specific hypogea in Palmyra and how they could be studied to showcase the relationship between customers and workshops. In the talk, they showed how the spatial arrangement of the tombs and the shape of the material allowed for easy transportation of funerary sculpture, indicating that the initial rough work was done in the quarries before the sculptures were finished inside the tomb. Based on the material, Bobou and Raja concluded that some families preferred specific workshops for their tomb and that numerous people worked in a tomb at the same time.

Giulia Vannucci (Aarhus University) gave a talk on the funerary sculptures from the area of Cilicia. After an introduction to the area of Cilicia and its history, she highlighted the problems one encounters when dealing with this material: its dispersal of objects through private collections and their sale to museums through art dealers. By examining the architecture, the sculpture themselves and similar material, Vannucci concluded that the sculpture could not be reduced to a single regional style and reflected local practices. The sculptures from Cilicia Pedias suggested shared workshop practices in the area, while recurring forms and techniques from the sculptures in Cilicia Tracheia point to shared craft traditions.

Giovanni Colzani (Aarhus University) gave a paper on the kline sarcophagi in the Roman Southern Levant in the second and third century CE. His talk focused on craft traditions and the availability of material in the region. The research showed that along the coast there was a preference for imported marble sarcophagi, whereas basalt and limestone were more commonly used further inland. Colzani suggested that the preference for certain materials was limited by the accessibility of the stone, with cities primarily using the available stone from surrounding quarries. Despite the different materials, the kline sarcophagi shared a similar visual language, suggesting the development of a regional tradition linking the Levantine coast and the cities of the Decapolis.

François Queyrel (École Pratique des Hautes Études) discussed granite portraits of rulers at the end of the Hellenistic period and the beginning of the Empire. His talk focused on how the Ptolemies mixed the iconographic, formal, and stylistic conventions of Greek and Egyptian sculpture in colossal granite portraits. Queyrel suggested that the sculpture was intended to highlight that the Ptolemies were both Greek kings and Egyptian pharaohs by combining Egyptian materials and styles with distinctive features and hairstyles reminiscent of the Greek arts. He showed a recently discovered head of Augustus in the Prima Porta type with pharaonic details, indicating that the mixing of Greek and Egyptian portrait style was not limited to the Ptolemies but continued into the Roman period.

Ines Ferjan (Aarhus University) presented on the funerary sculpture from Oxyrhynchus. She presented the main challenges of studying with this material: The lack of contextualised finds, objects sold through the illicit antiquities market, and a large number of counterfeit portraits in the Oxyrhynchus style driven by the market demand for Egyptian statues. Looking at a few well-documented examples, Ferjan gave an overview of the funerary sculpture from Oxyrhynchus, highlighting that the material shares similar portrait styles in a cross-regional context while also showing the carving technique indicates local production and traditions.

Kenneth Lapatin (J. Paul Getty Museum) shifted the focus onto engraved gemstones. While modern scholarship has focused on the style or the ‘magical powers’ of the gemstones, Lapatin examined the process of making gemstones from the quarry to the consumer, with special emphasis on the labourers and craftsmen behind that process. Tracing the chaîne opératoire of engraved gemstones highlighted not only the embodied experience of the workers but also the large number of people involved in the process such as miners, transporters, carvers, jewellers and merchants – not to mention the countless other workers needed to sustain mining operations.

Francesca Bologna (University of Edinburgh) and William Wootton (King’s College London) gave a paper on how artificial intelligence could be used as a tool to analyse traditional groupings of Roman mosaics. They explored whether AI-models could confirm groupings of mosaics previously established through connoisseurship. They first tested whether AI could distinguish regional styles between Britannia and Syria and found that it could. They next compared the mosaic groupings in Britannia identified by scholars compared them with those produced by supervised and unsupervised machine learning. The conclusion of their research showed that the AI-model was more likely to group the mosaic by regional style than workshop style, supporting the hypothesis that mosaic style was chosen by the patron not by the makers.

Francesca Lam-March (King’s College London) gave a talk about her experimental approach to research on flan production in the Eastern Empire. She focused on flan moulds found in the southern Levant. The experimental method allowed her to better understand the practicalities of pouring metal into flan moulds and the embodied experience of the workers. Lam-March carried out her research by making replica moulds using similar materials and techniques similar to those observed in the ancient examples. The experiment allowed her to propose a preliminary reconstruction of the coin-minting process, with particular focus on the production flan, and her research suggested that the work of producing flan might have been outsourced.

Eleni Hasaki (University of Arizona) gave a paper on energetics, the method of converting the labour expanded on production to person hours, aiming to reframe the organization of pottery production. She highlighted the importance of energetics, as it adds more depth to the method of chaîne opératoire, allows for closer examination of the operational calendar and its impact on production, and casts doubt on the traditional idea of potters working part-time as farmers. Hasaki utilised the method to answer questions about risk, pricing of vessels, and the production capacity of workshops. Her research showcased vessels, from the mundane examples to masterpieces, as the culmination of skilled expertise and savvy business management.

Julia Steding (Aarhus University) explored funerary portraiture from Roman Egypt, with a focus on the corpus of over 700 limestone stelai from Terenouthis and a corpus of just over 100 mummy shrouds. Despite the partly shared iconography, deeply rooted in ancient Egyptian beliefs and traditions, these two portrait types differed considerably. Steding explored how to approach the stelai and shrouds through their making, highlighting how customers, workshops, and contexts vary and how thus materiality and crafting traditions shaped the objects and their function.

Nathanael Andrade (Binghamton University) gave a paper on loan contracts and the relationship between creditors and debtors in late antique Christian hagiography. Drawing on sixth-century sources including the works of John of Ephesus, Andrade examined how saints in North Syria and Upper Mesopotamia (late fifth and sixth centuries) were depicted as championing debtors who sometimes went so far as to kill creditors who refused to surrender loan contracts. The paper considered how Christian hagiographies illuminate the ways legal documents functioned as objects that could exert control and, when necessary, justify violence in debtor-creditor relationships.

Each talk was followed by a fruitful and engaged discussion. The final discussion gave participants the chance to ask further questions and was used to highlight the underlying topics that were posed by the conference outline: ancient labour and craft production, (from portraiture to gems and ceramics); how workers organized themselves, managed risk, and navigated relationships with consumers, workshops, and coercive labour systems. Through interdisciplinary approaches combining archaeology, scientific analysis, experimental methods, and textual evidence, the speakers foregrounded the agency, choices, and networks of craftspeople, as well as their tools, workflow, and organisation of labour.