Nec Curant Carmina Manes: A Contextualized History of the Material Culture of Roman Children’s Burials

Abstract

This dissertation traces the histories of objects that were consciously taken “out” of time. It focuses on the material culture associated with imperial and late antique Roman children’s burials and explores the ways in which these objects have been used, interpreted, and displayed throughout their histories. By specifically examining the burials of children, this dissertation centers the use of words, images, and objects to mitigate the unnatural death of a child. But the permanency granted by the tomb necessarily outlasts mourner and even culture. Central to my argument is the recognition of the conflict inherent in studying burial goods. These objects were purposefully and ritually taken out of quotidian circulation and recast as either belonging to or being representative of the dead. I frame viewership as an active event. In tracing the histories of objects, I am also recentering those objects within the new contexts of their new viewers. I look to the ways in which advancements in technology, religious changes, and the development of new forms of media grapple with the same issues. I demonstrate that the multilayering of meaning, purpose, and function within un-buried funerary objects allows for a multifaceted historical contextualization in which no one version of an object’s history is privileged above the others. I approach my argument through the careful consideration of a variety of funerary objects including sarcophagi, plaster molds, grave goods, and even the physical remains of the deceased.