In ancient Rome, death set off a series of ritual and corporeal transformations that prompted the removal of a body from the world of the living. But for modern funerary archaeologists, human remains have been an afterthought compared to the art and inscriptions that adorned their tombs. Bringing together funerary inscriptions from the American Academy in Rome with skeletal evidence from Roman burials, this talk explores the sensorial impact and embodied experiences of touching, handling, burying and digging up the dead in Roman cemeteries.

Liana Brent is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/Samuel H. Kress Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellow in Ancient Studies (year one of a two-year fellowship) at the American Academy in Rome and a PhD candidate in the Department of Classics at Cornell University.

The event will be held in English. You can watch it live at https://livestream.com/aarome.