Ancient Seminar Program with Mantha Zarmakoupi: “Making it Public: The bouleuterion at Teos, Turkey”. An in-Person and Virtual Lecture*. Advance registration is required.
Abstract
This paper focuses on the bouleuterion / odeion at Teos and contextualizes the building’s chronology—considering the recent excavation results (Teos Archaeological Project of Ankara University and UPenn, 2022-), monumental building inscription, and relevant epigraphic documents—to address the variegated functions it fulfilled over time. It also tackles the ways in which the typological study of public monuments in the study of Greek and Roman architecture at large has affected our understanding of their design and meaning. By focusing on the long history of this building, I explore the ways in which ancient buildings were multifunctional and puncture our long-held idea that each designated building type must relate to a different function. The typological study of public monuments in the history of architecture is a project of the Enlightenment, but its approach continues to permeate the study of ancient architecture where typologies are an imperative tool of research. In analyzing this building and the rich epigraphic corpus with which it is related, my aim is to show how domains that we often assume to be separate—such as the political and cultural—were not always separate in these buildings. My analysis of the building types of bouleuteria and odeia more broadly and specifically in this region aims at providing an insight into the architectural design schemes that appeared in the Hellenistic and Roman East and the ways in which they served political and cultural transformations.
Mantha Zarmakoupi is an architectural historian and classical archaeologist and the Morris Russell and Josephine Chidsey Williams Assistant Professor in Roman architecture in the Department of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania.
Her work addresses the broader social, economic, and cultural conditions underpinning the production of ancient art, architecture, and urbanism. She has published widely on Greek and Roman architecture and art—including monographs Shaping Roman Landscape: Ecocritical Approaches to Architecture and Wall Painting in Early Imperial Italy (Getty 2023) and Designing for Luxury on the Bay of Naples: Villas and Landscapes (c. 100 BCE – 79 CE) (Oxford University Press 2014), edited volumes The Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum: Archaeology, Reception, and Digital Reconstruction (De Gruyter 2010), and Hermogenes and Hellenistic-Roman Temple Building in Greece and Asia Minor (University of Wisconsin Press, in progress)—as well as on late Hellenistic and Roman Delos. Her research on Delos extends the field of ancient urbanism in new directions to address the relationship between economic and social change with urban form. In the context of this project, she co-directed an underwater fieldwork survey around Delos (2014-21). She currently conducts an archaeological project in collaboration with Ankara University at the Bouleuterion at Teos, Turkey (2022–).
Mantha has a multidisciplinary training in architectural design (Athens), history and theory of architecture (Harvard), and classical archaeology (Oxford) and systematically fosters conversations across the fields of architecture and archaeology. For instance, her edited volume Looking at the City (Melissa, 2023) tackles architectural and archaeological perspectives in the study of ancient cities, and the research network she organized with Simon Richards and forthcoming edited volume on The Delos Symposia and Doxiadis (Lars Müller Publishers 2024) addresses the intertwinement of ideas on ancient urbanism in 20th century discussions on urbanism and ecology. Together with David Gissen and Jennifer Stager, they created for the 2021 Biennale of Architecture in Venice the research installation An Archaeology of Disability, which explores what it means to reconstruct lost elements of the Acropolis through the lens of human impairment (now touring in Greece).
*The program will be presented onsite at the James B. Duke House and live-streamed to those who join us by Zoom. Zoom details will be available upon registration for virtual attendees.