This article seeks to contribute to the growing scholarship on object-focused Roman histories by expanding the conversation to previously overlooked archaeological finds from Roman Palestine. This case study focuses on “Northern Collar-Neck Lamps,” which have been found throughout Roman Galilee and date to the first two centuries CE. I argue that their distinctive high collar, perhaps designed to reduce spillage, also served as an affordance that invited additional modes of interaction, namely placing a supplemental reservoir for oil – such as a pierced eggshell – over the filling hole. Once set up, this would allow for a slow drip of oil to prolong illumination time without human intervention. This usage is suggested from chronologically and geographically proximate sources, namely early rabbinic literature: Hebrew and Aramaic writings from the first centuries that reference physical details and uses of hundreds of objects and could prove helpful for future material histories of the Roman era.

A mixed Romano-Punic tomb discovered on private property to the west of Msallata contains many small stone chests containing cremated human remains. Some of these chests carry the name of the deceased written in the Latin or neo-Punic alphabet. Besides the stone chests, there are pottery jars containing animal remains. Figurative relief and religious symbols suggest the practice of rituals associated with the Tophet (sanctuary-necropolis) of Carthage. In addition to the stone chests and pottery urns there are many other objects that are typical of the grave goods usually buried with the Phoenician dead: oil lamps, tableware, coins, medals.

As self-appointed guardians of light who performed many of their activities between sunset and sunrise, medieval monks and nuns had a special relationship with fire, light, and darkness. While medieval monastic authors wrote copiously about light, however, modern scholars have shown comparatively little interest in this topic. Using the concept of lightscape, this essay recreates the unique Latin monastic culture of light of the tenth to thirteenth centuries, considering how religious communities used natural and artificial light as well as darkness to reinforce spiritual lessons, heighten the sensory experience of liturgical life, and signal distinctions between orders in a reform-minded age. Evidence from material culture as well as several textual genres demonstrates that monastic uses of candles, oil lamps, and lanterns reflected the commitment to a strictly regulated life which foregrounded bonds of community and encouraged constant spiritual and physical vigilance. Contemporary understandings of fire and light as heavenly matter also conditioned religious to see everyday light-sources as ready conduits for the miraculous, as well as technologies by which earthly spaces could be made to approximate heavenly ones.

In the Roman world, lamps with replicated images of sex were in circulation from the late 1st c. BCE until the end of the 4th c. CE. This paper maps out key regional and chronological trends in the representation and consumption of these objects using data from 11 provincial sites. It demonstrates sustained sensitivity of replicated sexual disc-reliefs to distinctive regional styles of consumption and representation. It also shows that symplegmata disc-reliefs were interacting and changing over time, resulting in innovative imagery that produced new meanings in localized contexts. This is the first comparative systematic study of the styles of consumption and representation of replicated lamp iconography using statistical methods. As such, the paper contributes a novel methodological approach to Roman sexuality research and also advances our understanding of how Roman replicated sexual imagery came about, how it constructed meaning, and how it was consumed by different communities over time.