Maureen Carroll studies how clothing and bodily adornment acted as important identity markers in early Rome by focusing on the funerary portraits painted in the tombs of self-confident Italic elites
The clothes we wear help define who we are, as the ancient Greeks and Romans expounded long ago. Clothing in antiquity was characteristically part of social discourse, and it played an essential role in self-presentation, and the lived reality of people. Clothing contributed towards defining aspects of the wearer’s identity, such as ethnic affiliation, gender, age and status, often all at once and recognisable immediately. It communicated in a non-verbal way.
My project investigates the relationship between ethnic identity, social status and clothing among indigenous peoples in southern Italy at a pivotal time of cultural tensions when Rome was expanding its territorial control and political influence in the region in the fourth century BCE. This part of Italy, with its ethnic diversity and fluctuating populations of Italic, Greek and Roman origin, presents an ideal opportunity to explore how and why people expressed their identities through distinctive dress.
The primary evidence for clothing and bodily adornment as important identity markers are the painted funerary portraits in the tombs of Italic elites in Campania and Lucania that were explicitly built during this time of insecurity. Without written testimony or surviving textiles, these portraits of men, women and children provide a valuable tool to explore diverse and changing ethnic, social and cultural identities. From the evidence captured in such images, it is clear that these people dressed in ways that intentionally distinguished them from their neighbours, with whom they might be in competition, and from the Romans, with whom they were in conflict. Preliminary examination indicates that clothing types varied markedly in communities in these regions, particularly for women who carried on local and family traditions for generations, thereby projecting group identity and membership. Figural images on contemporary painted ceramic vases and metal clothing accessories surviving in burials provide further evidence for how people dressed and presented themselves at this time.
The elite practice of decorating tombs died out by the early third century BCE when Campania and Lucania had come firmly under Roman political control. It will be important to ascertain whether Roman influence in this late period resulted in the elites moving away from expressing their traditional ethnic and local identities in funerary images to defining themselves culturally as Romans by what they wore.