The Art of Power: Ambiguity, Adornment, and the Performance of Social Position in the Pompeian House.

Abstract

In the tumultuous period between 80 BCE and 79 CE, social actors in the Italian Peninsula struggled to effectively articulate their positions in connection to the new political landscape of Rome. For these individuals, power was constructed visually; visual markers from jewelry and wall paintings to monumental temples and arches all acted as materializations of personal and social power intended to express physical presence and to reinforce personal, social, and political boundaries; while such boundaries are a mental construct, they are performed and maintained in the physical world, and thus require such material mediations to be made real. This dissertation asserts that self-presentation creates social realities, and that by examining material evidence associated with such acts of self-presentation—jewelry and depictions of jewelry—we can access and explore social tensions. It offers up a new paradigm for the interpretation of jewelry and depictions of dress practices in the archaeological record of Pompeii, stepping away from a system that privileges words over images to explore the ways in which interactions between adornment and viewership elucidate the creation and maintenance of social hierarchies in Pompeii. The dissertation concludes that jewelry is far more than an indicator of wealth, that adornment practices are themselves a form of socially determined knowledge, that the positive transformative power of adornment should be understood as a catalyst, and that this underutilized corpus of material offers up myriad opportunities for future research.