Ancient Visual and Material Culture

Numismatics

Numismatics is the study of coins and coinage, and objects that look like coins but may not have had an economic function: medals, tokens, coin-weights – even religious amulets, pilgrim badges or fake coins made to deceive collectors.

At Warwick we specialise in Greek and Roman coinage from their origins up to the seventh century AD, as well as the connection of numismatics to the Roman Economy. This encompasses the first coins, made in Asia Minor round about 600 BC through Classical, Hellenistic and Roman issues to the early phase of Byzantine coinage. We cover all aspects of ancient numismatics: studies of iconography, metallurgy and scientific analysis, metrology, finds, the economy, numismatics in the Renaissance, and paranumismatics.

The Department hosts one of the most important numismatic research hubs in Europe and indeed world-wide, led by Prof. Clare Rowan, who is the ancient numismatics editor for The Numismatic Chronicle, and Committee Chair of the Money and Medals Network. Her most recent publications include (2025) 'Representations of women on the tokens of Rome and Ostia', Papers of the British School at Rome 93: 79-115, Tokens and Social Life in Roman Imperial Italy. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2023; and (with A. Crisà and M. Gkikaki) (eds.), Tokens: Culture, Connections, Communities. London, Royal Numismatic Society, 2019.

We host a yearly numismatic conference involving specialists from Europe and abroad, have multiple national and international collaborations, and host several externally funded projects. We also have a numismatic library, teaching collection and working space within our numismatic hub.

Find out more about studying numismatics at Warwick here.

Find out more about our current research in numismatics here.

Recent major funded projects include Token Communities in the Ancient Mediterranean, Rome and the Coinages of the Mediterranean, and Historia Numorum Sicily.

Classical Epigraphy

Classical epigraphy, led at Warwick by Prof. Alison Cooley, is the study of the ancient Mediterranean world via its inscriptions, whether elegantly carved on marble monuments or rudely scratched upon a piece of pottery. Our approach to epigraphy is interdisciplinary, exploring the connections between inscriptions and art, architecture, texts, and coins. We are also interested in analysing the reception of classical inscriptions in the modern world, how they have been published from the Renaissance onwards and how they have been collected and displayed, and are committed to work with teachers in order to explore how Latin inscriptions can be used in schools, both primary and secondary.

Prof. Alison Cooley's latest monograph is an edition and commentary of the senatorial decree concerning Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, a dramatic account of the penalties imposed upon Piso by the Senate following his trial for maiestas in AD 20: The Senatus Consultum de Cn. Pisone Patre(CUP, 2023). Other recent publications include 'Latin epigraphy', in the Oxford Classical Dictionary; ‘An ash-chest in an English country-garden: EDCS 65000025 revisited’, in A. Kolb, M. Speidel (eds), A new era of epigraphy: 40 years of Epigraphic database of Clauss/Slaby (De Gruyter 239-46); 'Contextualizing ancient texts with generative neural networks', Nature 2025-07-23 with Yannis Assael, Thea Sommerschield, et al.

In the last few years, Alison has been collaborating on the use of 3-D imaging in cultural heritage and education with Paula Wilson and Mike Donnelly of Warwick Manufacturing Group, using the Chichester Tablet as a case-study: (2022) 'Reverse-engineering history: re-presenting the Chichester tablet using laser scanning and 3D printing', Studies in Conservation (YSIC) 68.8: 773-83 (with P.F. Wilson, M. Donnelly, E. King, M.A. Williams). They are currently working on the 'ghost inscription' in the Colosseum, a dedicatory inscription that survives only in the form of its dowel holes.

Prof Cooley is also a member of the research team Roman Statutes: Renewing Roman Law, led by Clifford Ando (Chicago), working on the Lex Libitina from Puteoli and the leges passed in honour of Germanicus and Drusus. She is joint series editor, with Andrew Meadows, of Oxford Studies in Ancient Documents (Oxford University Press), a member of the advisory board for the 'Crossreads: Text, materiality and multiculturalism at the crossroads of the ancient Mediterranean' (ERCA Advanced Grant, PI Jonathan Prag), and President of the British Epigraphy Society.

Art and text

Interpreting the interrelationship between visual art and text is a key thread in this Ancient Visual and Material Culture cluster, of relevance to our epigraphists, and also to those scholars working on visual art and on visuality more generally.

Prof. Zahra Newby studies the visual art of the Roman empire in its widest cultural contexts, including art in the provinces of the Greek east, the Roman response to Greek culture, ancient funerary art, ancient athletics, festival culture and the interface between art and text. She has particular interests in the intersection of art and epigraphy (Z. Newby/R. Leader-Newby eds., Art and Inscriptions in the Ancient World, CUP 2007) and the materiality of inscribed monuments. Prof. Newby was PI of the Leverhulme Trust Research Project, The Materiality of Graeco-Roman Festivals (2017-2021) which studied the active roles played by inscriptions, art and coinage in the experience of festivals in the eastern provinces of the Roman empire, and edited the volume, The Material Dynamics of Festivals in the Graeco-Roman East (OUP, 2023).

Prof. Michael Scott’s research has long been concerned with art and text, and with changing perceptions and experience of sacred space in the ancient Mediterranean world. His many books include Space and Society in the Greek and Roman WorldLink opens in a new window(Cambridge, 2012), and Delphi and Olympia: the spatial politics of panhellenism in the archaic and classical periodsLink opens in a new window(Cambridge, 2010).

Dr Emily Clifford works on art and literature from the Graeco-Roman world with a focus on the generative role played by cultural artefacts in processes of thought and imagination. Her first monograph, Figuring Death in Classical Athens: Visual and Literary Explorations (Oxford 2025) won the CAMWS First Book Award in 2026.

Dr Emmanuela Bakola is interested in the significance of performance, in its material and visual reality, for our understanding of ancient Greek drama (recent work includes ‘Seeing the invisible: Interior Spaces and Uncanny Erinyes in Aeschylus’ Oresteia’ in Kampakoglou, A. and Novokhatko, A. (eds.) Gaze, Vision and Visuality in Ancient Greek Literature, De Gruyter 2018).

Prof. David Fearn’s most recent book on Greek lyric poetry (Pindar’s Eyes, Oxford 2017) seeks to reorient debate about art and text, and the relation between lyric form and lyric contextualization, within Pindaric poetics. And in their publications on Latin literature.

Prof. Victoria Rimell and Dr Joe Watson are frequently concerned with visuality, spectacle, and with ancient conceptualisations of the materiality of texts, often in dialogue with discussion of modern paintings, sculpture and art installations: see e.g. Watson’s forthcoming Incest and Bestiality in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Cambridge) and Rimell’s The Closure of Space in Roman Poetics (Cambridge 2015).

Archaeology

Classical archaeology is a growing area of research within this cluster, led by Dr Trevor Van Damme, whose work centres on three regions of Greece—Athens and Attica, Boeotia, and Macedonia—extending diachronically from the Late Bronze Age into the Hellenistic period, and by Prof. Michael Scott, whose interests lie in the intersection of ancient history and archaeology.

Dr Van Damme’s research is multidisciplinary, often involving close collaboration with scholars in art history, analytical sciences, and engineering, and tackling questions about human-environmental interaction, collapse and resilience, urbanisation, ancient economics, colonialism, phenomenology, and intercultural interaction, through the multi-method study of large assemblages of pottery. Van Damme leads EBAP, an ongoing team project of fieldwork and research centred on the site of ancient Eleon in east Boeotia which has so far documented an important Early Mycenaean burial enclosure, a thriving Late Mycenaean settlement, and an extensive lower town enclosed by a Late Archaic fortification system. An important component of the work at ancient Eleon is the Digital Eleon initiative, which focuses on the 3-D modelling of significant artefacts and monuments with the end goal of developing an immersive VR experience. Dr Van Damme’s current book project, A New History of Early Athens (1450–650 BCE): Environmental, Technological, and Societal Transformations, reconsiders the early history of Athens, through a detailed study of pottery discarded from the Athenian Acropolis and excavated under the supervision of Oscar Broneer on the North Slope in the 1930s. Recent articles include ‘Phenomenological Approaches to Archaic Boeotian Zoomorphic Rhyta in their Ancient Use Context. In Phenomenology and the Painted Vase, D. Bennett, G. Hedreen, S. Kim, and C. Laferrière (eds.) University of Wisconsin Press, 2026, and ‘New Early Iron Age Finds from the Mycenaean Fountain on the North Slope of the Acropolis’, In Athens and Attica in the Early Iron Age and the Archaic Period. Proceedings of the Conference held in Athens, December 8–11, 2022, E. Andrikou, A. Mazarakis Ainian, S. Fachard, N. Papadimitriou, J. Papadopoulos, D. Vlanti (eds.) Oxford: Archaeopress, 2026.