Classics, Ancient History, Linguistics, Academia and more
I've recently started on a very exciting new collaboration with the I.Sicily project, which is building a fully searchable, freely available online corpus of the inscriptions of Sicily. (In my head I keep turning this project into "I, Sicily" in the manner of "I, Claudius" - this sounds quite dramatic, so I'm sticking with it.) To... Continue Reading →
μεfιτει μαρασ σταλλιεσ βρα τεισ δατ[α]σ To Mefitis, Maras Stallies, for grace given Oscan inscription in the Greek alphabet. Rossano di Vaglio, 325-275 BC. Imagines Italicae: Potentia 13; Sabellische Texte Lu 16. This is an inscription on stone, found at the sanctuary site of Rossano di Vaglio (pictured below) in central Lucania, modern day... Continue Reading →
It's become a bit of a cliche for me that my academic talks tend to start with a map of the languages of Italy, followed by an explanation of why the map is dangerously misleading. The map that I normally use is from Wikipedia, and looks like this: Now, this map does the job in... Continue Reading →
I'm reviewing a book this week called Vanishing Acts On Ancient Greek Amulets by Christopher A. Faraone. It's a short monograph that's incredibly rich in detail, using magical amulets in Greek, Latin and other languages to trace developments in how healing spells were spoken and written from the first century to the sixth century AD. In particular,... Continue Reading →
hn. sattiieis. detfri segnatted. plavtad herennis. amica signauit. qando. a- ponebamus. tegila(m) Detfri of Hn. Sattis signed with a footprint. Amica of Herens signed when we were laying out the tile. Oscan/Latin inscription and four shoe prints on a large clay roof tile (0.67 x 0.94m). Pietrabbondante, c. 100 BC. Imagines Italicae: Teruentum 25;... Continue Reading →
On Monday I finally got to see the British Museum's exhibit Celts: Art and Identity. It's a stunning collection, and if you can still get down to see it (or can see the re-jigged version when it transfers to the National Museum of Scotland), you should definitely catch it. Laura Cumming gives a great review here, with pictures... Continue Reading →
A new book on fragmentary epigraphy (which includes a chapter written by me) is coming out today. Genres épigraphiques et langues d’attestation fragmentaire dans l’espace méditerranéen, edited by Emmanuel Dupraz and Wojciech Sowa, is a collection all about the many epigraphic languages of the ancient Mediterranean and the genres of text that are attested all across... Continue Reading →
I'm pleased to announce that I'll be speaking at the upcoming Roman Archaeology Conference in March 2016, to be held at ‘Sapienza’ Università di Roma and the British School at Rome. The Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference will be held at the same time. For now, the RAC website is a little sparse, but you can... Continue Reading →
One of my favourite things about studying an unusual language is that your research is very memorable. Once people associate you with a particular obscure language, they will immediately think of you whenever they hear about it elsewhere. And - even better - they will send you sources that you never could have found otherwise.... Continue Reading →
Fairly regularly, someone will ask me: was there Oscan (or Venetic or Etruscan or South Picene) literature? Or, sometimes a bit more aggressively, someone asserts that there definitely wasn’t an Oscan literary culture and therefore that Oscan-speakers and their societies were just less advanced than the Greeks and/or Romans. It's not that I think this... Continue Reading →
Katherine McDonald 