The Archaeology of late antique statue monuments

Honorific statues did not only exist at the time of their dedication, as conceived by sculptors and letter-cutters. Rather, they were also moved, repaired, modified, neglected, and destroyed. This happened during what might be called their ‘statue life’, in which they went from being objects of memorial to artefacts of oblivion, in the same way as mausolea. The processes involved can be reconstructed from the archaeological study of statue monuments, especially the investigation of their context. This can also reveal a great deal more on the intentions of those who dedicated a statue, beyond what art history and epigraphy can demonstrate. In this paper, I set out the potential of a fully archaeological approach to these monuments, building on the strengths of the Oxford Last Statues of Antiquity project. In so doing, I give an additional perspective on the archaeology of memory in Late Antiquity, to that provided by the study of funerary monuments and their spoliation. I suggest that effort should be invested not just in studying the erection and removal of extant monuments but also those which we can surmise once existed. Thus, I seek to shift the study of public statuary away from describing the relics which survive, towards a historical consideration of how all such monuments were displayed and treated in Late Antiquity.