Roman funerary monuments of Augusta Treverorum in supraregional context - medial strategies of social representation.

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Anja Klöckner
• Subject Area: Classical, Roman, Christian and Islamic Archaeology
• Term: from 2015 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 279232664

In the course of the DFG-funded project ‘Roman funerary monuments of Augusta Treverorum in supraregional context – medial strategies of social representation’, which is currently in its final stages, the monumental Roman grave monuments in the area of the Treveri have been systematically indexed and digitally processed for the first time following appropriate standards for academic work. The final publication is in progress and intends to put a new focus on the grave monuments of the Roman north-western provinces by an interconnected evaluation and to set the stage for future researches.Every stone monument and fragment from Treves and the surrounding area which are in the magazines of the Rheinisches Landesmuseum Trier (RLM), the Dommuseum Trier and the smaller collections in the region were identified, photographed, documented and partly scanned in 3D. Thereby, the actual amount of material was considerably higher than estimated at first; there is an additional 28 %. Said work was flanked by the analysis of materials from the archives of the RLM in the frameworks of a digitisation project which was funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Both projects complemented each other very productively and released massive synergies. The up-to-now completely inaccessible archive material rendered entirely new insights for the academic evaluation of the grave monuments. With this, further and formerly unknown finds could be identified. By this means, together with the Citizen Science approaches of the BMBF project, additional possibilities for documentation opened up, especially in 3D.All parts of the documentation are combined in the digital database iDAI.objects/Arachne. The recording of the material on an enhanced and, thanks to the BMBF project, even further enlarged basis is now complete. Its digital processing will be concluded until the end of the project. Substantial project aims of the DFG project have thereby been not only achieved, but even exceeded. This evaluation of the data, which forms the actual centrepiece of the project and which, meanwhile, has become essentially more complex than originally planned thanks to the new outcomes described above, is well advanced, but will not be totally completed until the end of February 2021. Beside the reasons already mentioned, which mainly result from the significant increase of material and knowledge, there are also external factors to be named. In addition to unforeseeable institutional impediments and personnel changes, various restrictions related to the pandemic should be taken into account. The present application for a continuation of the project for an additional six months (E 13, 50%) shall ensure the exhaustive analysis of the new material, its integration into the overall image and the textualisation of the results in the final publication.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigators: Dr. Marcus Reuter; Professor Dr. Markus Scholz