Classical archaeology in the context of "Sexuality in ancient Rome"

Ostia Antica (lit. 'Ancient Ostia') is an ancient Roman city and the port of Rome located at the mouth of the Tiber. It is near modern Ostia, 25 km (16 mi) southwest of Rome. Due to silting and the invasion of sand, the site now lies 3 km (2 mi) from the sea. The name Ostia (the plural of ostium) derives from Latin os 'mouth'.

Ostia is now a large archaeological site noted for the excellent preservation of its ancient buildings, magnificent frescoes and impressive mosaics. The city's decline after antiquity led to harbor deterioration, marshy conditions, and reduced population. Sand dunes covering the site aided its preservation. Its remains provide insights into a city of commercial importance. As in Pompeii, Ostia's ruins provide details about Roman urbanism that are not accessible within the city of Rome itself.

An aulos (plural auloi; Ancient Greek: αὐλός : aulós, plural αὐλοί : auloí) or Latin: tibia was a wind instrument in ancient Greece, often depicted in art and also attested by archaeology.

Though the word aulos is often translated as "flute" or as "double flute", the instrument was usually double-reeded, and its sound—described as "penetrating, insisting and exciting"—was more akin to that of modern woodwind instruments such as oboes or bagpipes with a chanter and (modulated) drone.

Prehistoric archaeology is a subfield of archaeology, which deals specifically with artefacts, civilisations and other materials from societies that existed before any form of writing system or historical record. Often the field focuses on ages such as the Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age, although it also encompasses periods such as the Neolithic. The study of prehistoric archaeology reflects the cultural concerns of modern society by showing interpretations of time between economic growth and political stability. It is related to other disciplines such as geology, biology, anthropology, historiography and palaeontology, although there are noticeable differences between the subjects they all broadly study to understand; the past, either organic or inorganic or the lives of humans. Prehistoric archaeology is also sometimes termed as anthropological archaeology because of its indirect traces with complex patterns.

Due to the unique nature of prehistoric archaeology, in that written records can not be drawn upon to aid the study of the societies it focuses on, the subject matter investigated is entirely material remains as they are the only traceable evidence that is available. Material evidence includes pottery, burial goods, the remains of individuals and animals such as bones, jewellery and decorative items as well as many other artefacts. The subfield has existed since at least the late 1820s or early 1830s and is now a fully recognised and separate field of archaeology. Other fields of archaeology include; Classical archaeology, Near Eastern archaeology - as known as Biblical archaeology, Historical archaeology, Underwater archaeology and many more, each working to reconstruct our understanding of everything from the ancient past right up until modern times. Unlike continent and area specific fields of archaeology such as; Classical - which studies specifically the Mediterranean region and the civilisations of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome in antiquity, the field of prehistoric archaeology is not contained to one continent. As such, there are many excavations attributed to this field which have occurred and are occurring all over the world to uncover all different types of settlements and civilisations. 

Vere Gordon Childe (14 April 1892 – 19 October 1957) was an Australian archaeologist who specialised in the study of European prehistory. He spent most of his life in the United Kingdom, working as an academic for the University of Edinburgh and then the Institute of Archaeology, London. He wrote twenty-six books during his career. Initially an early proponent of culture-historical archaeology, he later became the first exponent of Marxist archaeology in the Western world.

Born in Sydney to a middle-class English migrant family, Childe studied classics at the University of Sydney before moving to England to study classical archaeology at the University of Oxford. There, he embraced the socialist movement and campaigned against the First World War, viewing it as a conflict waged by competing imperialists to the detriment of Europe's working class. Returning to Australia in 1917, he was prevented from working in academia because of his socialist activism. Instead, he worked for the Labor Party as the private secretary of the politician John Storey. Growing critical of Labor, he wrote an analysis of their policies and joined the radical labour organisation Industrial Workers of the World. Emigrating to London in 1921, he became librarian of the Royal Anthropological Institute and journeyed across Europe to pursue his research into the continent's prehistory, publishing his findings in academic papers and books. In doing so, he introduced the continental European concept of an archaeological culture—the idea that a recurring assemblage of artefacts demarcates a distinct cultural group—to the British archaeological community.

The topography of ancient Rome is the description of the built environment of the city of ancient Rome. It is a multidisciplinary field of study that draws on archaeology, epigraphy, cartography and philology. The word 'topography' here has its older sense of a description of a place, now often considered to be local history, rather than its usual modern meaning, the study of landforms.

The classic English-language work of scholarship is A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (1929), written by Samuel Ball Platner, completed and published after his death by Thomas Ashby. New finds and interpretations have rendered many of Platner and Ashby's conclusions unreliable, but when used with other sources the work still offers insights and complementary information.

In classical archaeology, a name vase is a specific "vase" whose painter's name is unknown but whose workshop style has been identified. The painter is conventionally named after the selected "name vase" that embodies their characteristic style, or for one of its distinctive painted subjects, or for other attributes.

The allocation of such names is necessary because the majority of ancient Greek and South Italian vase painters did not sign their works. For discussion and analysis of the work and career of individual artists conventional names were needed in order to designate them. The name can refer to a vase's motif (the Meleager Painter), former owner (the Shuvalov Painter), present location (the Baltimore Painter), find location (the Dipylon Master), inscription, habitual potter (the Kleophrades Painter), shape, and so on. For Athenian vases, the majority of such names were introduced by John D. Beazley, the first scholar to study them systematically; for South Italian vases, Arthur Dale Trendall played a similar role.

Semni Papaspyridi-Karouzou (Greek: Σέμνη Παπασπυρίδη-Καρούζου; 1897 – 8 December 1994) was a Greek classical archaeologist who specialized in the study of pottery from ancient Greece. She was the first woman to join the Greek Archaeological Service; she excavated in Crete, Euboea, Thessaly, and the Argolid, and worked as curator of ceramic collections at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens for over thirty years. She experienced political persecution under the Greek military junta of 1967–1974. She has been described by the archaeologists Marianna Nikolaidou and Dimitra Kokkinidou as "perhaps the most important woman in Greek archaeology", and by the newspaper To Vima as "the last representative of the generation of great archaeologists".