John Clarke, professor of Art History and executive committee member for the Center for the Study of Ancient Italy, has been invited to give this year’s J.H. Gray Lecture, a prestigious, annual lecture series at the University of Cambridge.
Clarke’s subject, “The Look of Luxury and the Framework for Commerce at Oplontis,” will examine the Roman town of Oplontis (modern Torre Annunziata), a site that, like Herculaneum, was buried in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. The lecture will explore two different kinds of buildings there — one an elite villa and the other a busy centre for the bottling and shipping of wine — and they will demonstrate how modern technologies such as geo-archaeology and isotopic analysis are throwing new light on the most important questions of social and economic history.