Ancient History from Below

The Falerii Novi Project

“…Finally, the FNP is insistently interested in adding to our knowledge of 'ordinary' city life beyond the elite. In so doing, we intend to answer recent calls for writing 'ancient history from below' or an expanding interest in subaltern histories of Graeco-Roman antiquity (Courrier and Magalhães de Oliveira, 2022). We respond to a typically elite frame employed by a past generation of urban archaeology, and posit that this focus creates an imbalanced situation that ignores how the majority of people lived in, interacted with and moved through urban space.…”

Grupos subalternos e exploração do trabalho na Antiguidade: uma entrevista com Fábio Duarte Joly

“…Grupos subalternos e exploração do trabalho na Antiguidade 14 partir de baixo", como demonstra um livro recém editado por Júlio César Magalhães de Oliveira e Cyril Courrier (2022). Essa proposta tem permitido questionar de forma mais incisiva uma tradição historiográfica que conferia muito peso à participação política dos cidadãos nas cidades-Estados gregas e romanas em detrimento dos outros habitantes das cidades, como mulheres, escravos, estrangeiros e libertos.…”

Brushing Society Against the Grain: Digital Footprints, Scraps, Non-Human Acts, Crumbs, and Other Traces

“…The oblique look at sources entailed by investigating their traces echoes Benjamin's (1969) injunction to "brush history against the grain" (p. 257). Benjamin concern was primarily to unbury the "tradition of the oppressed" normally erased from institutional documents, rescuing the viewpoint of subordinated classes in the process (see, e.g., Courrier and de Oliveira, 2021;Löwy, 1996). But this also implies to analytically read documents against the intentions of those who assembled them as well as to treat as documents certain sources whose producers never thought they were producing any documents to begin with.…”