New exhibit to chronicle daily life of women in classical times—with goddesses, monsters and musesBy Susan Williams | |
 Nancy Klein (shown above left with curator Adriana Calinescu) knows about one culture’s trash becoming another’s treasure. For the past 11 years, she’s worked on the excavation of Kavousi-Vronda, Crete, a Minoan settlement from the Late Bronze Age, which flourished about 3,100 years ago.
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Being an archeologist isn’t as adventurous as Indiana Jones makes it look; in fact, it’s rather low key for the most part.
“Archeologists have to be part detective, art historian, literary critic and trash collector,” said Nancy Klein, visiting assistant professor of classical studies at Indiana University and collaborator with curator Adriana Calinescu on “The Spindle and th e Shrine: Daily Life of Women in Classical Times,” a new exhibit opening at the IU Art Museum (IUAM) Saturday, Oct. 7, in Bloomington. Klein knows about one culture’s trash becoming another’s treasure. For the past 11 years, she’s worked on the excavation of Kavousi-Vronda, Crete, a Minoan settlement from the Late Bronze Age, which flourished about 3,100 years ago. While the site was fir st uncovered in 1900, today’s project revisits old findings with what Klein calls an entirely new set of tools in the form of theoretical approaches and scientific developments—like paleoethnobotany and physical anthropology; radiocarbon dating and remote sensing. So, while Indiana Jones races with the bad guys to find a single spectacular artifact—the Holy Grail or the Temple of Doom—Klein is happy with scaling past knowledge to a new understanding of the culture she’s unearthing. “One of the great joys of archaeo logy is a new discovery, through excavation or reinterpretation, which sheds an entirely new light on an old problem,” she said. “We seek a certain level of understanding based upon the data available at the present time, and we have to admit that there a re multiple levels of analysis leading to multiple interpretations. It is our job to take all the evidence and reconstruct as clear and accurate an interpretation of the past as we can.” In trying to understand what life was like for women in the Greek and Roman worlds, Klein was confronted with levels of interpretation and preservation. “First, most literature and art was created by men for a male audience,” she explained. “While women a re featured, the purpose is almost never to record the facts of a woman’s life. Second, the imagery may not reflect actual women. Artwork may have been intended to show abstract qualities or caricatures. “Finally,” she continued, “women’s personal possessions, along with most domestic artifacts, survived only by chance—the eruption of Mount Vesuvius buries the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum—or by selective process—gifts placed in a grave with the decea sed—which do not give us a complete picture of how lives were lived.” Collaborating on “The Spindle and the Shrine,” though, did provide Klein with new knowledge. “From my own viewpoint,” she said, “this has been an opportunity to look at what I thought I knew about women in Greece and Rome. When Adriana and I began work on this project, we had to ask ourselves if there was enough material in the IUAM ancient collection to present an entire exhibition focusing on women. Now, a year later, we have more than we can possibly present in a single show. “That in itself has reminded me of how much we can learn from the ancient world, even if it is already familiar, by going back and asking new questions.” |
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Publication date: September 29, 2000
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