Hugh Last Rome Award: Remembering Romulus: curatorial approaches to regal Rome

Long a source of debate about the value and veracity of ancient texts and their relationship to archaeological remains, regal Rome, as a period and as a space, lies at the nexus of history, archaeology and mythology as ways of conceptualising the past. The question of how to engage effectively with different types of evidence manifests itself in a tangible form in the ways that archaeological sites are curated to be meaningful to the public and in museum displays, where finds are accompanied by labels and decisions are made about placement, lighting and many other parameters. By investigating how regal Rome has been curated, my research examines how this contested context can be made fruitful for broader epistemic questions about how the past is constructed. More than a simple act of organisation, curation takes into account both materiality and space. The physical qualities of objects or other types of material remains, as well as their arrangement in relation to each other and to the spaces around them, are as important as their possible symbolic meaning, representative potential, or 'thick description' (cf. C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, Basic Books, 1973)). Curation turns the past into something material and viewable, and constructs what that past looked like for its audience.