Graduation Year

2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ph.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Degree Granting Department

History

Major Professor

Davide Tanasi, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Denise Cali, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Jonathan Scott Perry, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Elizabeth Bevis, Ph.D.

Keywords

Dress, Appearance, Late Antiquity, Identity, Migration Period, Mosaics

Abstract

This dissertation examines how Late Roman iconography of dress and appearance acted as visual bolsters of elite identity in the province of Sicily by engaging with two villas and their mosaic corpora: the Villa Romana del Casale, and the Villa Romana del Tellaro. Traditional Roman scholarship on power have focused on monuments, military achievements, and imperial building programs, and while these are all necessarily facets of Late Roman identity, there are valuable avenues left unexplored. Some, but not enough, attention has been given to the role of dress iconography during Late Antiquity. This study addresses this gap by investigating how Roman elites included visual representations of dress to communicate power.

This dissertation's hypothesis begs the question that the depictions of dress and appearance can be used for such investigation. This study uses a holistic research approach: combining archaeological fieldwork, critical reuse of 3D digital assets, and the construction of the Vestitus Auctoritate Database (VAD). The VAD being a relational qualifying database serving as a method of recording dress, adornment such as jewelry and footwear, activity, and spatial context for over three-hundred individuals present in mosaics collected from both villas.

This work identified that dress and appearance in mosaics were not just serving as decoration in a sea of storytelling for the wealthy to look at while escaping political turmoil at their rural stately homes. These images were ideological tools that instead provided a message of enduring Roman power to all those who viewed them. It focuses on important variations in garment type such as discerning tunicae from dalmaticae, their embellishments containing clavii and orbiculi, and individual actions such as hunting or bathing within the mosaic scenes. These constant visual themes did not just display elite Late Roman identity, but rather reinforced it as part of a widespread Mediterranean aristocratic culture.

By combining traditional archaeological interpretation using on-site fieldwork and analog observation, with that of digital humanities methodologies including 3D visualization and relational data analysis, this dissertation provides a novel study of every identifiable figure represented in the mosaics of both Sicilian villas. It argues that representations of dress and appearance served as powerful visuals of elite self-fashioning and continued to uphold Roman authority and continuity when faced with the twilight centuries of the Western Roman Empire.

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