“A Bath for No One: Cosa’s Public Bathhouse and its Role in Reassessing Life in a Roman Town.”
“A Bath for No One: Cosa’s Public Bathhouse and its Role in Reassessing Life in a Roman Town.”
Free and open to the public
About the lecture:
“The Roman town of Cosa was established about 90 miles north of Rome in 273 BCE. For a few centuries, the town flourished, but the first century BCE saw mass movement away from the colony. While there was an attempt to revive the town in during the second half of the next century, excavations have shown that Cosa remained little more than a backwater – until now. Recent excavations have shed light on the life span of Cosa, markedly the construction of a Roman bathhouse in the second and early third centuries CE. This talk explores a newly proposed timeline for the city of Cosa, focusing on questions surrounding the bathhouse, its design, and why such a resource-heavy project would be needed to supply hygienic and leisure facilities in a supposed ghost town. ”
About the speaker:
Allison Smith is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Classics Department at Davidson College. She graduated in 2022 from Florida State University with a dissertation on the baths of central Italy and she is also the field director of the Cosa Excavations, a field school that has been excavating the small Roman bathhouse at Cosa (Ansedonia, Italy) since 2013. She is interested in aspects of design and construction, particularly of Roman baths in central Italy and the wider Mediterranean, as well as the roles architects and women in construction industries.