Danielle Vander Horst M.A. ’19 fell hard for face pots, a type of ancient pottery found throughout the former Roman empire, when she first encountered them in a Cornell course.
“They’re normal looking pots that some potter decided to slap a little anthropomorphic face onto,” said Vander Horst, undergraduate and graduate coordinator in the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. “I got one look at them and I thought, ‘these are awesome.’ They are so evocative and so unique.”
Romano-British face pots were the topic of her master’s thesis in the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies, and this year, Vander Horst published a chapter on them in the Archaeological Institute of America's annual peer-reviewed book series that expands on her thesis. In "Containing Yourself: Romano-British Face Pots as Proxy for Body and Self," Vander Horst argues that face pots in Britain reflect pre-Roman ideas about the body and human agency.
In the chapter, Vander Horst goes beyond the ergonomics of face pots – whether and how they were useful – to explore cultural patterns the pots reveal in the diverse context of late Pre-Roman Iron Age tribal system in Britain.
Face pots came to Britain with the Roman army in the first century A.D., Vander Horst said. Although uncommon compared to other types of Roman ceramic, face pots have also been found in excavations across former Roman provinces in Spain, France, Germany, and Italy, the specimens in Britain are found in a more diverse array of scenarios or contexts than those found on the continent.
Face pots in Germany, for example, are found only in military burial or rubbish pit contexts, Vander Horst said, whereas those in Britain are found in civilian burials, non-military homes, shrines, votive deposits at river sites and more. They could reveal more about the society existing in this place before and after the Roman conquest.
“Before the conquest, representations of the human body were not very pervasive in Iron Age British societies,” she said. “They didn’t have a lot of art that had the human body, especially compared to classical Greek and Roman art.”
The Roman conquest brought new ideas about how the human face and body could be depicted. Face pots inspired by the Roman practice but made locally in occupied Britain can therefore reveal a lot about the Late Pre-Roman Iron Age ideas in the geographical area about what the body is and how it can be depicted, in what format and in what media, Vander Horst said.
For the Romans on the European continent, face pots were created in military contexts and used almost exclusively in funerary contexts but in ways that were suggestive of their being apotropaic – used to ward away evil – rather than representative of the deceased individual.
In Britain, they took on increasingly domestic and a broader range of ritualistic purposes. Vander Horst has found in her studies of artifacts in various British museums that face pots from Britain were not particularly functional for everyday use. Made locally in a range of sizes from 11.5 cm to 33 cm in height, face pots were used in homes, at shrines, and as funerary urns where they stored human remains for burial, she said. “The face of the pot, we could argue, could be a substitute for the person.”
Face pots are not well researched in any geographical context, with only one book dedicated to the topic published almost a decade ago, Vander Horst said. She wants to continue her research, exploring how they relate to socio-cultural practices in Britain at the time of Roman occupation.
Supported by her master’s thesis advisor Annetta Alexandridis, associate professor of history of art and visual studies (A&S), Vander Horst will begin a Cornell Ph.D. program in fall 2025 through the Employee Degree Program.
“I want to lend my voice to this collection of materials that’s so interesting and so deserving of attention,” Vander Horst said. “There are a lot of interesting ideas to play around with. And it doesn’t hurt that they’re fun to look at.”
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