The Art of making in Antiquity: Stone Carving and Carvers in the Roman World.

The Art of Making in Antiquity: Stone Carving and Carvers in the Roman World is a two-year project funded by the Leverhulme Trust which started in July 2011. The project develops an innovative approach to Roman sculpture by interpreting carving techniques through the lens of practical craft expertise.

The project team are in the process of building a web resource around an unpublished photographic collection assembled by Peter Rockwell, a sculptor and expert on stone carving. The project is concerned with the relationship between mark and tool but, as importantly, with the sequence in which the marks were made. The aim is to enhance our understanding of the physical sculptural process and to investigate the relationship between the surviving objects and their makers.

The Art of Making constitutes a different approach to most studies which group tools separately, thus failing to show how they might be used in the course of a single piece of work. This attention to process is extended yet further by including quarry sites, thus visualizing the actions from material acquisition to the completed object.