The Villa Faun: Dating by Style Against Dating by Stratigraphy
A student is given a site report for a rural villa. The mosaic in room 4 is a black-and-white geometric floor with a figural panel of a hunting scene. Stylistic comparison suggests a date of 150–180 CE, on the basis of parallels in North African mosaics. The excavators, however, record that the floor sits on a make-up layer containing a coin of Gordian III (238–244 CE) and that a later wall was built over the mosaic's edge. A second scholar argues the coin is residual, having rolled under a floor laid earlier, and that the style is decisive. The student must decide what the site can and cannot establish, and write a paragraph for an examination answer on 'the relative value of stylistic and stratigraphic dating'. The report also notes that the figural panel was repaired in antiquity with differently coloured tesserae.
1. What date-range should the student accept, and on what reasoning?
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The student should accept a terminus post quem of 238–244 CE for the floor's construction, while acknowledging a range rather than a precise date. The reasoning is hierarchical: stratigraphy gives a direction of time, not a date. A coin in a make-up layer beneath a floor establishes that the floor was laid after the coin was lost - unless the coin is intrusive. The second scholar's 'rolled under' hypothesis is possible but must be argued, not assumed: coins are small and can migrate through deposits, so the student should ask whether the make-up layer was sealed and undisturbed, whether the coin was found in situ or in loose earth, and whether other finds in the layer agree. The stylistic argument is weaker as a dating tool because it is circular - the 'parallels' are themselves dated by style - and because provincial workshops can be conservative or innovative. So the student should write: the floor is later than 244 on the stratigraphic evidence, the stylistic parallels at 150–180 are either wrong or the floor is a late continuation of an older fashion, and the repair with differently coloured tesserae shows the floor was in use long enough to need mending, which fits a later date. The precise century remains open; the direction does not.
2. How should the repair evidence be used in the paragraph without overclaiming?
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The repair should be used as evidence of use-life, not of date. A floor repaired in antiquity with mismatched tesserae tells us the floor was valued enough to mend, that matching tesserae were not available or not worth obtaining, and that the room continued in use after damage. It does not tell us when the floor was laid, and it cannot be used to push the date earlier or later. Its proper role in the paragraph is to support a picture of the villa as a long-occupied, maintained, and partly improvised site - which in turn makes a conservative or belated mosaic style more plausible, since rural workshops and patrons may work from older pattern books. The student should explicitly mark the limit: 'the repair indicates continued use but is chronologically neutral.' That kind of explicit limitation is what examiners reward, because it shows the student knows which inferences the evidence will bear. A common error is to treat every interesting detail as dating evidence; the discipline is to assign each find to the question it can actually answer - coin to chronology, repair to use-life, style to workshop and taste.