Acknowledgements
First and foremost, my thanks go to Dr Allison Surtees, Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Winnipeg, without whom this project would never have happened. She and I co-organised the two conference panels about ancient material culture at the annual meeting of the Classical Association of Canada (in Winnipeg, 2013 and Montreal, 2014), which planted the seed of the idea for this book. She co-organised and hosted the dedicated conference at the University of Winnipeg in 2015, and was a driving force in the early stages of organising this volume.
Thanks also to all the contributors in this volume for their ideas, cheerful support, and unfailing patience, particularly during the slow final stages of review. I was warned that editing a collected volume would be frustrating, but I have genuinely enjoyed working with you all, despite more than our fair share of challenges!
I would also like to thank all the scholars who took part in the conference and panels from which this volume arose and those who submitted work which was not selected for inclusion. Their lively discussion and many stimulating ideas have served as an inspiration, showing that the new approaches to the subject are even more wide-ranging than can be represented by the selection in the current volume.
I am grateful to my friends and colleagues in the Royal Ontario Museum, the University of Toronto, and the international Classics community for their generous help and encouragement throughout this process. Particular thanks go to Cillian O’Hogan and Matt Gibbs for advice on their areas of expertise.
Most importantly, I thank Ben Akrigg for everything he does for me, every day.
Finally, I would like to thank my parents who have constantly encouraged and supported me, and diligently read early versions of manuscripts despite no Classical knowledge. Sadly, my father, Colin Paul Cooper, died in March 2019 before this book was published. I would like to dedicate this volume to his memory.
C.L. Cooper, June 2020