Amanda Claridge, who has died of cancer aged 72, wrote a much-praised guide to early Rome that remains a phenomenon. Created with the help of several acknowledged colleagues, it is, as one specialist reviewer said, “a triumph of synthesis and astute perception”.
It is long: the first edition of Rome: An Oxford Archaeological Guide (1998) had more than 450 pages and 200 illustrations; it was substantially updated and made even longer in 2010. It is comprehensive: together with museum guides and extensive background information, site descriptions range from the inevitable Forum and Colosseum to lesser-known ruins such as Monte Testaccio, a monumental mound of broken jars (“the amphora mountain”, Claridge called it) discarded at the Tiber-side docks.
Importantly, not only was it written for tourists with little prior knowledge, it appealed alike to archaeologists and classicists, who recognised the author’s mastery of the huge subject’s archaeology, classical and antiquarian literature, and modern setting, and her willingness to display new ideas that in other hands would have languished in academia.
A case in point is Trajan’s column, a sculptural masterpiece that towers 35 metres (115ft) above the Forum. A recently restored plaster cast of the column can be seen in the V&A. Conventionally said to have been created by Trajan to commemorate two military campaigns, the shaft, said Claridge, was originally plain; only after Trajan’s death in AD117 was a 200-metre-long spiralling frieze carved into the marble, when Hadrian celebrated his predecessor’s Dacian victory in “extraordinary detail” in 155 scenes. For good measure she added that “Trajan’s tomb”, a small room at the base of the column, was a misnomer, proposing instead a now lost statue and free-standing tomb nearby, and a new location for a temple to the north built by Hadrian. She also argued, in this case countering new rather than old thinking, that the figures on the column had never been painted.
Claridge was born at RAF Halton, Buckinghamshire, to parents who had played prominent roles in the second world war. Her father, John Claridge, a New Zealander from Wellington, was awarded the DFC as a flight lieutenant bomber pilot, and subsequently rose to wing commander in the RAF. Her Scottish mother, Marie (nee Cooper), was a flight officer at RAF Bottesford, Leicestershire. After attending several schools as her parents moved, Amanda finished her secondary education at Holton Park girls’ school, Wheatley, near Oxford, where she played hockey and the bagpipes.
After her parents separated, her father returned to New Zealand and her mother moved to Italy. Pursuing an early interest shared by her mother – who as a student volunteered on excavations directed by Mortimer Wheeler – Claridge studied at the Institute of Archaeology, in London (now part of UCL), where she was taught by Donald Strong, a leading figure in Roman art and architectural studies.
After graduating she went to the British School at Rome as a scholar in classical studies (1973–75). She wrote an influential essay with Strong, published in 1976 after his early death, in which they argued that highly skilled sculptors continued to practise until the final collapse of the western Roman empire.
In the same year she assisted John Ward-Perkins, recently retired director of the British School, with the curation and catalogue of the Royal Academy’s Pompeii AD79 exhibition (compared to garden gnomes, she told a Daily Telegraph writer, Pompeiian statuary “was vaguely erotic” but “the pornography [was] of fairly low character”).
She moved to Princeton University in the late 1970s as assistant professor of classical archaeology, and Pompeii AD79 accompanied her to the US, where exhibits and attendances were compared to those of the British Museum’s touring Tutankhamun show.
In 1980 she was appointed assistant director of the British School at Rome, where she stayed until 1994, working with three appreciative directors. The most recent, Richard Hodges, wrote that she had “reintroduced real trust and belief in the British School … after a sticky period” in the 1970s.
Her knowledge of Roman sculpture and the city was unsurpassed – if there was ever an issue about ancient Rome, a senior professor told me, the cry would go up, “What’s Amanda got to say?”.
But she was no remote academic. Friendly, enthusiastic, opinionated, a brilliant administrator and devoid of higher executive ambitions, she was key to the school’s day-to-day operation, freely sharing her knowledge on tours for scholars and artists – and on one occasion with the then director, Graeme Barker, a self-styled “ignorant prehistorian”, before he showed Diana, Princess of Wales, the sights. (I benefited from such generosity of her time when, as a London student unknown to her, she saved me from disaster in the photo lab as I prepared slides for an imminent lecture.)
Meanwhile, she led a major project investigating luxury Roman villas on the Laurentine shore south-east of the Tiber delta between 100BC and AD500. As remarkable as its achievements – a small team generated a large archive of scientific and archaeological data of a kind rarely matched at such sites – was that it happened at all: she needed access to an estate owned by the president of Italy. A British archaeologist unusually respected by Italians, she was appointed Commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (the order’s only class available to women).
She was able to continue directing this fieldwork when she left Rome for Oxford, to become a research associate at the Institute of Archaeology there, and a lecturer at St John’s College, and again when moving to Royal Holloway, University of London, in 2000 as reader in Roman archaeology. The project ended after 25 years in 2009.
At her death she was working on another large scheme, begun in 1988, the Royal Collection Trust’s catalogue raisonné of several thousand drawings and prints once owned by Cassiano dal Pozzo, a 17th-century Roman collector, and his brother (the Museo Cartaceo, or paper museum). She was series editor of 16 proposed volumes on antiquities and architecture, and had co-edited those on early Christian and medieval antiquities, and classical manuscript illustrations; studies of sarcophagi, statues and busts are on the way.
Claridge was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1986, and a corresponding member of the Archaeological Institute of America in 2010. She retired from Royal Holloway in 2014, and was a research fellow at the British School at Rome (2018-19), co-editing an authoritative new book on the city of Rome.
She is survived by her older brother, Jolyon; her younger brother, Michael, died in 2015.
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