The study is dedicated to the visual language and the messages of reliefs showing images of battle and fight, which provided the contemporary viewers with models of explanation for their own cognition. The analysis of 195 reliefs from Athens, Lycia, the Black Sea-Region, the Hellenistic world and from Etruria has been conceived as a further element in a history of the perception of war examining media practices in association with a central cultural phenomenon. The identification of a great variety of perceptions of war already in Classical and Hellenistic times results in the abandonment of the dichotomy between Greek and Roman in the consideration of ancient battle depictions, which has dominated scholarship on this topic until now.

The growing awareness of the current climate crisis has led to an increased interest in the investigation of historical human-environment interactions. In this context, the micro-region has proven to be a significant category for ecological, socio-economic and cultural analyses. The present volume offers a collection of papers held in 2022 at an interdisciplinary workshop in Istanbul. They reflect on micro-regions from the ancient Mediterranean as spaces of socio-ecological interaction on a theoretical, methodological and empirical level and reveal perspectives for future research.

Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli’s seminal article on the “Arte plebea” (1967) voiced the requirement that classical archaeology be pursued in a new way, as a critical discipline with an explicit historical orientation. In Germany this desideratum was substantiated and gained currency mainly thanks to the work of Paul Zanker. Since then the analysis of the relationship between form, content, and the social locus of ancient works of art defines broad sectors of classical archaeology. The ten papers collected here, which were delivered on the occasion of Zanker’s 70th birthday, illustrate several perspectives of this field of research; they devote particular attention to the imagery of Pompeii, but also to ancient Greek art as well as Roman provincial art. In this way they underscore the ongoing relevance of the issues related to the arte plebea and to similar formal phenomena, also across times. Using the questions formulated since 1967 and the 1970s as a starting point, these selected case studies manage to disclose further perspectives of research for classical archaeology understood as a form of socially oriented art history.