 Thank you very much and good morning. It's my pleasure to be in this lovely city today and I must thank the organizers of the panel for having me on board. I'm currently working on a research project about the consumption of Athenian pottery in the Eberian Peninsula, but for today's talk I'll go back to an old piece of research of mine that might be more relevant for the presentation because it provides a commentary on the interpretation of art objects from archaeological excavations as well as on the role of iconography in processes of identity formation and the pervasive nature of images in the modern process of a scholarly interpretation of the archaeological or of the past actually. So my case study is the anatic shape known as the plemohoi. So this is a stemmed vessel, black laced and most often lidded whose essential characteristic is the incurving rim that you see here over hanging, what is it here, over hanging on the interior. Its function is not entirely clear and its peculiar rim considerably limits the functions and the uses that it can perform. It's neither a drinking nor a pouring vessel, but it looks like a perfect container to hold kind of powderish product or even liquids which could be sprinkled with the fingers but which at the same time are not too precious. So we rule out pure perfume and exotic oils because these are much more conveniently stored in narrow-necked containers such as the alabaster and all the lekkethers. But what's interesting about the plemohoi is that it's a seemingly divide existent between how it is represented on vase painting, we have it here and here, versus the evidence of its actual use provided by the extant vessels. The plemohoi is one of the vessels that most often appears in the realm of women in anatic vase painting particularly in the second half of the fifth century and it has traditionally been assumed that its use was restricted to them, to women. Also because of the association of the vessel with the feminine world in vase painting, when it appears in the archaeological record in late sixth century and fifth century Macedonian and the ocean tombs, the vase is taken as a gender marker and the deceased is assumed to be a woman. So the two sources of evidence for my research are the archaeological artifact itself and its images on other vases. Scholars often use vase painting to make sense of the archaeological record and that's fine but that often leads to distortions of the evidence to fit the discourse provided by the images. This is particularly dangerous in cases like ours when the two types of evidence come from two different cultural milieu and temporary milieu, ecological milieu. So we cannot use an Athenian image to explain the use of a given shape among the Macedonians or deviations in this case. So the extant plemohoi come mainly from, as I say, Macedonian and the ocean tombs where they should be put into relation to a wider class of vases with these sort of kind of inward rims and the plemohoi which are very often represented on Athenian vases are surprisingly very seldom attested in Attica. There's a couple of them and this one comes from the tombs of Marathon. This is a list of sites which have yielded extalitra and plemohoi in ancient Macedonia but extalitra I mean the Corinthian or local version of the Athenian shape of the plemohoi. The extalitras, as I say, local and Corinthian are very important phenomenon in the thermite gulf, this area, where they were an essential part of the basic funerary set and Vivissa Rippenini will come up to the other slide explains its popularity as a result of a particular need for the shape derived from its suitability for the storage of local specific products such as the nitrune calastricum which was a compound of great importance in the preparation of different salves and pharmaceutical formulations and which was particularly important among the Macedonians and in the burial customs of the Macedonians. As for the plemohoi, although in absolute terms there's a remarkable concentration of them in Macedonia, relatively speaking they are just a very restricted phenomenon and they appear only very sporally there, we have some 20 examples. They appear in well-furnished graves in some of the wealthiest cemeteries of the region, what suggests that they could have been deemed prestigious in those contexts. Nevertheless, their insignificant number does not make it possible to establish a direct and definite link between the particular level of the wealth at the tomb and the consumption of the shape because we have many wealthy burials which do not have plemohoi and the deposition of the examples that we have is far from following a recognizable pattern. So the archaeological records suggest both the same function for both the ecthalypetron and the plemohoi but there's maybe a slightly different function and it can be noted also that the presence of one shape most often excludes the other and that there's no accumulation of shapes that could be understood to perform the same use. And finally the presence of the plemohoi in the cemeteries that I studied did not distinguish between genders either which is quite important and at least for the graves for which we count with osteological studies these are not all of them of course but we have reliable data for many. The situation differs somehow in the ocean from the 41 tombs that fall within the chronology of my shape in the cemetery of Ritsona 19 did not contain either plemohoi or ecthalypetra and most of these had less than 100 objects in total. The name that what you see here is another name for the ecthalypetra so I mean ecthalypetra. The remaining 22 burials in Ritsona have plemohoi and nine of them also include plemohoi so that means that none of the graves without ecthalypetra had plemohoi but the other situation is attested. Also as you see in the table the ratio between the two vessels is interesting the higher number of ecthalypetra the higher number of plemohoi but the ecthalypetra are always more common than the plemohoi. The plemohoi concentrate in the best provisioned tombs those that received more than 200 objects while the ecthalypetra although present there they appear in more modest tombs so to say well modest for the Ritsona standards of course tombs that contain less than 100 objects so the number of plemohoi that a particular disease received was then clearly dependent on the total number of objects disposed for them but contrary to the situation of Macedonia neither the plemohoi nor the ecthalypetron were part of the basic set of rave goods at Ritsona. This basic set there was made up of at least one oil container closed oil container usually the lecithos and a drinking vessel which was usually the cantheros. So if it's cleared a practical function for the plemohoi in Ritsona evidence points again towards the idea of wealth which in this case is not expressed by the introduction of the Athenian shape at the expense of the ecthalypetron but by the massive accumulation of objects of all sorts. So also the barriers which contained plemohoi there had metal objects and glass figurines etc and even silver necklace. So let's have now a look at the second part of the material. There's only a few representations of the shape on black figure vases starting at the end of the 6th century but red figure vase paintings in white crown lecithoi offer much more material to study the shape. The scenes with plemohoi can be divided roughly in three groups. First we have images where we can assume that the vase is actually been used or is going to be used soon. These as you see here are mainly bath scenes and active beautification scenes like also these ones. These images offer a background against which to understand the second group of images which are images where these and other objects are being presented to a woman in a more or less defined setting generally in bridal scenes or in more passive beautification scenes like this one here. So the object is exchanged and displayed together with other shapes such as the alapastron or the mirror or other kind of boxes. This group points to the querying of one as one of the contexts where the vessel could acquire relevance because this is a moment where the cleansing of the body and the attractiveness of the bride are important. At the same time within this iconographical tradition these images help us understand and also these ones helps us understand many of the scenes in the first group as invested of bridal nuances. The third category of images also takes to the limits the observations that's made about the second group because these are mainly late images for sensory vases where the piebohoe and other boxes and objects become the focal centers of attention of the scene because of their magnified dimensions as you see here. So the object here becomes a sort of extension of the woman's own body but I think the presence of these vases and others in these scenes is not random and meaningless and judging from all these images I think that the piebohoe was used in general terms to recall the nuptial bath and as it is the case with other objects such as the kalathos or the alapastron it brings forth a series of ideas or ideals better about the contemporary Athenian woman but from these it doesn't follow that the use of the vase was restricted to women exclusively. So in this line we need to address also these scenes on the leki foi so the fact that it's a woman who brings the vase to the tomb on Athenian white crown leki foi of the second half of the fifth century does not say anything about the gender of the disease and it's definitely no evidence to argue that the sixth century Beocian and Macedonian tombs where the vase appears are female barrios and even if we want to take the leki foi at face value the claim does not find support because on the occasions where the dead is actually present this is most often a male not a woman. So also it's also worth noting that the what we are seeing on the leki foi are grave offerings which in purpose are not the same as grave goods so that might might or may not explain the absence of the shape from contemporary Athenian graves and also relevant is the absence of figural decoration of the plemahoe many a priori gendered objects such as the deutrophory, pinedra, pixidias, etc seem to target their potential users but by the display of a particular iconography and if the gender dimension was so important in the case of the plemahoe one might may wonder of course why they did not receive images at all. So this is only a quick very quick overview of the theme you can find more information in this publication but I hope to have showed the dangers of a two positivistic comparison between life and art. So the plemahoe was probably speaking a cosmetics container indeed but this function does not necessarily put it exclusively in the realm of women because there are many occasions in the ancient world where cosmetics were used. So the vase painting shows a remarkable association of the vase and women and that derives in highly iconic images where the object and woman become one and the object is invested with gender connotations that must be explored of course. So it's integrated in a cosmos of objects that function as metonyms of a series of values and characteristics that define the reputed Athenian woman of the time but this is only one of its uses. The gender connotations that we can observe in part of the images of the vase do not translate to the archaeological record and in fact if I had to generalize about anything about the Athenian plemahoe as indicator of anything in the archaeological record it would not be gender but a certain degree of wealth although we must be extra cautious here also. In sum the plemahoe is just a restricted phenomenon and a very interesting phenomenon that allows us to test some of our traditional assumptions between the relationship between art and life and it contributes to the fundamental question of how to understand Greek imagery and it shows once more the importance of the context for the interpretation of the remains of the past. Thank you very much.