Institute of Archaeology

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Claire Louise Lyons

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR

Ph.D. Bryn Mawr College, 1983

Fax: 310-206-4723
E-mail: clyons@getty.edu

Mailing Address:

Cotsen Institute of Archaeology
308 Charles E Young Dr. North
A210 Fowler Building/Box 951510
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1510

Class Websites

Position and Home Institution

Curator of Antiquities, J. Paul Getty Museum

Research Interests

Classical archaeology, social history, visual culture, Greek vase-painting, colonialism

Research Summary

Claire Lyons is Curator of Antiquities at the Getty Villa, where she has organized exhibitions on "Grecian Taste and Roman Spirit: The Society of Dilettanti" (2008) and "The Herculaneum Women and the Origins of Archaeology." (2007). She is a co-author of Antiquity & Photography: Early Views of Ancient Mediterranean Sites, the companion volume to a 2006 exhibition. Prior to joining the staff at the Getty Villa, she was Senior Curator at the Getty Research Institute, where her research centered on the afterlife of antiquity in the visual arts, culture, and politics. A specialist on the art and archaeology of pre-Roman Italy, she has excavated at the Etruscan site of Murlo, as well as at Corinth and the Greek colonial settlements at Metaponto and Morgantina. Among her publications are Morgantina: The Archaic Cemeteries (1996), Naked Truths: Women, Sexuality, and Gender in Classical Art and Archaeology (2000, with A. Koloski-Ostrow), and The Archaeology of Colonialism (2002, with John Papadopoulos). Much of Claire Lyons's professional activity has focused on archaeological heritage, a topic explored in a 2008 graduate seminar at USC titled "Art, Business, and the Law." Claire has been active in the Archaeological Institute of America in this field, both as a former Vice-President for Professional Responsibilities and as a current member of the Cultural Property Legislation and Policy Committee, and museum task force. Claire Lyons sits on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Archaeology, the International Journal of Cultural Property, and the Journal of the History of Collections.

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Featured Publication

The Construction of Value

Scholars from Aristotle to Marx and beyond have been fascinated by the question of what constitutes value. The Construction of Value in the Ancient World makes a significant contribution to this ongoing inquiry, bringing together in one comprehensive volume the perspectives of leading anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, linguists, philologists, and sociologists on how value was created, defined, and expressed in a number of ancient societies around the world. Based on the basic premise that value is a social construct defined by the cultural context in which it is situated, the volume explores four overarching but closely interrelated themes: place value, body value, object value, and number value. The questions raised and addressed are of central importance to archaeologists studying ancient civilizations: How can we understand the value that might have been accorded to materials, objects, people, places, and patterns of action by those who produced or used the things that compose the human material record? Taken as a whole, the contributions to this volume demonstrate how the concept of value lies at the intersection of individual and collective tastes, desires, sentiments, and attitudes that inform the ways people select, or give priority to, one thing over another.

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