Personal touch: Engaging students with Roman funerary inscriptions using the Nicholson Museum's exhibition Memento: Remembering Roman lives

The Nicholson Museum at the University of Sydney holds a collection of sixty eight funerary inscriptions (stelae) dating from the first to fourth centuries AD. They record the lives of ordinary people from across the social spectrum that made up Imperial Rome. The majority of the inscriptions are written in Latin, three are in ancient Greek, and all of them have been recently translated for the Nicholson Museum's exhibition Memento: Remembering Roman Lives. This paper discusses how the collection of stele, engaged with by visitors as archaeological artefacts, can be used to illuminate aspects of social history in the Roman Imperial period and how the museum is using digital technology in exhibitions to facilitate interaction between students and artefact.