The Callisto Database was set up in 2010 by the eponymous research team of Fribourg University focusing on material culture and visual/textual representations of children in ancient societies. The ERC project Locus Ludi is now vastly expanding the database which will include all iconographic resources useful for teaching and research on play and game culture, involving animals, children and adults, men and women, heroes and gods, through the lenses of gender studies, cultural history, and anthropology.
Callisto is an important collaborative tool for the renewal of research on ancient ludic culture as the fabric of past societies. It brings together a wide set of visual material from the birth of the Greek city-state c. 800 BCE to the end of the Western Roman Empire, c. 500 CE . These documents are often inaccessible and/or unknown. Each entry includes a detailed commentary of the object which reflects different interpretations and links to downloadable scientific papers (PDF).
