Ancient towns were filled with life-size bronze and marble figures. Cities in the Roman Empire could have over a thousand such statues. Statues honored rulers and gods. Beautiful statues also made people proud of their city. But by 400 CE, the number of statues began to fall. By 700 CE, hardly any new statues were being built in the Roman world. The Last Statues of Antiquity project wanted to know why cities built statues for so long, and then slowly stopped building them. Historians collected and analyzed evidence for new statues being built from 250 to 650 CE. They wanted to find evidence for why so few statues were being made. Why did historians choose to study this topic? They were interested in finding out which artists stopped building statues. They wanted to understand why there was a decline in caring about cities. They wanted to discover how so many statues were lost. They wanted to learn why there was a decline in creating statues in ancient Rome.