Materialising Roman Histories

A. Kyle and B. Jervis (eds) Make do and Mend: the archaeologies of compromise, Oxford: Archaeopress, 2012

Britain to assess the social significance of local modifying practices. Objects absorb meanings through use and this research proposes that the material culture of Empire required to be fundamentally altered and ascribed new meanings before it could be successfully appropriated into alternative social settings. The tracking of material biographies, particularly through physical, metaphysical and/or symbolic transformative phases, elucidates strategies for negotiating changing socio-politico-economic conditions resulting from the Roman presence. Such objects can thereafter be defined as hybrid products, neither Roman nor Iron Age, but rather the manifestation of a cultural collage and the forming of an entirely new thing.

Antiquity, 2018

The three books reviewed here document the emergence of the new paradigm in Roman and Mediterranean archaeology, often associated with the material turn that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s in all disciplines related to human artefacts. It is a paradigm that puts things, not makers or users, at the centre of enquiry and that studies what things do, not their meaning. Its key notions are material and materiality, agency, practice, connectivity, the trajectories of objects and globalisation. It is also a rejection of the representational approach to material culture, which takes objects to represent people or immaterial aspects, such as religious ideas or group identities of the culture that created them. At first sight this new paradigm looks very materialist, but it is in fact driven by the attribution of all kinds of immaterial qualities and activities, such as agency, the capacity to act or afford human-thing entanglement, to objects.

In: Äikäs, T, S. Lipkin and A-K. Salmi (eds.) Archaeology of Social Relations: ten case studies by Finnish archaeologists. Acta Universitatis Ouluensis B Humaniora: 77-102., 2011

2015

The research essay explores new scientific approaches in the study of the artefact as material culture and in particular the contemporary theory that the artefact embodies a narrative of itself, its time, and its society. There has been a progressive shift away from object-specific archaeology where attention tended to focus on sign values with which to identify and date cultures. Artefacts ranging from something as simple as a glass bead to a monumental architectural structure, are now considered to connect or become entangled with their cultural and historical environments beyond their obvious functional forms and usages. Such theorising requires a holistic, multi-disciplinary approach in research and interpretation. Reference will be made to pottery artefacts in Roman material culture to illustrate contemporary theories and methodologies . To put the contemporary theories and methodologies in perspective, the science of archaeology in its classical form as well as the related sciences which archaeology drew into its ambit, require some discussion. The artefact per se will be defined with commentary on how it fits into, and participates in the material culture of a society. The current literature in which authors argue in favour of the agency of the artefact to affect makers, owners and users, will be reviewed. In the final section of the essay, reference is made to Roman material culture to illustrate that the artefact can be ‘read’ as a narrative of entangled social, economic, ideological, and religious values and practises. Though Roman primary sources offer very limited insights into the aesthetic values assigned to pottery in material culture, this will nevertheless receive attention. The essay reflects academic arguments to support contemporary debate that artefacts, when considered only as archaeological objects, will reveal little beyond their cultural origin, typology, dating, materials, method of production, circulation and usage. The alternative which is being promoted, is a meta-methodology with which artefact can be ‘read’ as having agency to generate and gain reciprocal meanings and values. When the artefact can be understood from that point of view, it can be considered as an entangled narrative.

Materialising Roman Histories, eds. A. Van Oyen and M. Pitts, 2017

The relation between form and matter is a fraught issue in archaeological analysis, expressed most vigorously in the style/function debate. Traditionally, formal change has been the empirical identifier for historical trends – including the development of a ‘Roman cultural revolution’ – leaving matter as its mute twin. But even after the ‘material turn’ in archaeological thought, matter continues to be ‘socialised’ or written out of historical narratives altogether. This chapter explores different models for writing truly ‘material’ histories. It does so through the case study of Roman concrete or opus caementicium, one of the few materials recognised to have been developed in the Roman period, and to have been granted its own formal revolution in architecture.

Materialising the Roman empire, 2024

Empire and urbanism in ancient Rome 123 Louise Revell 6 'Becoming darkness' and the invisible slave economy: archaeological approaches to the study of enslavement in the Roman world 147 Rebecca Redfern 7 The Roman Empire and transformations in craft production 181 Astrid Van Oyen

Elements of being, 2005

In this paper, I try to show how we as archaeologists form past identities on the basis of artefacts and how a sudden change in the composition of archaeological evidence must be evaluated carefully. Within Roman Iron Age contexts, Roman imports seem to lead to extreme excitement in a lot of archaeologists, as is shown by the description of every piece of Roman material and the meagre description, if any, of local artefacts. We need to evaluate if the local inhabitants shared the same reverence for Roman (material) culture during the Iron Age, or if they incorporated Roman artefacts in their own way.

"Driessen, M., Heeren, S., Hendriks, J., Kemmers, F. & Visser, R. (eds.), 2009: TRAC 2008: Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference, Amsterdam 2008, Oxford. ISBN-13: 978-1-84217-351-0 ISBN-10: 1-84217-351-0 Table of Contents Preface Forced labour, mines, and space: exploring the control of mining communities (Hannah Friedman) Feeling like home: Romanised rural landscape from a Gallo-Roman point of view (Cecilia Courbot-Dewerdt) Centrality in its place: Defining urban space in the city of Rome (David J. Newsome) Finding your way in the Subura (Simon Malmberg) Amateur metal detector finds and Romano-British settlement: A methodological case study from Wiltshire (Tom Brindle) Meat consumption in Roman Britain: The evidence from stable isotopes (Colleen Cummings) Barley and horsesL Surplus and demand in the civitas Batavorum (Ivo Vossen and Maaike Groot) The way to a Roman soldier's heart: A post-medieval model for cattle droving to the Hadrian's Wall area (Sue Stallibrass) Creating a community: The symbolic role of tumuli in the villa landscape of the civitas Tungrorum (Laura Crowley) 'Montani atque agrestes' or women of substance? Dichotomies of gender and role in ancient Samnium (Amy Richardson) Native ServiceL 'Batavian' pottery in 'Roman' military context (Eef Stoffels) The natural will: Community in Roman archaeology (Robert Wanner) The social world of Roman fullonicae (Miko Flohr) The dichotomy in Romano-Celtic syncretism: Some preliminary thoughts on vernacular religion (D. Martin Goldberg)"