From Imperium to Imperialism

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J. Mattingly
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Social Behavior ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Historical Archaeology ◽  
New World ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Colonial Society ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Recent Developments

This chapter reviews the traditional understandings of the Roman Empire and reflects on how recent developments in the study of imperialism more generally could influence the future of Roman studies. It explores problems with the orthodox paradigm of Romanization and highlights the need for alternative interpretative frameworks. It presents a case for applying the concept of creolization to the Roman Empire, despite its connotations primarily with the New World and slave society. Creole language and creole material culture are built up by the integration of the language and traditions of the underclass with elements of language and culture of the dominant colonial society, resulting in a “highly ambiguous material culture, in the sense that it is imbued with different meanings in different contexts.” In principle, these approaches adopted in North American historical archaeology to understand the material culture and social behavior of the slaves and underprivileged classes can also be applied to the archaeological record of the Roman world.

LATE ANTIQUE PAGANISM: ADAPTATION UNDER DURESS

2011 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-134
Author(s):  
Béatrice Caseau
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
New World ◽  
World Order ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
New World Order

This paper examines the ways in which worshippers of the old gods adapted to the new world order of the 4th c. Roman empire, where emperors, through various pronouncements, consistently attacked elements of their religious infrastructure and rituals. This included forbidding divination sacrifices, temple funding, and eventually led to the temples’ definitive closure. This led to a privatisation of pagan worship and then to secrecy, a process difficult to detect in the archaeological record.

Blind to Chains? The Potential of Bioarchaeology for Identifying the Enslaved of Roman Britain

Britannia ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 251-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca C. Redfern
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
New World ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Physiological Stress ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Roman Britain ◽  
The Poor

AbstractThis research explores the contribution bioarchaeology can make to the study of slavery in Roman Britain, responding to the calls by Webster and colleagues for the greater use of osteological and scientific techniques in this endeavour. It reviews the evidence for the bodies of the enslaved in the primary sources and bioarchaeological evidence from the New World and the Roman Empire. The paper aims to establish patterns of physiological stress and disease, which could be used to reconstruct osteobiographies of these individuals, and applies these findings to bioarchaeological evidence from Britain. It concludes that at the present time, it may not be possible for us to successfully separate out the enslaved from the poor or bonded labourers, because their life experiences were very similar. Nevertheless, these people are overlooked in the archaeological record, so unless we attempt to search for them in the extant evidence, the life experiences of the majority of the Romano-British population who were vital to its economy will remain lost to us.

Medicine

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Baker
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
The Body ◽  
Ancient Medicine ◽  
Medical Practices ◽  
Textual Evidence ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Roman Medicine ◽  
Ancient Texts

The study of ancient medicine has grown in popularity over since the early 1990s in a variety of fields, including ancient texts, epigraphy, osteology, and archaeology. Many of the studies have demonstrated that there were a diversity of medical practices and concepts throughout the Graeco-Roman world. In this chapter it is shown that the evidence for medical practices in the province of Britannia indicates there are likely to have been a combination of indigenous, Roman and, possibly, Gallic conceptions of the body and its care. Hence, through an examination of material culture, inscriptions, and some textual evidence from Vindolanda, it is argued that the term Romano-British medicine is more appropriate than Roman medicine as a means of noting the heterogeneity in healthcare found in the Roman Empire.

Conversions

2021 ◽  
pp. 21-56
Author(s):  
Crawford Gribben
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Northern European ◽  
Christian Culture ◽  
Gradual Expansion ◽  
Fall Of Rome

This chapter discusses the gradual expansion of the Christian movement into Ireland. Despite widespread fears, the fall of the Roman empire did not herald the end of Christianity. Instead, it encouraged its expansion. Christian missionaries in Ireland worked to ensure that an island with an unfamiliar language and culture beyond the edge of the western empire would accept Christianity more than 100 years before the Anglo-Saxons, and centuries before other northern European peoples. For the fall of Rome and the crisis of imperial Christianity were contexts for the emergence in Ireland, and elsewhere, of a new kind of faith. From the early fifth century, and over several hundred years, the Irish converted to Christianity, shaping their new faith, exporting their theological and missionary cultures, and working for the conversion of the Picts, the Northumbrians, and Anglo-Saxons, as their Christian culture expanded throughout Europe, saving souls, if not ‘saving civilization’, at the end of the Roman world.

In Small Things Forgotten: The Georgian World View, Material Culture and the Consumer Revolution

Rural History ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Courtney
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Historical Archaeology ◽  
New World ◽  
World View ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Small Things ◽  
Medieval Archaeology

The publication of The Art and Mystery of Historical Archaeology, a festschrift in honour of James Deetz, makes a useful starting point for assessing the remarkable development of American historical archaeology over the last four decades. The discipline of ‘historical archaeology’ is the New World equivalent of British post-medieval archaeology. It is the study of the material culture of colonial and industrial America. Unlike its highly marginalised British counterpart, the discipline has seen an enormous growth in America over the last two decades, reflected in the creation of numerous posts both in universities and public-sector archaeology. This article seeks firstly to discuss some of the main contributions to the festchrift and areas of promise for future research. Secondly it will assess the relevance of some recent contributions on the history of consumption to Deetz's concept of the ‘Georgian world view’ and the notion of radical change in eighteenth-century material culture.

What Graeco-Roman Grammar Was About

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. H. Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Parts Of Speech ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Secure Place ◽  
Present Understanding

This book explains how the grammarians of the Graeco-Roman world perceived the nature and structure of the languages they taught. The volume focuses primarily on the early centuries AD, a time when the Roman Empire was at its peak; in this period, a grammarian not only had a secure place in the ancient system of education, but could take for granted an established technical understanding of language. By delineating what that ancient model of grammar was, the book highlights both those aspects that have persisted to this day and seem reassuringly familiar, such as ‘parts of speech’, as well as those aspects that are wholly dissimilar to our present understanding of grammar and language.

Ibero-American Architecture and Urbanism

2019 ◽  
pp. 285-311
Author(s):  
Paul Niell
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
New World ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
American Architecture ◽  
Political Norms ◽  
The City

The Baroque in Ibero-American Architecture and Urbanism, in parts of the Americas formerly comprising the Spanish and Portuguese empires, has been traditionally studied as a question of adherence to or deviation from a Counter-Reformation style promoted primarily by ecclesiastical institutions. This article expands upon what is meant by “Baroque” in the architecture and urbanism of the Iberian empires in the Americas. Through the analysis of urban plans, images of the city, architectural interiors and exteriors, physical urban spaces, and other forms of material culture, this article argues that Ibero-American architecture and urbanism in the age of the Baroque belonged to a phenomenon of ordering and thereby creating the “New World” as ideologically constituted colonial spaces that reified social and political norms. Furthermore, human subjects actively negotiated the spaces created by architecture and the city, making the American Baroque also part of a process of negotiating order and thereby producing American spaces.

scholarly journals Evergreen Plants in Roman Britain and Beyond: Movement, Meaning and Materiality

Britannia ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 135-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa A. Lodwick
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Norway Spruce ◽  
Spatial Patterns ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Food Plants ◽  
Stone Pine ◽  
Roman Britain ◽  
Roman World

ABSTRACTIn tandem with the large-scale translocation of food plants in the Roman world, ornamental evergreen plants and plant items were also introduced to new areas for ritual and ornamental purposes. The extent to which these new plants, primarily box and stone-pine, were grown in Britain has yet to be established. This paper presents a synthesis of archaeobotanical records of box, stone-pine and norway spruce in Roman Britain, highlighting chronological and spatial patterns. Archaeobotanical evidence is used alongside material culture to evaluate the movement of these plants and plant items into Roman Britain, their meaning and materiality in the context of human-plant relations in ornamental gardens and ritual activities. Archaeobotanical evidence for ornamental evergreen plants elsewhere in the Roman world is presented.

Gender, Memory, and Identity in the Roman World

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Roman History ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Imperial Rome ◽  
The Past ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Material Sources ◽  
Close Relationship

This volume approaches three key concepts in Roman history — gender, memory and identity — and demonstrates the significance of their interaction in all social levels and during all periods of Imperial Rome. When societies, as well as individuals, form their identities, remembrance and references to the past play a significant role. The aim of Gender, Memory, and Identity in the Roman World is to cast light on the constructing and the maintaining of both public and private identities in the Roman Empire through memory, and to highlight, in particular, the role of gender in that process. While approaching this subject, the contributors to this volume scrutinise both the literature and material sources, pointing out how widespread the close relationship between gender, memory and identity was. A major aim of Gender, Memory, and Identity in the Roman World as a whole is to point out the significance of the interaction between these three concepts in both the upper and lower levels of Roman society, and how it remained an important question through the period from Augustus right into Late Antiquity.

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