The Roman period witnessed massive changes in the human-material environment, from monumentalised cityscapes to standardised low-value artefacts like pottery. This book explores new perspectives to understand this Roman ‘object boom’ and its impact on Roman history. In particular, the book’s international contributors question the traditional dominance of ‘representation’ in Roman archaeology, whereby objects have come to stand for social phenomena such as status, facets of group identity, or notions like Romanisation and economic growth. Drawing upon the recent material turn in anthropology and related disciplines, the essays in this volume examine what it means to materialise Roman history, focusing on the question of what objects do in history, rather than what they represent. In challenging the dominance of representation, and exploring themes such as the impact of standardisation and the role of material agency, Materialising Roman History is essential reading for anyone studying material culture from the Roman world (and beyond).

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Introduction
  • 1. What did objects do in the Roman world? Beyond representation
• Part 1: Representation Reconsidered
  • 2. Writing power. The material culture of literacy as representation and practice
  • 3. Soldiers in life and death. Material culture, the military, and mortality
  • 4. Gallo-Belgic wares. Objects in motion in the early Roman northwest
  • 5. Discussion. Reflections on the representational use of artefact evidence
• Part 2: Standardisation
  • 6. Standard time. Typologies in Roman antiquity
  • 7. Different similarities or similar differences? Thoughts on koine, oligopoly and regionalism
  • 8. Rethinking standardisation through late antique Sagalassos ceramic production. Tradition, improvisation and fluidity
  • 9. Discussion. Material standards
• Part 3: Matter
  • 10. Finding the material in ‘material culture’. Form and matter in Roman concrete
  • 11. Design, function and everyday social practice. Artefacts and Roman social history
  • 12. Object ontology and cultural taxonomies. Examining the agency of style, material and objects in classification through Egyptian material culture in Pompeii and Rome
  • 13. Discussion. Object-scapes. Towards a material constitution of Romanness?
• Part 4: Reflections
  • 14. On theory-building in Roman archaeology. The potential for new approaches to materiality and practice
  • 15. Roman things and Roman people. A cultural ecology of the Roman world
• Bibliography