Materialising the Roman Empire defines an innovative research agenda for Roman archaeology, highlighting the diverse ways in which the Empire was made materially tangible in the lives of its inhabitants. The volume explores how material culture was integral to the processes of imperialism, both as the Empire grew, and as it fragmented, and in doing so provide up-to-date overviews of major topics in Roman archaeology. Each chapter offers a critical overview of a major field within the archaeology of the Roman Empire. The book’s authors explore the distinctive contribution that archaeology and the study of material culture can make to our understanding of the key institutions and fields of activity in the Roman Empire. The initial chapters address major technologies which, at first glance, appear to be mechanisms of integration across the Roman Empire: roads, writing and coinage. The focus then shifts to analysis of key social structures oriented around material forms and activities found all over the Roman world, such as trade, urbanism, slavery, craft production and frontiers. Finally, the book extends to more abstract dimensions of the Roman world: art, empire, religion and ideology, in which the significant themes remain the dynamics of power and influence. The whole builds towards a broad exploration of the nature of imperial power and the inter-connections that stimulated new community identities and created new social divisions.

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).

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).

A fascinating history of the intricate web of trade routes connecting ancient Rome to Eastern civilizations, including its powerful rival, the Han Empire. The Roman Empire and the Silk Routes investigates the trade routes between Rome and the powerful empires of inner Asia, including the Parthian Empire of ancient Persia, and the Kushan Empire which seized power in Bactria (Afghanistan), laying claim to the Indus Kingdoms. Further chapters examine the development of Palmyra as a leading caravan city on the edge of Roman Syria. Raoul McLaughlin also delves deeply into Rome’s trade ventures through the Tarim territories, which led its merchants to the Han Empire of ancient China. Having established a system of Central Asian trade routes known as the Silk Road, the Han carried eastern products as far as Persia and the frontiers of the Roman Empire. Though they were matched in scale, the Han surpassed its European rival in military technology. The first book to address these subjects in a single comprehensive study, The Roman Empire and the Silk Routes explores Rome’s impact on the ancient world economy and reveals what the Chinese and Romans knew about their rival Empires.

The Roman Empire was home to a fascinating variety of different cults and religions. Its enormous extent, the absence of a precisely definable state religion and constant exchanges with the religions and cults of conquered peoples and of neighbouring cultures resulted in a multifaceted diversity of religious convictions and practices. This volume provides a compelling view of central aspects of cult and religion in the Roman Empire, among them the distinction between public and private cult, the complex interrelations between different religious traditions, their mutually entangled developments and expansions, and the diversity of regional differences, rituals, religious texts and artefacts.

It introduces a religious dimension to the study of ethnic identity and globalization in the provinces of the Roman Empire.

In Destinations in Mind, Kimberly Cassibry asks how objects depicting different sites helped Romans understand their vast empire. At a time when many cities were written about but only a few were represented in art, four distinct sets of artifacts circulated new information. Engraved silver cups list all the stops from Spanish Cádiz to Rome, while resembling the milestones that helped travelers track their progress. Vivid glass cups represent famous charioteers and gladiators competing in circuses and amphitheaters, and offered virtual experiences of spectacles that were new to many regions. Bronze bowls commemorate forts along Hadrian's Wall with colorful enameling typical of Celtic craftsmanship. Glass bottles display labeled cityscapes of Baiae, a notorious resort, and Puteoli, a busy port, both in the Bay of Naples. These artifacts and their journeys reveal an empire divided not into center and periphery, but connected by roads that did not all lead to Rome. They bear witness to a shared visual culture that was divided not into high and low art, but united by extraordinary craftsmanship. New aspects of globalization are apparent in the multi-lingual placenames that the vessels bear, in the transformed places that they visualize, and in the enriched understanding of the empire's landmarks that they impart. With in-depth case studies, Cassibry argues that the best way to comprehend the Roman Empire is to look closely at objects depicting its fascinating places.

Domesticating Empire is the first contextually-oriented monograph on Egyptian imagery in Roman households. Caitlín Barrett draws on case studies from Flavian Pompeii to investigate the close association between representations of Egypt and a particular type of Roman household space: the domestic garden. Through paintings and mosaics portraying the Nile, canals that turned the garden itself into a miniature "Nilescape," and statuary depicting Egyptian themes, many gardens in Pompeii offered ancient visitors evocations of a Roman vision of Egypt. Simultaneously faraway and familiar, these imagined landscapes made the unfathomable breadth of empire compatible with the familiarity of home. In contrast to older interpretations that connect Roman "Aegyptiaca" to the worship of Egyptian gods or the problematic concept of "Egyptomania," a contextual analysis of these garden assemblages suggests new possibilities for meaning. In Pompeian houses, Egyptian and Egyptian-looking objects and images interacted with their settings to construct complex entanglements of "foreign" and "familiar," "self" and "other." Representations of Egyptian landscapes in domestic gardens enabled individuals to present themselves as sophisticated citizens of empire. Yet at the same time, household material culture also exerted an agency of its own: domesticizing, familiarizing, and "Romanizing" once-foreign images and objects. That which was once imagined as alien and potentially dangerous was now part of the domus itself, increasingly incorporated into cultural constructions of what it meant to be "Roman." Featuring brilliant illustrations in both color and black and white, Domesticating Empire reveals the importance of material culture in transforming household space into a microcosm of empire.

Bright red terra sigillata pots dating to the first three centuries CE can be found throughout the Western Roman provinces. The pots' widespread distribution and recognisability make them key evidence in the effort to reconstruct the Roman Empire's economy and society. Drawing on recent ideas in material culture, this book asks a radically new question: what was it about the pots themselves that allowed them to travel so widely and be integrated so quickly into a range of contexts and practices? To answer this question, Van Oyen offers a fresh analysis in which objects are no longer passive props, but rather they actively shape historical trajectories.