Contents

Preface

List of figures

List of tables

INTRODUCTION

1. What did objects do in the Roman world? Beyond representation

Astrid Van Oyen and Martin Pitts

PART 1: REPRESENTATION RECONSIDERED

2. Writing power. The material culture of literacy as representation and practice

Hella Eckardt

3. Soldiers in life and death. Material culture, the military, and mortality

Rob Collins

4. Gallo-Belgic wares. Objects in motion in the early Roman northwest

Martin Pitts

5. Discussion. Reflections on the representational use of artefact evidence

Martin Millett

PART 2: STANDARDISATION

6. Standard time. Typologies in Roman antiquity

Alicia Jiménez

7. Different similarities or similar differences? Thoughts on koine, oligopoly and regionalism

Jeroen Poblome, Senem Özden Gerçeker and Maarten Loopmans

8. Rethinking standardisation through late antique Sagalassos ceramic production. Tradition, improvisation and fluidity

Elizabeth A. Murphy

9. Discussion. Material standards

Robin Osborne

PART 3: MATTER

10. Finding the material in ‘material culture’. Form and matter in Roman concrete

Astrid Van Oyen

11. Design, function and everyday social practice. Artefacts and Roman social history

Ellen Swift

12. Object ontology and cultural taxonomies. Examining the agency of style, material and objects in classification through Egyptian material culture in Pompeii and Rome

Eva Mol

13. Discussion. Object-scapes. Towards a material constitution of Romanness?

Miguel John Versluys

PART 4: REFLECTIONS

14. On theory-building in Roman archaeology. The potential for new approaches to materiality and practice

Andrew Gardner

15. Roman things and Roman people. A cultural ecology of the Roman world

Greg Woolf

Bibliography