This volume explores the role of material things in shaping Roman histories. Different conceptual and methodological tools can be brought to bear on this question, but no example proves the basic point as well as the story of the genesis of this book. At first sight, the key ingredients for a project like this appear to be limited to people and ideas: one needs a stimulating question, a line-up of bright scholars, and a toing and froing of new ideas. These elements were definitely part of the cocktail of the 2015 Laurence Seminar at the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge, and of a session at the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference (TRAC) at King’s College London two years earlier, both organised by the editors. And yet, no seminar or volume was ever made from the mere combination of the aforementioned ingredients. What is missing?
Minds alone do not speak to one another directly, and not even the digital revolution has done away with the need to bring people together physically. Agendas need to be aligned, trains booked, and rooms reserved. These are not just practical trivia, subordinated to the real business of intellectual exchange. For true discussion to be had and intellectual progress to be made, the atmosphere needs to be at once collegial and critical, and imbue participants with the right state of mind. Indeed, the setting directly acts on the mind. In a similar vein, ideas need to be fed, hydrated, and rested. We can therefore state that without the generous financial support of the Faculty of Classics and the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, not only would this volume not have been made, the ideas expressed in it would not have taken shape.
The fundamental role of the material setting and its inherent contingency mean that the development of ideas is never a case in which one plus one equals two. Instead, as the trajectory of this book unfolded, starting assumptions were challenged, new questions emerged, and routes mapped out in advance were travelled only in part or diverted. These transformations not only affected ideas, but also the very line-up of participants. The original TRAC session included a paper by Ros Quick, and seminar contributions by Hilary Cool, James Gerrard, and John Robb did not end up in the volume, but have nevertheless shaped it in no small measure. Conversely, Astrid Van Oyen’s chapter was written after the seminar, and while Elizabeth Murphy was not present at the Laurence Seminar, her contribution to the volume adds a much-needed micro-scale perspective to the whole.
For the eventual publication of this volume, we are grateful for the financial support of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, for the editorial guidance of Clare Litt at Oxbow Books, and for the comments of two external peer-reviewers. For all its emphasis on things – redressing a long-lost balance – this volume emphatically does not deny the essential contribution of human agency. Our biggest thank you, in the end, goes to the participants in the seminar and the contributors to this volume, for expanding our horizons and those of Roman archaeology, and to the reader who has picked up this volume, for joining the exciting dialogue that is Roman material culture.