Archaeologists often remark on the massive and widespread changes in the material environment in the Roman imperial period. There were more ‘things’ around, which impacted on the lives of the many as well as the privileged few. The volume of traded goods increased, networks of circulation expanded, and local production intensified (e.g. Greene 2008; Bowman and Wilson 2009). With quantitative increase came qualitative innovation. Objects became ever more differentiated in terms of style and function. For many communities, especially in northern and western Europe, the Roman period heralded the first appearance of genuinely standardised material culture, as opposed to objects that belonged to a more generally shared stylistic continuum. Despite the deep and far-ranging implications of these observations for current understandings of the Roman past, there have been relatively few attempts to explain or come to grips with their implications (a notable exception is Wallace-Hadrill 2008). Inquiries into the causes of such profound material changes have often involved methodological leaps of faith, connecting the plethora of new objects and styles to top-down models of imperialism, economic growth and Romanisation. But behind these empirical observations lurks another historical question: what were the historical consequences of these changes in the material environment? Did these changes actually alter people’s relations to things, and through this, to each other?
In order to address these questions, we believe it is necessary to free up conceptual space to reconsider the issue of how we write history from artefacts. The culture-historical equation between pots and people that underpinned (for example) the earliest models of Romanisation is now rightly frowned upon. From changes in artefacts and assemblages we cannot confidently deduce the arrival of new people (e.g. Eckardt 2014). We argue that in the wake of the discredited culture-historical paradigm, Roman archaeology has neglected the opportunity to rethink its model of material culture. Instead, it has merely refined a representational approach: if objects no longer represent people, they have come to stand for or reflect motives external to them, such as status or other facets of group identity.
What we describe as a ‘representational approach’ is firmly ingrained in the ways that artefacts figure in major narratives in Roman archaeology and history. To illustrate this further, let us take the example of pottery – the most ubiquitous and numerous class of artefacts that survives from the Roman world. If pottery plays a role in Roman history at all, it does so in an intrinsically representational manner. This practice is perhaps most explicit in studies of the Roman economy. Since the absence of equivalent data means that the Roman economy cannot be directly measured in ways analogous to modern economies, pottery falls into the category of ‘proxy data’, in which distribution patterns allow otherwise archaeologically invisible economic phenomena to be studied, such as market integration or economic growth (e.g. Brughmans and Poblome 2016b). Despite the general success of this approach, Kevin Greene (2005, 43) has drawn attention to problems associated with a representational way of thinking:
The ‘Roman economy’ is not a natural phenomenon or set of variables analogous to climate. Unlike weather and tree-ring growth, no direct causal connection exists between the workings of an economy and the deposition of potsherds on archaeological sites. Thus, the term ‘proxy evidence’ may promote an unduly optimistic expectation that material evidence can be used directly for ‘reconstructing’ the economy.
Greene’s cautionary observation highlights the essential disconnection in representational thinking between the specific circumstances of individual artefacts and the bigger ideas they are often made to stand for. In addition, extensive data-mining to illuminate understandings of Roman trade entails problems of biases in large datasets, uneven quantification, and comparing data recorded and classified according to different regional traditions (Wilson 2009, 245–6). Nevertheless, the core assumption that artefacts may stand as proxies for economic activity remains unchallenged (but see Scheidel 2007). Let us be clear: there is nothing wrong with this method per se. Studies of pottery as proxy evidence offer much potential for insights into ancient economies. Reduction is inevitable in an approach that largely divorces pottery from the specific contexts in which it was produced, consumed and discarded, so that it may stand for overarching phenomena such as ‘trade’. Likewise, it is commonplace in such studies for important characteristics of the data to be ignored, such as stylistic innovation and functional variation. The problem is not that the use of pottery as proxy data is reductive, but that it silences alternatives. Indeed, the fundamental question of why some pottery travelled long-distances when it could be produced locally in most areas of the Roman world is seldom considered in Roman economic studies.
To continue our example of pottery, its representational treatment in historical narratives of the Roman empire is not limited to the field of economics. The representational lure of pottery for cultural and social analysis is neatly summarised by Greg Woolf (1998, 186):
All but the very poorest had access to some kind of pottery, and those who could expressed their social position and tastes through selection within the variety of ceramics available. Pottery thus makes manifest a series of social categories and claims about status that are inaccessible through most other sources.
Here pots are not so much equated with people, but are viewed as conduits to revealing conscious choices made by different Roman socio-economic groups. In other words, pottery may be used as ‘proxy evidence’ for social differentiation and cultural process. At one level, this realisation is to be welcomed since it has encouraged wider consideration of pots and potsherds as social and cultural indicators, in addition to their well-established use in charting economic patterns and as a dating tool for archaeological structures. There are, crudely speaking, two kinds of major study that have harnessed this approach – the big picture historical narrative, and the more specialist account of consumption patterns. Both tend to be implicitly representational in their treatment of artefacts, which introduces similar problems to those associated with the use of material culture within economic history.
For an example of the study of pots and culture in big picture Roman history, the elegant discussion of Italian-style terra sigillata in Andrew Wallace-Hadrill’s Rome’s Cultural Revolution provides an excellent example (Wallace-Hadrill 2008, 407–21). In many ways this is a rare case in which pottery is given treatment beyond fleeting reference to the archetypal distribution map. Wallace-Hadrill gives detailed thought to the cultural influences acting on Italian-style sigillata, its material properties (e.g. colour and decoration), its origins and the reasons for its boom in the Augustan period. However, his conclusion focuses on a representational issue – what was the meaning of terra sigillata to the consumer? Wallace-Hadrill answers this question by equating the circulation of Italian-style terra sigillata with the blanket concept of ‘luxury’. While this achieves a satisfactory outcome for the reader in connecting the origins of sigillata to other important innovations of the Augustan age, there is an uncomfortable gulf between this high-level generalisation and a lack of detailed consideration of sigillata across various contexts of production and consumption.
If bigger picture historical studies can lack the space to do justice to the complexities of artefactual data, this is less a problem for more dedicated syntheses of Roman pottery. Successful approaches in this vein have connected pottery to its role in the social practices of eating and drinking, as everyday arenas in which routine use informed the formation of changing and contrasting cultural identities (e.g. Cool 2006; Roth 2007; Dietler 2010; Perring and Pitts 2013). However, despite the rejection of blunt representational analyses of ceramic changes under the umbrella of Romanisation, and the increased sensitivity of these studies to sample size and context, most studies continue to use an implicitly representational approach. For example, changes in ceramics and cuisine are variously attributed to internal community dynamics (Cool 2006, 168), an emphasis on local identity (Roth 2007, 201), the presence of ‘native wives in the households of early settlers’ (Dietler 2010, 253), and participation in ‘Gallic styles of consumption’ (Perring and Pitts 2013, 245). While analysis of material culture has become more nuanced, what appears to be most at stake is what ever more complex patterns represent.
At the root of the problems with this representational model is the partial methodological engagement with pottery (and other artefacts, for that matter) as material culture. Attributes of data not deemed essential to reconstructing social and cultural phenomena are often excluded at the outset of analysis, since the primary objective tends to be to understand an abstract concept or process (e.g. cuisine and identity formation) that is external to the object of study (pottery sherds). Crucially, little energy is expended on tracing the broader range of genealogies, associations, continuities and changes in the collective histories and biographies of Roman pottery. For example, in the tradition of Romano-British archaeology, the construct of ‘imported pottery’ forms a familiar and seemingly well-understood category that tends to be used as one of a suite of materials to shed light upon themes ranging from economic networks to urban/rural relations or eating and drinking. In this way, research jumps straight from labelling something as ‘imported’ to broader themes, rather than directly questioning the roles of ‘imported pottery’ as material culture itself. While such leaps were necessary in order not to lose sight of the big picture, archaeology now has tools to build a more continuous path from objects to historical process. A thorough consideration of ‘imported pottery’– including thinking about its associations, genealogies and biographical pathways in neighbouring parts of the Roman world – has considerable potential to inform representational readings at local and pan-regional levels (see Pitts, this volume, for further discussion).
So far, we have made the case for why the representational model of material culture can be problematic for bigger picture narratives and synthetic artefact research in Roman archaeology, in large part by failing to get to grips with objects’ context and stylistic and material specificities. But what of the implications for the study of Roman finds more generally? In a sense, traditional specialist artefact reports are better placed vis-a-vis synthetic studies to deal with such problems. Compared with the writing of big picture history, experienced artefact specialists often have a greater depth of knowledge of their material gained through routine handling of artefactual assemblages. Here, however, the problem of representation is less concerned with issues of interpretation and research questions (although the same issues are present in specialist reports), but rather with the descriptive languages used to categorise and classify artefacts.
To explore further, let us resume our consideration of pottery. Representational models of material culture are implicit at multiple levels of the description of ceramic wares. At a general level, descriptions of pottery fabrics and vessel shapes are frequently equated with inherently fuzzy cultural concepts, such as ‘Roman’, ‘Romanising’, ‘Romanised’, ‘Belgic’, ‘native’, etc.; the terminology of long since discredited archaeological cultures is persistently used, e.g. site-type names such as La Tène and Aylesford-Swarling; wares may be described in terms of historically attested regional groupings (e.g. Durotrigan ware) or modern administrative boundaries (e.g. South Devon ware, North Kent grey ware) with equal likelihood; and in some cases be associated with specific social groups, e.g. Legionary ware. In the majority of examples, these labels no longer carry explicit representational meaning among the practitioners that use them – they are instead a form of short-hand that has been retained for practical reasons (i.e. the need to ensure compatibility with older reports). Nevertheless, the problems caused by retaining such labels arguably go beyond those associated with mere clumsy terminology. These include the perpetuation of hierarchies of preconceived value and importance (from widely circulating ‘Roman’ terra sigillata and ‘imported pottery’ to inferior ‘Romanising’ coarse wares), which runs the risk of conditioning interpretation at the level of individual site narratives and regional studies. Categories of objects are treated as known quantities or passive indicators, so that all the analyst needs to do to scrutinise a social process in a given period and region is to build up a big enough database of objects.
A representational model of material culture is not inherently wrong. This is true especially since material culture’s representational role is increasingly accepted as complex, context-dependent and fragmented. Concepts like ‘discrepant identities’ have proven useful in their emphasis on the multivocality and situatedness of material culture (Mattingly 2004). Moreover, a representational reading of artefacts can be an appropriate strategy in response to certain questions. There is no doubt that a tombstone communicates and reflects at least some aspects of identity (if not of the deceased, definitely of those commissioning it), or that statues rely precisely on a representational mechanism (although this may be more complex than hitherto acknowledged, see Trimble 2011). Our charge against representational approaches is not that they are methodologically unsound, as can be argued of the culture-historical approaches, but that they are partial. The mechanism of representation does not exhaust how material culture works. Study of artefacts centred on representation tends to privilege certain things in specific contexts: often the special, the new, or the visible; and mostly focused on distribution patterns and consumption practices, which, on analogy with our modern experience of being cut off from production, seem more directly ‘expressive’. If, for instance, a certain type of artefact has its ‘core’ distribution area in the Danube region, and one example is found in a burial in Britain, then this seems like a particularly ‘meaningful’ case in representational terms.
But even a tombstone or a statue does not only act as a signifier for an identity, value, or memory. Both tombstones and statues are also visible, solid, relatively durable, difficult to move around, etc. These aspects are the kinds of information that artefact specialists master so well. Specialists see, handle, measure, weigh, and touch artefacts in all their detail and specificity. Materials are provenanced, their properties noted and even experienced ‘first-hand’. Those material properties tend to be approached with a largely implicit, ‘common-sense’ instrumentalist model of material culture, according to which artefact properties are marshalled by people as befits a specific goal. Someone could for instance choose to harness the hardness of a particular rock in order to use it as a grinding stone. But when it comes to writing historical narratives, a representational model is used, in which artefacts’ material qualities do not contribute to historical interpretation. At their best, representational readings are cursorily informed by artefacts’ material properties. For example, the rarity of a particular resource may be seen as linked to a certain object’s exotic value. But reconstruction of the regime of value in which this object was set to work tends not to be based on the object’s material properties. For example, when Dressel 1 amphorae are lined up in a Welwyn tomb in Britain, their interpretation as prestige goods draws first on their scarcity and that of their assumed contents (wine), and much less on their attendant material properties and contextual associations with other objects (Millett 1990, 29–33; but see Poux 2004; Pitts 2005; Dietler 2010).
In order to escape the culture-historical model archaeologists felt the need to break the direct representational link whereby ‘pots’ stand for ‘people’. The alternative, however, has not been to rethink representation as the sole mechanism for linking artefacts and historical process, but to turn to a more complex kind of representation on the model of text (Hodder and Hutson 2005; Buchli 1995). The relation between a textual sign and its meaning is arbitrary and depends entirely on its position in a grammatical and semantic structure. The word ‘dog’, for instance, has no a priori relation to the concept ‘dog’ – hence the great variety in vocabulary between languages, so that words with spelling and sounds as different as ‘dog’, ‘hond’, and ‘chien’ can all refer to the same concept. On those premises, there would be nothing intrinsic to a particular artefact that would steer its meaning. Things accordingly get divided into physical matter plus social meaning (Van Oyen 2013, 87–8). Following this model, the ‘meaningful’ aspects of material culture are located outside the objects themselves, and added to their passive, stable, in itself ‘meaningless’ physical substrate. To repeat, our aim is not to disprove this model on theoretical grounds (for which, see Hicks 2010). Instead, we want to focus attention on what falls through the cracks of a representational reading of artefacts.
The denying of historical significance to artefacts’ material qualities is an important issue, not only because it impoverishes historical interpretation, but also because it severs the link between artefact studies and bigger narratives. The textual model of representation does not grant conceptual space to the specificities of objects, and, therefore, to the key parameters of artefact study. In the linguistic analogy, neither the spelling or typography nor the pronunciation of the word ‘dog’ steer meaning in any way (except through their arbitrary relations with other words). Moreover, texts are on the whole not handled, measured, weighed and touched as part of their interpretation process in the same way as archaeological artefacts. As a result, it is hard to find a space for the contribution of specialist artefact analyses in historical narratives predicated upon a representational template. The continued labelling of objects along categories and principles long critiqued on theoretical grounds is a case in point of the resulting incompatibility.
In its search for a more complex representational model than ‘pots equal people’, Roman archaeology thus turned to a textual analogy loosely inspired by post-structuralism. Structural concepts like socio-cultural ‘identity’ or economic ‘growth’ became the mould wherein artefacts are analysed and made to speak – e.g. the ‘expression of social identity’ (Eckardt 2002, 26). The reification of such postulated invisible phenomena has been repeatedly critiqued on theoretical grounds in the last decades (most notably by Latour 2005). While anchored in a more general tendency in social theory, the issue reveals itself particularly acutely in representational studies of material culture. If objects are assumed to represent external meanings, these meanings have to be attributed to and grouped by some external causal force. This leads to a form of reverse engineering by the analyst, whereby ‘structural’ categories are inserted at the start of research instead of being the outcome of analysis, e.g. ‘elite’ (Millett 1990), ‘Italians, soldiers, Gauls’ (Woolf 1998), and ‘the military community, the urban population, and the rural societies’ (Mattingly 2011, 223). This is not to say that ‘elites’ or ‘soldiers’ were not historical realities. Rather, it is an urge not to reify such postulated structural phenomena a priori, but to dissect what they were made up of and how they worked in order to avoid the danger of circularity.
Closely related to the reification of social categories is a final issue with the representational approach to artefacts, which is about the kinds of causal forces it invokes in history. The problem is neatly demonstrated by the perpetual bone of contention of how to make historical inferences from distribution maps: does the presence or absence of a certain artefact on a certain site reflect supply mechanisms or choice (e.g. Gardner 2007, 91)? In the former case, big economic structures seem to take over in history-writing, whereas the latter interpretation creates a past made up of human agents making conscious choices along the lines of popular discourse about identity today. While few scholars are fully invested in either model, the problem lies in the difficulty of choosing between them. This is not merely an issue of the limited detail of our data; instead it is symptomatic of how a curtailed concept of how artefacts work forces the analyst into an unrealistic choice between two extremes. Simplification of how material culture works, then, is likely to result in a reductive causality in history-writing. To avoid this, rendering the mechanism of representation more complex is only one step, which needs to be paired with an acknowledgement and exploration of other possible ways in which things can be said to be involved in history.
The last decades have seen a surge of interest in material culture across disciplines as varied as literature, history, art history, anthropology, and sociology. Given its particular expertise and long history of dealing with objects, archaeology could have a major contribution to make to this material turn (Olsen et al. 2012). While each discipline comes to material culture studies with its own historically constructed goals and questions, all emphasise that material culture does not just work in a representational way.
In order to balance the dominance of the question of what objects mean or represent, the recent material turn has focused on asking what objects are and what they do. Historians and anthropologists have shown that the distinction between humans and things, or society and nature that seems self-evident in the modern West is a historical construct, and is not universally shared (Fowler 2004). Meanwhile, cognitive and ecological studies emphasise the difficulty in pinning down the boundary between humans and their environment: brain, body and world do not just ‘collide’ (Clark 2008), but may well turn out to be inseparable (Malafouris 2013). Human perception cannot exist except through material mediation (Gibson 1979; Ingold 2000). These insights challenge our ontological categories of ‘humans’ and ‘things’, and push for an inquiry into what exactly things bring to the ontological scene. Ingold’s call for not writing away the material qualities of objects strikes a chord with the above analysis of how representational approaches risk neglecting the specific properties of artefacts (Ingold 2007; Murphy, Van Oyen, this volume).
The question of ‘what objects are’ is answered more radically by studies subscribing to the so-called ‘ontological turn’ (e.g. Henare, Holbraad and Wastell 2007; Holbraad 2007; Viveiros de Castro 1998; critique by Heywood 2012). Anthropologists recounted how in some societies rocks can be people, or jaguars can be people. The traditional response of the western analyst is to revert once again to a representational model, ascribing these different categorisations to culturally specific, constructed meanings overlaying a universally shared and singular reality in which people, jaguars, and rocks are ontologically distinct. In this view objects may well represent people, spirits, or immaterial things, but this is not really what they are. The ontological turn questions this representational solution on political and methodological grounds and urges the analyst instead to turn to the fundamental ontological categories in her research. In contrast to our Western ontology in which nature is stable and culture varies, in other ontologies the same essence can be shared by different natural forms (e.g. Descola 2013). However, the ontological turn in archaeology has yet to transform from a critical into a constructive project capable of generating new knowledge (for steps in this direction, see special issue of Cambridge Archaeological Journal 19.3, 2009).
A more productive alternative seems to be to move from the question of what objects are to what objects do. As agency is no longer considered an inherent propensity, be it of humans or of things (Robb 2010), some other criterion has to be defined for ‘what things do’. This criterion can take different forms, but one of the most workable variants proposes that agency (sensu what things – or humans – do) be linked to effects on the course of action (Latour 1999; 2005, 71). Ontological status then features at the end rather than the beginning of the analysis, and is predicated upon the shape and modality of these effects (cf. Van Oyen 2015). The link between effect and agency is only one possibility, and different criteria have in the last decades led to a whole spectrum of views on material agency, some more ontologically radical than others (Van Oyen 2016a, 1–3). It is important to note here that, while many frameworks start from the ontological uncertainty just identified (i.e. not a priori assuming that things are what we understand them to be from a modern Western perspective), none so far has argued for a resultant material agency imbued with intentionality and reflexivity, and most stay close to fundamental principles of Western ontology in their interpretations (cf. Robb 2004). Concerns about the terminology of material agency, as raised for instance by Andrew Gardner at the seminar that led to this publication, are valid, but they cannot always be taken to indicate fundamental incompatibility (e.g. compatibility between a Latourian material agency and the dialectical framework of Bourdieu has been suggested in archaeology by Maran and Stockhammer 2012).
The question of material agency and its modalities is therefore not the main concern of this volume. Instead we are interested in how the creation of interpretive space for mechanisms other than instrumentalism (things as tools) and representation (things as signifiers) in dealing with things can improve historical narratives and can lead to new insights into the Roman world. The adoption of ontological uncertainty as a starting point for research cautions that the way humans relate to things is not uniform across time and space. Different kinds of persons and different kinds of things emerged from different ways of structuring this engagement (already in Foucault 1975; cf. studies on personhood, Brück 2001; Fowler 2004). By challenging the boundaries of bodies, identity, and memory, Emma-Jayne Graham (2009), for example, has shown how M. Nonius Balbus, major benefactor of Herculaneum, emerged as a literally larger-than-life person through social commemoration after his death. His personhood was no longer defined by the boundary of his skin, but dissipated across the city’s monuments and topography, including memorials literally and metaphorically indexing his transformation from patron to ancestor. An answer to the question ‘what did things do in the Roman world?’ promises to inform at the same time on the specificity of human-thing relations and on the kinds of persons in that world.
Such inquiries should, in turn, shed new light on that other aspect of how material culture works: what and how things represent. Current Western society, for instance, in which few people produce objects themselves yet many consume large quantities of objects whose links to production have been obliterated, creates certain kinds of things and specific kinds of people. As a result, some objects are more predisposed than others to representing for instance status, value, or power. We have already noted that consumption is traditionally considered an area in which the expressive role of material culture is particularly salient. While this may well be the case today, it is the historically specific result of a particular rendering of the human-thing relation, and cannot a priori be extrapolated to other times and places.
What different kinds of historical narratives can we expect to follow from a move beyond instrumentalism and representation as the sole modalities of human–thing relations? Starting from ontological uncertainty, the boundary between description and explanation becomes more porous. The case is well illustrated by considering the role of ‘practice’ in historical explanation (Bourdieu 1977; Giddens 1984; Ortner 1984). Ever since the development of post-structuralist practice theory, ‘practice’ has been a staple term in archaeology (Dobres and Robb 2005; Dornan 2002). In practice theory, it features as the intermediate-scale dynamic driver of the dialectic between structure and agency. In analytical terms, it is the ‘how’ of agency, but in Roman archaeology, it is often thought along functional categories, e.g. practice of ‘eating’, ‘cooking’, ‘constructing’, etc. (e.g. Gardner 2007). As far as artefacts are concerned, then, such a functional reading forces them into an instrumentalist role, where they are always already for something (for eating, cooking, constructing, etc.) (see organisation of the contributions in Aldhouse-Green and Webster 2002 and Allason-Jones 2011). Because such categories are pretty universal placeholders, both practice (the ‘how’ question) and objects are denied much explanatory value. Instead, an additional explanatory level is invoked over and above everyday practices, be it a habitus à la Bourdieu, status, power, or some other deus ex machina acting as prime causal mover.
Traditionally, then, objects can be causally involved in history, but only insofar as they slot into human schemes of purpose (instrumentalist) or meaning (representational). Once we widen the spectrum of mechanisms for how material culture works, however, causality changes and the question of ‘how’ (i.e. practice) is granted explanatory value. The point is neatly made by an example of ethnography of hospital practices (Mol 2002). In a general practitioner’s consulting room, the disease of atherosclerosis manifests itself as ‘pain when walking a certain distance’. Under a microscope, diagnosis of the same disease relies on ‘×% blockage of the arteries’. These different definitions are not wholly due to a different habitus of ‘general practitioners’ versus ‘surgeons’ for instance – some sort of external causal force. Instead, they are shaped by the practices of the settings: the possibility to talk to and touch the patient in a consulting room; the presence of a microscope to visualise the interior of the arteries in the laboratory. These differences in practice themselves have explanatory power: they explain discrepancies and negotiations, for instance in coming up with a diagnosis and deciding on the best treatment. The question ‘what did objects do in the Roman world’ is therefore no mere trivial addition to existing narratives; it can fundamentally change the dynamics, causality, and agency in historical explanation.
This book aims to convince the reader of the need to expand and diversify our interpretation of material culture, but also hopes to provide some tools for realising this theoretical move. Just as we are looking for a more complete theoretical model of how material culture works – adding to but not precluding instrumentalism and representation – we are not jettisoning the tried-and-tested analytical tools of archaeology. The fact that typologies long outlived the usefulness of the culture-historical paradigm shows how tools can be deconstructed and repurposed as interpretative models change (Van Oyen 2015 on types and material agency). It is clear that we can no longer do without contextual analyses and, for production, chaîne opératoire approaches to study the actual practices in which artefacts were produced and used, even if we are asking questions other than ‘what did objects represent?’
All the while, the conceptual advancements of the material turn have been linked loosely to a set of new tools that hold great promise for archaeology. A first series of tools helps refine what is meant by representation and how to analyse it. In direct analogy with the human life course from birth to death (and even afterlife), artefact biographies follow objects as they move from production, through distribution and use, to discard (and after). The emphasis is typically on how an object can be redefined and given different meanings as it passes through the subsequent stages in its biography. A single pot can go from being a functional container for cooking to something with emotional value accompanying the dead as grave good; it may later turn into waste, or be recycled as useful building material. The onus is on contextual analysis to reveal the relations and regimes of value into which an object enters at any given stage of its biography. In practice, this means that the biographical approach to material culture tends to pay off particularly when working with single, specific, highly visible objects. Analytically, artefact biographies create conceptual space for an approach starting from material culture. Interpretively, however, they tend to revert to representational narratives, due to their close analogy with human biographies. The different phases in an artefact’s biography are triggered, shaped, and given meaning strictly by human agents, with little regard for the material or relational qualities of the object and its preceding ‘life course’.
While artefact biographies focus on how objects are redefined in time, networks have become a generic term for tracing the movement of objects in space. Hahn and Weiss (2013b, 4, 7) for instance prefer the metaphor of ‘network’ for their conceptualisation of material culture, in order to escape the linear connotations of ‘biography’. Both such metaphorical and more formal (e.g. contributions in Knappett 2013) versions of networks trace similarities in material culture through space. These similarities can be typological: if artefacts of similar type are found in places x and y, these places become connected in a network. But the similarities at the basis of networks can be of a different nature as well: connections can be predicated upon the use of similar raw materials, for instance. Networks in archaeology thus have a tendency to break up material culture into a series of attributes, in analogy with the social networks by which they are inspired, which analyse different attributes of social actors (e.g. ‘class’, ‘gender’, etc.) (Knox, Savage and Harvey 2006). As a corollary, the interpretive framework that comes with this tends to be similarly ‘broken up’: networks may well show the spread of a certain pottery shape, but they do not necessarily prove that this was underpinned by the adoption of a particular eating practice. If networks are interpreted as the crystallisation of exchange relations, for instance, different parties in the exchange can attribute different meanings to any traded object. Objects, knowledge and practice cannot be assumed to travel through space as one (cf. Versluys 2014).
While these approaches offer a healthy corrective to the culture-historical equation between material culture and culture, they have the unfortunate ‘representational’ outcome of dissociating the object world from the world of meaning. As a result, objects can be recipients of meaning attributed to them by humans, but cannot themselves add to the creation of meaning. As they travel through space, objects are redefined according to the contexts they find themselves in. By focusing on redefinition between contexts, both biographies and networks threaten to negate the importance of the analytical similarities on which they were based in the first place. The question of what ties one stage of an artefact’s biography to the next, or what connects one node in a network to another, is pushed to the background in favour of local meaning-making and differing regimes of value. For example, in the case of Italian Dressel 1 wine amphorae in late Iron Age Britain and Gaul, the economic explanation of Italian over-production and westward trading networks has little bearing on local interpretations of amphorae in the different value systems that governed the Gallic ‘potlatch’ (Cunliffe 1988, cf. Poux 2004 for a more comprehensive account).
Biographies and networks work best when focusing on single objects. But they can often run into problems when dealing with a mass of objects, such as a particular type of pottery or brooch. In contrast to the ‘odd one out’, objects en masse reveal the limits of representational readings. When trying to decipher the meaning of e.g. terra sigillata pottery or dragonesque brooches in general, the analyst is forced into a representational shortcut not unlike the abolished ‘pots equal people’ model, although now with various ‘identity options’ other than ethnicity to account for similarity. The interpretation of objects en masse in particular seems to benefit from shifting the research question from ‘what do objects mean?’ to ‘what do objects do?’
The previous section discussed tools to refine our understanding of objects as signifiers. In this section we turn our attention to different approaches that have the potential to address the gaps brought about by the dominance of representational treatments of material culture in Roman archaeology. In particular, we suggest the notions of trajectory and entanglement as non-representational ways of tracing objects in time and space.
Trajectories are particularly suited to dealing with objects en masse, following the question ‘what do objects do’. Although anchored in time, trajectories lack the linear connotations of biographies, necessitating a beginning and an end. By shifting emphasis from the attribution of meaning to possibilities for action, trajectories introduce a forward-looking parameter and reappraise the links between contexts that got lost in artefact biographies. As a result, the objects themselves actually have a role to play in deciding on the direction and the shape of their trajectories (Van Oyen 2016a, 131–2).
Consider terra sigillata tablewares, Roman archaeology’s most emblematic kind of pottery. Terra sigillata pots were highly standardised, both in shape and technology. This standardisation made any two pots comparable – think about the proverb not to compare apples and orange. Apples and oranges cannot be compared, because they belong to different categories; but someone can compare any two apples as to how red they are, or what size they are. Similarly, someone could compare any two standardised sigillata pots as to which was the shiniest or the best, etc. This created a possibility of competition between potters and workshop groups. Competition, in turn, spurred a particular model of distribution and exchange. Standardisation also made it easy to stack sigillata pots, which greatly facilitated transport in bulk over long distances. As a result, these pots travelled far, but in sets, so that they were rarely the odd one out in consumption and were not particularly suited to working representationally. As sets, sigillata pots could be made to fit the parameters of different contexts: in one setting only plates might be needed, in another context decorated bowls may have been selected for. Sigillata pots thus could easily and widely be integrated in a variety of practices, not because they represented a desired ‘Roman-ness’ or even ‘luxury’ (cf. Wallace-Hadrill 2008), but because of their material ability to cater for different parameters. At the same time, their strict standardisation made reproduction difficult and created a fairly centralised production landscape. This argument has been developed in detail elsewhere (Van Oyen 2015; 2016a), but the key point is that the way in which these pots were defined in one context set possibilities for what they could do in the next. While context is still of the utmost importance, a consideration of trajectories helps appreciate how an object’s agency and meaning do not necessarily start from a blank slate each time it enters a new context.
Rethinking terra sigillata’s production, distribution, and consumption through the lens of trajectory is no mere theoretical fancy, but fundamentally affects historical interpretation. In particular, it frees explanation from the deus ex machina that needed to be added to objects in representational accounts. Traditionally competition is invoked as such an external causal force triggering standardisation: as different production sites competed, there was pressure to make the production process more efficient through standardisation (e.g. Picon 2002). Following a trajectory based on the question of ‘what possibilities for action did terra sigillata allow’ rather than ‘what did these pots mean’, instead, shows that competition is only enabled in relation to a material environment already characterised by a certain degree of standardisation (Van Oyen 2016a, 57). For competition to take place, things have to be made comparable first. Here we have an example of how the specificity of material culture (terra sigillata’s standardisation) can itself become a historical explanation, rather like the example of atherosclerosis, without the need for an explanatory deus ex machina.
A parallel move to that from artefact biographies to trajectories in relation to things’ movement in time exists for the spatial dimension as well. Concepts like entanglement, object-scapes (Pitts, Versluys, this volume), and ecology (Woolf, this volume) invoke metaphors that allow objects to be placed at the centre of inquiry while emphasising their spatial mobility (e.g. Foster 2006; Hodder 2012). Like trajectories, they shift attention away from the identity and uniqueness of individual objects towards greater emphasis on the relations between objects, people and other objects (Hahn and Weiss 2013a). The notion of entanglement, coined by Thomas (1991) and redefined and popularised by Hodder (2011; 2012), draws attention to the mutual dependencies between humans and things, which tend to increase with time and give things a hold over people that exceeds their immediate local context. For instance, the use of grinding stones in the Neolithic created new entanglements by intensifying plant use and increasing nutrient retrieval; by modifying food preparation and making bread into a dietary norm; and by triggering a reliance on heavy stones that reduced mobility (Hodder 2012, 196–9). For the purposes of this volume, entanglement, object-scapes, and similar concepts may help to overcome the problems posed by dealing with objects en masse, as well as approaching the issue of what objects did without immediate recourse to exclusively representational analysis or interpretation.
Methodologically, the implications of these kinds of approaches are considerable, not least given the wide geographical and temporal parameters for the circulation of objects in the Roman world, as well as the sheer quantities involved. For this reason, the concept of globalisation could act as one possible overarching framework for object trajectories and entanglements (Versluys 2014; Pitts and Versluys 2015a). For useful application to the Roman world, globalisation can be defined as a condition in which marked increases in connectivity (evident in the inter-regional flow of people, things and ideas) enable the existence of trans-regional consciousness and shared culture. In the first instance, this perspective helps to overcome arbitrary and entrenched boundaries (e.g. between periods; between provinces) that have prevented researchers from effectively studying a broader range of trajectories and circulations of material culture in the Roman world (cf. Jennings 2011 for similar application to other ancient world scenarios). In this way, globalisation breaks with the methodological nationalism that implicitly informs the writing of much ‘provincial’ Roman archaeology (Pitts and Versluys 2015b, 7–8). Secondly, and crucially for this volume, globalisation fosters an alternative kind of history in which the movement of objects is allowed to take centre stage. Unlike concepts such as imperialism, globalisation does not assume the a priori importance of particular structures (e.g. the Roman state), mechanisms (e.g. the annona) or cultural processes (e.g. Romanisation) that condition or structure the interpretation of material culture. In this sense, some of the perceived problems of globalisation prove to be real assets, namely the uncertainty over where agency lies, and its paradoxical character as both process and outcome (e.g. Morley 2015). By encouraging an analytical emphasis on tracing objects, people, and ideas in motion, globalisation offers a framework that is well-equipped to address the pleas from material culture studies to answer questions of ‘what do objects do?’ rather than ‘what do objects represent?’.
The aims of this volume are twofold: first, to refine representational readings of objects in Roman archaeology (Part 1); and secondly, to explore what objects did in the Roman world and how this changes historical narratives (Parts 2 and 3). Granting conceptual precedence to questions other than representation in dealing with material culture can avoid cutting loose historical explanations from the objects themselves and from the practices in which they participated. Moreover, by drawing attention to the qualities of objects, such approaches can illuminate the historically specific patterns of human-thing relations that shaped the Roman period. For example, we have already suggested that some objects in the Roman world were exceptionally standardised and that, as a result, they acted in a certain way, creating particular possibilities such as long-distance trade or widespread consumption with low representational capacity. Instead of relying on external forces, explanation then becomes part of the description. And like the description, explanation is cumulative in nature: both change depending on the start and end point, length, and level of detail of the analysis.
This volume aims to put new questions on the agenda, not to provide firm answers. While we should be wary of devising a catch-all model, a first question to be addressed in this volume is how to imagine the interaction between the different ways in which objects can work. The trajectory of terra sigillata sketched briefly above, for instance, precisely relies on and tries to account for the apparently flexible representational functioning of these pots. Distribution analyses have neatly shown different terra sigillata consumption profiles (for example, for military, urban and rural sites) (e.g Willis 2011), with different preferences in shapes, decoration, etc. A representational approach asks what these different preferences signify (e.g. do they represent distinct consumer identities?), while a non-representational approach is interested in why these different preferences could exist and could be catered for in the first place (e.g. pointing to standardisation as making these pots into flexible signifiers). The object’s specificities – in this case the pots’ standardisation – at once shaped the possibilities for action and the roles it itself could take up in that playing field. A similar question about the relation between the different ways in which objects can work is whether the new model of explanation set forth above works with single objects – the odd ones outs – as well as with general artefact categories. Perhaps a representational model is better suited to the former?
Secondly, how are archaeological tools and methods shuffled by a non-representational approach to things? Archaeological mainstays like ‘context’ and ‘practice’ have featured prominently in this theoretical discussion. These are clearly still key concepts in our toolbox, but the way they slot into interpretation has been adjusted. Whereas practice – the ‘how’ question – used to merely describe contextual variation, it now has gained explanatory value. Following the concepts of trajectory and entanglement, practice steers humans and things into a directionality that shapes history, and the very description of which conversely explains historical process. By moulding practice (which in turn fuels trajectories and entanglements), the material and stylistic specificities of artefacts can (in part) transcend the defining power of context. Things can shape history beyond their here and now.
But the final and most important question to be explored by the contributions in this volume is whether the question of ‘what did objects do in the Roman world’ can lead to new historical insights. The brief example of sigillata’s standardisation and the phenomenon of competition suggests it can, but the onus is on the chapters in this volume to show that an object-centred approach produces a better understanding of the Roman world rather than merely adding texture to existing narratives.
The rest of this book is structured along three main sections, each followed by a shorter discussion chapter. In Part 1, Representation Reconsidered (discussant: Martin Millett), Hella Eckardt, Rob Collins and Martin Pitts address traditional concerns in Roman finds studies such as identity, supply and demand, and consumer choice, in light of the problems identified in this introductory chapter. Here, the contributors make it clear that it is neither possible nor desirable to get rid of representation in Roman archaeology, while at the same time pointing towards either a) more critical uses of representational logic in archaeological approaches, or b) new ways of thinking about material culture that incorporate both representational and non-representational dynamics. Thematically following the chapter by Pitts on standardised pottery, Part 2, Standardisation (discussant: Robin Osborne) confronts the issues of object categorisation, typologies and standardisation. Standardisation is arguably one of the most salient features of the material world in the Roman period. But did standardised objects lead to standardised human-thing relations, particular economic landscapes, or even standard time? Using examples drawn from multiple object classes, Jiménez introduces the concept of ‘standard time’ to provide new insights into the apparent stylistic synchronisation of the material world in particular periods of Roman history. Jeroen Poblome et al. address the relationship between artefact typologies and the big-picture cultural and economic constructs of koine and oligopoly in the Eastern Roman empire, whereas Elizabeth Murphy considers the constitution of material standards at the micro-level in pottery production at Sagalassos. Lastly, Part 3, Matter (discussant: Miguel John Versluys), sets out a blueprint of what going ‘beyond representation’ really entails for Roman archaeology. From the seemingly mundane world of concrete (Astrid Van Oyen) to the lure of dice and gambling (Ellen Swift) and the exotic (or familiar) use of Aegyptiaca in Roman Italy (Eva Mol), this section demonstrates the fundamental capacity of objects to guide and influence human behaviour in the Roman world, with a specific emphasis on their material qualities. The volume is completed by two concluding discussions, which respectively contextualise the implications of the collected chapters with regard to the practice of theory in Roman archaeology (Andrew Gardner) and the contribution of material culture to Roman social history (Greg Woolf).
* Department of Classics, Cornell University; Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Exeter.