History evolves through the particular relationship between objects and people. The configurations we call society and history are a mix of human beings with objects, in which both people and things have some sort of agency and influence each other (Böhme 2006; Boivin 2008; Hicks 2010 for an overview of the debate).
To date, the disciplines of Roman history and archaeology have mainly focused on human agency. They did so even while making objects a central component of their investigations, as in those cases the implicit, underlying research question always was what these objects represented in terms of human agency; or, in other words, what they meant (Versluys 2014; Van Oyen and Pitts, this volume). However, forms and styles of material culture are able to shape people as effective social entities (Gosden 2005). The ‘material and visual ecology’ (Wells 2012; Woolf, this volume) of a certain region in a certain period, therefore, matters greatly in the sense that things, through their entanglement with people, become instrumental in shaping habitus as well as pathways of change. It is well-known that objects are fundamental to what Pierre Bourdieu (1977) called habitus and that they structure human life in an often subconscious way. However, objects are as fundamental to change as they are to continuity. Previously unknown objects, in new styles and made from new materials, often challenge the boundaries of the known, lead to fresh questions and perspectives for the societies they enter, and pave the way for novel practices (van der Leeuw and Torrence 1989; Gosden 2004; Versluys 2017b). For this reason, objects play an important role in the emergence of new cultural configurations and it could even be argued that they ‘make up’ societies.
It is particularly important that in recognising the role that forms and styles of material culture play in shaping people or (imagined) communities, the present volume works towards a new, ‘truly archaeological’ agenda for Roman history and archaeology (Versluys 2014). With that qualification, I do not simply mean to say that objects matter, but rather that objects matter fundamentally ‘beyond representation’ and beyond being used as mere historical sources.
The difference between these two approaches becomes clear from reading the introduction to the handbook Writing Material Culture History (Gerritsen and Riello 2015b), as well as from the papers in this book and the reception of the material turn within Roman studies in general. Providing a critical introduction for students interested in material culture, history and historical methodologies, Gerritsen and Riello mention three ways in which material culture has, in their view, enriched the discipline of history: 1) by complementing other (e.g. written) sources; 2) by making historians ask new questions, and 3) by directing historians towards new themes. All this change is the result of what they characterise as a ‘Damascene conversion to material culture’: the material turn in history. Laudably taking up and elaborating on the material turn, most contributions to the book do not, however, attempt to rewrite history as a particular relationship between objects and people with things as the agents provocateurs of (historical) change. In my view, however, this is the real challenge elicited by the material turn (notable exceptions from the book include Charpy 2015, on how things shaped people through the Industrial Revolution, and Gerritsen and Riello 2015c, on the material landscapes of global history). The ‘Damascene conversion to material culture’ should not simply be about focusing on objects but about reconceptualising understandings of their impact and agency within societies.
As such, both Writing Material Culture History and the present volume show how difficult it is to put the material turn into practice. Scholars have eagerly turned towards objects (again). But they often seem to do so for their own reasons: to acquire new sources, questions and themes; to turn their backs on everything pertaining to post-modern hermeneutics and become empiricists again (for this debate see Hillerdal and Siapkas 2015, who are more positive on neo-empericism than I); and to develop the role of museums beyond issues of heritage and identity alone (see ter Keurs 2014), among others. These aims are, of course, understandable, useful and legitimate. Taking and developing a ‘turn’ implies looking at it critically, testing it with regard to one’s own discipline, and subsequently reworking it. One should indeed not simply ‘go with the flow’ when there happens to be another theoretical paradigm around (Gardner, this volume). However, the problem remains that the aforementioned perspectives often seem to keep the real challenges at bay. Indeed, it is arguable that they do not use the material turn to its full potential, and nor do they help to develop it conceptually.
Looking at this reticence (or abstention?) with regard to the field of Roman history and archaeology in particular, these perspectives could even be called reductive. Why? In the first place, much critical deconstruction, testing and reworking has already been done. The two most important handbooks of the material turn are probably the SAGE Handbook of Material Culture and the Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, published in 2006 and 2010, respectively. There was not much Roman archaeology or history in them, nor are they widely used within Roman studies. Moreover, exciting new interpretations are proposed for many periods on the basis of this new paradigm: from the Neolithic (Robb 2013) and the Bronze Age (Vandkilde 2017) to modernity (e.g. Böhme 2006; Goody 2012; Goldhill 2014). Other fascinating debates address the important issues surrounding how things shape the mind (Malafouris 2013), and the extent to which being human depends on particular relationship with objects (Barrett 2014). With a robust foundation to build on, therefore, I propose that we should evaluate the material turn by putting it into practice for Roman archaeology and history (Versluys 2014). The second reason to do so, instead of taking the risk of becoming reductive, is given by the utmost and undeniable relevance of the material turn for our period. As Van Oyen and Pitts assert in their Introduction: ‘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 (…). With quantitative increase came qualitative innovation. Objects became ever more differentiated in terms of style and function.’ I would argue that the study of every historical period needs a truly material turn, but that the Roman period constitutes a privileged vantage point for such an exercise.
The remainder of my contribution first discusses the three articles of this section against the background of how Roman archaeology and history deals with the material turn. How do the authors position themselves, and what are the strengths and weaknesses of their engagement with the material turn? Second, I briefly explain what I consider to be a fruitful way forward. I argue that in order to understand how relationships between people and things are instrumental in shaping the pathways of change, archaeologists should focus on the circulation and impact of classes of objects through their stylistic and material characteristics. For this purpose, I introduce the concept of ‘object-scape’ as an applied research tool to study these classes of objects and will illustrate its practical application by briefly looking at object-scapes in the Iron Age Levant and the Roman Republic.
In their introduction, Van Oyen and Pitts claim that focusing on what objects did provides a more complete theoretical model of how material culture works – a view supported by the rest of the volume. As the articles in this section show, traditional cultural-historical approaches are unsound for a proper understanding of objects, while postcolonial or postmodern approaches, which draw heavily on the notion of identity, are at best only partial approaches – even when identities are understood as complex, overlapping, fragmented, and context-dependent (cf. Pitts 2007). In both strands, ‘people’ and ‘pots’ are seen as being related in a representational way. Neither approach is helpful to provide a more complete theoretical model of how material culture works, as they do not move beyond representation. When sketching their more complete theoretical model, Van Oyen and Pitts draw on various notions in their introduction: most prominently, artefact biographies and networks; trajectories, entanglement and globalisation. These should all serve to help focus on what artefacts were and what objects did in the Roman world.
The articles in this section make use of these notions in different ways and subsequently represent different ways of dealing with the material turn. In her essay, Ellen Swift deals with the relations ‘between the physical features of artefacts (their form and material), everyday social practice and experience, and wider cultural traditions of behaviour’ and thus illustrates the importance of what I call object-scapes (see below) in order to understand both habitus and socio-cultural change. It is interesting to note that she distinguishes form and material as the most important physical features of artefacts, which could also be called style and materiality, respectively. Hence, ‘a theoretically informed approach to functional studies’, as she calls it, can indeed become important for our understanding of the diversity of social experience within the Roman world. Although Swift’s chapter does not deal with the latter aspect specifically, it follows that the more artefacts with these particular physical features are around, the greater the diversity of the social experience. A larger and more diverse object-scape results in increasingly diverse human-thing entanglements – and will therefore also result in a different habitus. Her essay also shows how difficult it is to go from the ‘physical features of artefacts’ to ‘wider cultural traditions of behaviour’ as instigated by artefacts; and hence to arrive at what Hodder (2011) has characterised as an integrated archaeological perspective. In her careful analyses of seal-rings and dice, Swift often falls back on standard historical narratives, like the survival of pre-Roman cultural practices in Roman Britain and the categories of elite and non-elite, to reconstruct the diversity of social experience. But the question of how objects created these, or other, categories, is yet to be answered. I am not sure whether it is really true that ‘by studying ordinary everyday items, such as dice or seal-rings, we can examine the extent to which introduced mental concepts were or were not assimilated into everyday provincial practice’, because such a conclusion seemingly considers objects as representing a single interpretative concept; and hence singles out just one of many possible affordances.
Swift clearly shows how beneficial it is to try and understand the relationship between objects and social practice by thinking about object agency. The essay by Mol shows this, too, and in addition establishes a convincing connection between habitus and social change. In order to achieve this, it is necessary to move away from artefact biographies and their networks proper towards concepts like trajectories, entanglement and globalisation (cf. Boschung, Kreuz and Kienlin 2015), or, in other words, from single objects to classes of objects and the inter-artefactual domain (Gosden 2006). This is because, in Mol’s words, some objects move us (intentional) but all objects shape us (unintentional). Mol defines agency as ‘the power that style or objects have to affect human intentions and behaviour’. In her essay, using object agency turns out to be an excellent and effective means to deconstruct cultural taxonomies. Mol is as critical as she is enthusiastic about the potential of the material turn; thus testifying to a serious engagement with its theory and arguing that, through its particular data-sets, Roman archaeology could help to ‘soften’ the material turn. She usefully reminds us that ‘the agency of objects should never be accounted for in isolation, nor should we conceive agency as having only one significance in terms of power and directionality when human-object relationships are concerned.’ This leads to the conclusion that ‘although society is built up from things, things do not exist without people, they rather co-exist in a complex network of being and becoming’. The notion of being and becoming – the fact that things are not determined by their logical relations within a classification scheme but by their working relations with other things and humans in their environment – is crucial and can significantly contribute to a more complete theoretical model of how material culture works. Mol’s case study on ‘Aegyptiaca’ illustrates both the practical and methodological strength of this model. In practical terms, it demonstrates that, to use an illuminating example, the small marble sphinx-statue found at a canal in the garden of the Casa di Octavius Quartio (II 2,2) in Pompeii was placed there because it was made from marble and because it was a sphinx – and both that subject and that material had a relation to water – not because it was Egyptian. Still it has been described as something representing Egypt in all scholarly literature thus far. In methodological terms, this allows us to understand how history evolves through the particular relationship between objects and people: the influx of things Egyptian is shown to affect Roman classifications as well as stretch them and, eventually, the influx of things Egyptian also affects the categories of ‘Egyptian’ and ‘Roman’ themselves.
The essay by Van Oyen asks how matter came to matter in the Roman empire, and is therefore very much engaged with the similarly fundamental question of ‘writing matter into history’. For her analysis of how concrete helped produce an imperial Roman world, she provides us with an Ingoldian account of the organic ‘growing’ of opus caementicium. One way in which Roman concrete can be said to have ‘grown’, in this sense, is through its physical transformation from a fluid to a solid state. Her analysis beautifully shows how concrete and its constitutive components ‘came with specific biographies of material transformation’ and how ‘concrete as a building material developed along a trajectory of redefinition, categorisation, and differentiation’. ‘Caementa were sorted both in relation to one another (within the layers) and in relation to the structure and its loadbearing requirements’. Hers is certainly not an article about materiality without materials (Ingold 2007). Another important question in understanding how matter matters, is what kind of socio-economic, cultural, or even conceptual changes were brought about in Roman society through, for instance, the use of opus reticulatum stones (emphasising ‘the unity of concrete as a material over the heterogeneity of its constituent components’) in comparison to earlier opus incertum or later opus testaceum or latericium with its terracotta materiality. Were buildings in opus incertum perceived differently than those in opus reticulatum – even if covered by marble or stucco? What different kind of affordances came with reticulatum when compared to incertum, and how did those (differing) affordances result in changes in Roman society?
The importance of these questions is underlined by Van Oyen’s own analysis of the concrete revolution that took place in the Julio-Claudian period, with Nero’s Domus Aurea as best-known example. Through concrete and its affordances, a different form of architecture emerged: ‘a new world closed in on itself, cut off from surrounding “nature”’. In this way, the unintended consequences of the shift to concrete in Roman architecture changed not only Roman architecture, but also Roman lifestyles and society. The fact that concrete had to be used in vaults – flat concrete ceilings were structurally impossible – set in motion the development of a whole new spatial vocabulary. Thus, concrete’s material histories branch out into histories of imperial identities, economic development, control, and citizenship. As Van Oyen concludes: ‘The historical footprint of Nero, then, would not have been possible without concrete – without the possibilities of speed and shape it afforded. These possibilities emerged from concrete’s much longer material history of transformation and categorisation. Material histories shuffle causality, situating traditional protagonists firmly within their historical entanglements.’ In her final analysis, Van Oyen sketches a model that, I think, is similar to Mol’s, in viewing material histories as being relational; performative and emergent: ‘they have a history and they make history.’ The study of Roman artefacts, then, should be about the power of things and the flow of cultural transformations (cf. Saurma-Jeltsch and Eisenbeiss 2010 and Maran and Stockhammer 2012 for historical case studies from this perspective but not from the Roman period).
One thing that is certainly not desirable when applying the material turn to Roman archaeology and history is more jargon. It could be argued that one of the main conceptual problems is the fact that many debates, in different fields like archaeology, art history, anthropology, and ethnology, are talking about the same problems without awareness of each other’s debates and definitions. These and other disciplines can only face the challenges that the material turn poses in tandem (Van Eck, Versluys and ter Keurs 2015). Nevertheless, in my view, it is useful to introduce the term ‘object-scape’ as a research concept that enables us to move from the stylistic and material properties of artefacts to cultural formation. As demonstrated in the discussion of the three articles above, the link between object-properties and cultural formation is as important as it is difficult to establish. The idea of an object-scape might help here (see Pitts, this volume, and Pitts and Versluys forthcoming for further theoretical background and practical application of this concept).
The influx of new objects leads to new practices, socio-cultural configurations and imaginations. Automobiles, plastics, air-conditioners, computers, and smart phones all have profoundly changed the societies they entered. They did so in practical, technological, and economic terms, but also in social and cultural respects. And so did the influx of iron, glass, marble, terracottas, and bricks in earlier periods. For prehistory, this is abundantly clear. Many Eurasian societies in the second and first millennia BC are characterised as Bronze Age, because in all respects the alloy of bronze is considered as the main ‘game changer’, with regard to what came before (copper) and after (iron) (Vandkilde 2017, drawing upon earlier work by scholars like Oscar Montelius and Gordon Childe; cf. Van Oyen, this volume). Bronze objects are regarded as literally ‘making up’ the Bronze Age; and their significance and affordances indeed permeated Bronze Age societies (Kohl 2007). The same is true for historical periods; although, in their case, the fundamental role of objects in shaping human behaviour is often still very much underplayed (Böhme 2006; Goody 2012; Goldhill 2014 are important exceptions and illuminating studies regarding the nineteenth century; as is Appadurai 2013 for the present-day).
Through object-scapes it is possible to identify and investigate (classes of) objects as ‘game changers’ and look at their impact. I define an object-scape as ‘the repertoire(s) of material culture available at a certain site in a certain period in terms of their material and stylistic characteristics’. The concept implies that scholarly interpretation should not focus on what this repertoire represents in terms of human behaviour, but rather on its impact, namely what it does at a certain site in a certain period, and how it moulds human behaviour through its material and stylistic characteristics. The term takes inspiration from Tim Ingold’s (1993) taskscapes but also from archaeological discussions about the meaning of landscapes as constitutive of human history and behaviour (Tilley 2010) and, more specifically, islandscapes and seascapes (Berg 2007). Object-scapes are similar to these and the concept can function, moreover, in relation to what Arjun Appadurai called ethno-scapes (Appadurai 1996; cf. Versluys 2015). Charting an object-scape over time will help provide answers to the following interpretative questions: What (classes of) objects were new? Where did they come from? Where, how and why did they innovate? And what were the historical consequences of these changes in the material environment (see Versluys 2017b)?
At this point, I briefly introduce two examples to illustrate what object-scapes are about and how they may help to establish a more integrated archaeological perspective (Hodder 2010), from object to cultural praxis and beyond representation. The first example draws on the important work of Marian H. Feldman on the Bronze and Iron Age Near East (Feldman 2006; 2014). Her recent study on the Iron Age Levant, entitled Communities of Style (2014), is concerned with ‘the material effects of art objects, particularly that of style, with the human beings who made and used them, proposing the power of their entanglement in creating and structuring communities of inclusion and exclusion’ (Feldman 2014, 2). Style is usefully described here as a material effect of objects. Her analysis clearly shows how ‘More than simply a guide to attribution, style serves to establish and structure communities through the engagement of human participants with material objects. Style is thus not autochthonous and bound to geography but rather, through its activation of collective memories, constitutive of communities along both spatial and temporal axes’ (Feldman 2014, 6). Charting the development of an object-scape of a certain site over a certain period, and focusing on style and material, can provide much insight into how cultural praxes and communities are made up by their material ecology. As Feldman summarises: ‘Through the consumption of styles and objects, we can see how art constitutes community identity rather than simply reflects it’ (Feldman 2014, 9).
Feldman discusses art where archaeologists would talk about objects or material culture. That difference is not really important, especially not as art might well be a term that simply designates a special form of object agency. I mention her work here deliberately to underline that archaeologists need to engage much more seriously with developments within art history when applying the material turn (Van Eck, Versluys and ter Keurs 2015). One important reason for such a re-orienatation is that more archaeological attention is needed to address the agency of style, as the chapter by Mol underlines (cf. Versluys 2015). Another reason is that art history has a lot of experience with rethinking representation (cf. Belting 2001). Representation is a difficult concept as it constantly plays an important role on many different levels of scholarly interpretation. There is representation involved when an object is excavated or otherwise encountered; when the encounter is experienced there is the representation, in words, of that experience (Gosden 2010). It is thus not only important to rethink Roman artefacts but also to rethink representation, because as much as I endorse the plea to go ‘beyond representation’ within Roman history and archaeology and apply the material turn, we cannot, I think, do without representation as such.
The second example concerns Republican Italy and the dramatic changes in its object-scape between roughly 200 BC and the turn of the millennium. During this period, substantial and widespread changes occurred in the material environment. Unparalleled amounts of objects, from more different areas and in more different styles, ended up at more different places than ever before in (Mediterranean) history. The Roman conquests of parts of Sicily (211 BC), Greece (168 and 146 BC) and North Africa (146 BC) led to a significant intensification of Mediterranean connectivity and changes in the object-scape, along with it. Moreover, through the conquests of large parts of the Hellenistic East in the first century BC, a direct Roman involvement with the Silk Road was established, which formed a corridor to large parts of middle and eastern Eurasia. The result was an unprecedented influx of new objects, leading to major new practices and configurations. Around 300 BC, the object-scape of Rome contained temple-ornaments, votive objects and grave goods as its major characteristics – while portraits played a minor role (Zanker 2008). The intensification of connectivity resulted in the erection of Greek-style temples, the building of large peristyles and porticoes that displayed large amounts of statues and other objects, the fabrication of new forms and styles of terracotta, and many other things.
One of the consequences of this dramatically altered object-scape was a new culture of collecting and the subsequent emergence of museum and heritage contexts (Rutledge 2012). This development would, among other things, result in the pervasion of Antiquarianism in late Republican Roman society (Schnapp 2013). The circulation, appropriation, collection, and display of non-local artefacts thus shaped Roman society and the city of Rome to a significant degree. This new object-scape would dramatically change Republican lifestyles, across all domains of society. Objects and styles from Greece, from Egypt and Africa and from Asia are most prominent in this respect (Porter 2006; Versluys 2013). Gosden (2005; 2006) has shown the complex range of social effects that was brought about by the changing corpora of objects for proto-historic Britain during this period. Wells (2012) has done the same for parts of temperate Europe, highlighting the dynamics that were brought about by new visual patterns. In Republican Italy, the consumption of new styles and materials likewise constituted new identities and communities that were dependent on the affordances of those foreign objects and their effects. Barrett (2014) recently argued for the existence of a material constitution of humanness. Could there also be a material constitution of Romanness? Or, in other words, were the processes of the formation of the Roman empire and ‘becoming Roman’ intimately tied up with objects and their agency?
This essay was written in April 2016 during a stay in Berlin at the invitation of the excellence cluster TOPOI. I would like to thank TOPOI and in particular Kerstin P. Hofmann for providing me with this stimulating experience. I am grateful to Astrid Van Oyen and Martin Pitts for organising an inspiring and important meeting, and for the feedback they provided on a first draft of this paper. Marike van Aerde kindly corrected the English text.
* Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University.