The Roman Empire is as valid a case study for comparative analyses of imperialism and colonialism as any other. Thus, the proposal of Fernández-Götz et al. (Reference Fernández-Götz, Maschek and Roymans2020: 1630–1639) to use the notion of ‘predatory regimes’—developed by Achille Mbembe (Reference Mbembe2001) and adapted to archaeology by González-Ruibal (Reference González-Ruibal, Lane and MacDonald2011, Reference González-Ruibal, Leone and Knauf2015: 425) to understand the “darkest sides of [Roman] imperialism”—seems relevant. I wonder, however, whether classical archaeologists will be willing to engage in a meaningful debate about ancient Rome as a ‘predatory regime’. Despite the publication of influential post-colonial analyses of Roman expansionism some 20 years ago (Webster Reference Webster, Webster and Cooper1996; Mattingly Reference Mattingly1997; van Dommelen Reference van Dommelen1998), and critical studies on the use of Rome as a conceptual model for nineteenth- and twentieth-century European colonisation (Hingley Reference Hingley2001), the expressions ‘Roman imperialism’ and ‘colonialism’ appear in the work of a minority of authors. Many scholars remain wary about using these concepts to understand the incorporation of new territories in pre-modern societies. Consequently, Rome is rarely equated to the more recent and supposedly ‘sophisticated’ forms of brutal conquest and submission of the European powers from the fifteenth century onwards, even if the terms ‘Roman Empire’ and ‘Roman colonisation’ are often used. Ironically, the words colonia and imperium have Roman origins. They were used not only to articulate the Romans’ own written accounts of conquest, but also formed the basis of a complex classificatory framework of lands, settlements and peoples at the core of a new system of domination and its representation through maps, triumphal monuments, sculptural reliefs and coinage. Although studies on the concepts of colonia and imperium and their historical evolution are numerous (see Richardson Reference Richardson2008; Lavan Reference Lavan2013), more research is needed to illuminate the material dimension of Roman colonialism, which, of course, must be analysed in its historical context (see Sweetman Reference Sweetman2011).
The obvious place to start looking, as suggested by Fernández-Götz et al. (Reference Fernández-Götz, Maschek and Roymans2020), are sites that allow us to trace episodes of violence. These include Roman camps, battlefields, siege-works and mass burials. But what were the consequences of imperialism beyond the instances of more archaeologically visible overt violence? What were the effects of the symbolic and systemic violence that generated those outbursts, and that sustained the ‘normal’ peaceful order of things (Žižek Reference Žižek2008)? How do archaeological remains help us to understand the ramifications of a new “system structured by systematic differences, differences that both sustained and were the product of Roman power” (Woolf Reference Woolf1998: 242), in which Rome was placed—both metaphorically and literally—at the centre, while the provinces were moulded as her peripheries? What makes the material culture of the provinces provincial, and how can archaeologists access the inner workings of imperialism through the study of such materials (Jiménez Reference Jiménez, Frakes, Egri and Alcock2016; for the rural communities in Germania inferior, see also Roymans et al. Reference Roymans, Derks and Heeren2020)?
The culturalist approach denounced by Fernández-Götz et al. (Reference Fernández-Götz, Maschek and Roymans2020) is ultimately sustained by an insistence on a divide between violence and culture—one that allows us to present the spread of Latin inscriptions, theatres, villas, statues and terra sigillata pottery across the provinces as something positive and detached from the imperial project, when they formed an integral part of it. One of the insights of literary post-colonial studies, however, is that ‘culture’ (from novels to scientific treaties that form part of the dominant colonial discourse) sits at the core of imperialism as much as administration, a predatory economy and the military (van Dommelen 1998: 26). New approaches to the traditional ‘Romanisation’ model, such as ‘Romanisation 2.0’ and globalisation (Versluys Reference Versluys2014; Pitts & Versluys Reference Pitts and Versluys2015), have contributed important insights into connectivity and networks, but they also risk stagnating debate around the permanent deconstruction of a problematic paradigm, and setting the analysis of material culture in an ahistorical vacuum. Objects did not move in a transnational free market, but rather in a new Roman order that privileged the movement of certain people, objects and ideas to specific places. Ignoring the power imbalance is not conducive to better insights to build artefact-driven historical narratives, and in some cases may even be misleading.
Nonetheless, the material turn has the potential finally to take us in a different direction, as it forces us to question what things do and are, not simply what they were supposed to mean in a given context. As Fernández-Götz et al. (Reference Fernández-Götz, Maschek and Roymans2020) state in their conclusion, a thing-oriented Roman archaeology does not necessarily contradict the analysis of violence and imperialism, and it should, in addition, strive to provide new historical insights (Van Oyen & Pitts Reference Van Oyen, Pitts, Oyen and Pitts2017: 18). An archaeology beyond representation is not an archaeology that refrains from understanding how representation works; it is an archaeology that explores further the complexity of representation. It highlights the role of representation in the creation of categories around power axes and models that have the capacity to influence the subject of the representation. It acknowledges that the very distinction between people and things is ontologically arbitrary and that each society creates the ‘natural’ differences that exist between humans and other entities, be they animals, things or supernatural beings. Thus, object agency, understood as the capacity to produce effects in the course of action, is highly context-specific. It also takes into account the thing-driven component in the human conceptualisation of material culture, without negating the simultaneous human conceptual transformation of the very same things involved. It shows certain ways in which “objects work on people, rather than what they stand for or represent” (Woolf Reference Woolf2014: 48), and the importance of the constellations of objects within which people are socialised.
