This volume brings together seven papers presented at the sixth E. Togo Salmon conference at McMaster University in 2007, and is a welcome addition to new work on the material things through which slavery was materialized and articulated in the Roman world. Two of those studies — M. George in K. Bradley and P. Cartledge (eds), The Cambridge World History of Slavery, Vol. 1: The Ancient Mediterranean World (2011), 385–413 and S. Joshel and L. Hackworth Petersen, The Material Life of Roman Slaves (2014) — were authored by contributors to the present book. Both are acknowledged pioneers in the study of Roman slavery through artefacts, as well as texts.

Following an introductory overview by Michele George, the first three contributions explore slavery through artefacts located at the intersection between object and text: funerary inscriptions and graffiti. Christer Bruun focuses on the naming of vernae, offering some important challenges to the contention that a Greek cognomen necessarily indicated ‘servile status’ and exploring why Latin cognomina appear to have been favoured for the house-born. Henrik Mouritsen's statistical analysis of epitaphs from the columbaria of two élite families (the Statilii and Volusii) carefully highlights the variability of practice — and the caprice — concerning manumission. Mouritsen's brief discussion of the structures themselves left me wanting to know more about the relationship between epitaph, status and space: in the case of the Statilii, ‘outsiders’ seem also to have been spatial outliers. Peter Keegan's paper on the inscribed graffiti from a building thought to be used for the training of enslaved page boys for the Roman court carefully adduces wide-ranging information on the training, labour and social identities of a category of slave more ‘privileged’ than most, but for whom the social realties of slavery were no less grim. Sandra Joshel's excellent contribution, which draws inspiration from Stephanie Camp's work on plantation landscapes in the American South, explores the built environment within which household slaves moved and laboured. Joshel's diachronic methodology, integrating archaeological data (the physical remains of buildings) and textual evidence, provides illuminating insights into the lived experiences of the army of domestic labourers making their way through the ‘zebra-striped’ (117) service areas of villas and urban houses. The comparative perspective found in Joshel's paper is also present in Noel Lenski's treatment of lamps, serving trays and other Roman artefacts depicting servile figures. The comparanda in this case are objects — figurines, pepper pots and so on — from the post-slavery United States. The images supporting Lenski's analysis are particularly well-chosen, and the fact that such a high proportion of the Roman objects depicting slaves as ‘tools’, ‘props’ and ‘dumb waiters’ (as Lenski puts it (130)) are also images of sub-Saharan Africans adds weight to a fascinating comparative analysis. Michele George's compelling analysis of a minor genre scene in Roman art — the ‘Cupid Punished’ motif — is a masterclass in the art of reading through objects to the discourses they encode. She argues persuasively that careful reading of objects depicting a tearful, shackled Cupid speaks powerfully to the values of Roman slave-owners and their culture. The final paper in the book is, sadly, a posthumous contribution. Natalie Kampen takes a funerary monument depicting the centurion Marcus Caelius and his two liberti as the launch point for an authoritative, questioning analysis of liberti on military tombstones.

At first sight — with three of its seven contributions considering funerary inscriptions, a fourth graffiti and two statuary — this book might appear to plough the traditional furrows in which slavery has tended to be studied by classicists. In fact, the best of these studies are both innovative and nuanced, achieving the aim (set out in G.’s introduction) of creating stronger bonds between history and material culture in order better to explore both Roman slavery and slave experience. This said, in a book that rightly champions an interdisciplinary approach, the balance between contributions on epigraphy, art history and archaeology might have been more even. G.’s introduction — which suggests that ‘the disciplinary boundaries which led [Moses] Finley to despair of archaeology are still intact’ (4) — sets the tone for a rather narrow approach to the discipline thereafter: archaeology's principal value seems to lie in providing secure contexts for the artefacts which art historians and epigraphers then go on to analyse. Yet as other papers in this volume suggest — particularly Joshel's study of the geographies of slave containment — it is only extensive area excavation that makes this type of creative analysis possible. One thinks also of the contribution which isotope and DNA analysis, and field projects like that at Vagnari, are beginning to make to the identification of diasporic individuals (and the material culture associated with them), as seen, for example, in H. Eckardt (ed.), Roman Diasporas (2010).

The principal weakness in a very strong collection is that, beyond the introduction, the papers exist in isolation from each other. There is considerable methodological crossover between, for example, the papers by Joshel and Lenski, and those of Bruun and Lenski, yet no one author engages with the contribution of another. My other quibble concerns the illustrations. Whilst they are well produced, the plates — sandwiched together into the centre of the book — are frustratingly distanced from the contributions which discuss them. This is a counter-intuitive strategy in a volume aiming to integrate words with things.