2009 was an unusual year for the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference, with sessions being held both at the Roman Archaeology Conference in the US, at the University of Michigan, and at a separate UK-based event at the University of Southampton. Over 30 papers were presented across both venues. This, I think, shows that the conference continues to provide a highly valued platform for a diverse range of perspectives and for developing ideas, and that its role is recognised across the community of Roman archaeology. The publication of papers from both events in a single volume also highlights how globally-broad this community is, and certainly helps to dispel the image of TRAC as having a somewhat parochial Romano-British focus. This volume, like others in the series, serves as a useful snapshot of some of the innovation in Roman research and contains several strong papers.
As with other TRAC proceedings, though, there are a couple of criticisms which need to be aired as issues for future consideration. These are not new, actually, having been examined in detail in previous reviews and commentaries (particularly R. Laurence, Britannia 30 (1999), 387–90, and papers in TRAC 2005, ed. Croxford et al. (2006)), which is itself somewhat worrying. In a nutshell, while there are good reasons why TRAC has become established enough to still prosper in what was a busy year for conferences, the extent to which it has become ‘establishment’ needs to be constantly examined. Certainly, the understanding of what role theory plays in Roman, or any other archaeology, and what kinds of theory should be brought into play, risks becoming rather implicit and safe. In this reviewer's opinion, TRAC must constantly push the boundaries of Roman archaeology if it is to continue contributing as much to the future reshaping of the discipline as it has in the past.
The first paper in the volume highlights this point well, in tackling one of the issues that has not been as consistently worked through in a TRAC context as it should have been. Louise Revell rightly questions the extent to which feminist critique of core concepts in Roman archaeology has been carried forward, and presents a series of examples where insights from gender studies are interwoven with evidence for a range of identities which interact with gender, particularly age. This paper successfully moves the debate forward and opens the door for further developments: the profound questions raised by feminist theory about our understanding of human subjectivity should be high on the agenda of future TRACs. The next two papers are concerned with the raw materials of Roman imperialism. Ronald Visser considers our knowledge of methods of woodland management in the Roman world, as compared with modern silviculture, utilising both textual and archaeological evidence to document techniques such as coppicing. Forests certainly played an under-examined role in the cultures of the Empire, but here slightly more attention to the spectrum of relationships between knowledge and practice, as shaped by more than functional considerations, would have been welcome. Bradley Sekedat, writing about stone quarrying in Anatolia, pursues this line more clearly, looking at the temporal and spatial networks within which quarrying practice was situated, though fuller discussion of the case-studies would be useful. Indeed, both authors suffer somewhat from the brevity that the format and circumstances of TRAC proceedings compel, a point I will return to below.
The next three papers are linked by the theme of technological developments in methodology. Gareth Beale and Graeme Earl offer an effective discussion of the challenges to traditional ideas of aesthetics and interpretation posed by the application of new visualisation technologies to Roman statuary. Annick Lepot demonstrates the utility of GIS in handling complex spatial datasets, in this case in northern Gaul, though again room for fuller discussion would be helpful, while the paper is hampered by a rather traditional approach to Roman-period culture-change. Finally, Ivo van der Graaff et al. discuss a coring approach to landscape survey, and in so doing raise important issues of wider applicability in archaeological method concerning sampling and the understanding of depositional processes.
The second half of the volume comprises three papers dealing with issues of space, albeit from different perspectives, and three with identity. Cecelia Feldman Weiss offers an original and distinctive interpretation of the relationship between movement and place in Ephesus, and explores the flow of both water and people in the city. The discussion of performance theory helps makes this a strong paper. The contributions by Simon Wood, on pleasure gardens in Republican and early Imperial Rome, and Rick Bonnie, on centuriation in the North-Western provinces, are more descriptive. Both discuss interesting conceptual issues — the ideology of public space in the former case, the role of academic preconception in the recognition of evidence in the latter — but have limited room to engage with the dynamics of Roman power as fully as one would like.
The final three papers concern treatment of the elderly in southern Romano-British burial contexts (Alison Moore), gender and burial in Samnium (Rafael Scopacasa), and culture change at the end of the Roman period in Baldock, Herts. (Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews). All three contain strong case-studies, and variable levels of discussion of interpretative approach, although arguably the theme of identity has become so well-worn that it is indeed primarily empirical elucidation which is needed. This highlights the fact that eclectic takes on ‘theory’ should be expected — and welcomed — in a TRAC volume, as different problems in different regions of the Roman world require different approaches at different times. That said there is a little too much in this volume which is familiar, and scant sign of several of the major theoretical debates that archaeologists in other sub-disciplines have found fruitful.
In terms of format, Oxbow have served TRAC well, but slightly more generous word-counts would do most papers greater justice, probably necessitating larger volumes; a list of the conference sessions and papers would also help orient the reader and contextualise the published papers. More importantly, though, the sense of theoretical adventure that characterised the earliest TRACs needs to be recaptured. There are good ideas in the present volume, as in previous ones, but there are also a lot of themes, and theories, that have yet to be tried in the context of the Roman world, and no good reason why they should not be.
