Viewed from the perspective of early Roman Italy, Versluys's stimulating proposal is extremely thought-provoking, both with regard to the framework proposed and with regard to what we might call an ‘ahistorical’ approach that explicitly places a material-culture studies perspective at the centre of analysis. This proposed approach interacts in a variety of fascinating ways with the direction that study of the early Roman expansion and Roman Italy has taken over the last two decades, both in terms of research topics and questions, and also in terms of the academic and disciplinary setting within which they have developed. In order to stimulate the debate from the perspective of ‘the beginnings’ of the expanding Roman world, I would like to reflect briefly here on some of these potential interactions as I see them. Below, I will sketch the development of the discussion for early Roman Italy and raise two main, interrelated points.
The first regards the degree to which studies over the last decades have already come to embrace globalizing perspectives, as well as the impossibility of separating this development from very specific (if different from 19th- and 20th-century) conceptions of power and imperialism. Global perspectives can, at least in part, be seen as a reaction to excessively dichotomizing and atomizing approaches of the late 20th century (e.g. Hingley Reference Hingley, Merryweather and Prag2003) that exhibited a strong regional focus with little consideration for changing Roman agendas and attitudes (these approaches, of course, were in turn a salutary reaction to earlier, colonialist conceptualizations of the Roman world). To redress this bias, ‘combining a global framework with sensitivity for the context’ (Terrenato Reference Terrenato, Hurst and Owen2005, 62; Reference Terrenato and Bispham2008) seems wise, at least as a general attitude. But globalization and related views on local developments, connectedness and mobility themselves are underpinned by assumptions derived from our understanding of the workings of power and imperialism – wherever located, both geographically and socially – and it is important to acknowledge that to that extent the globalization framework is not intrinsically different to previous approaches: it is a specific world view, not a neutral method or research methodology. Power and imperialism have an important role to play here, too, and cannot be left out of this intricate equation – although the degree to which they matter varies with what it is we want to know (cf. below).
My second, closely related point concerns the recent convergence of archaeology and ancient history in the study of the early Roman expansion, and how this collaboration compares to approaches based more on material culture ‘in its own right’, such as the approach now advocated by Versluys. It is significant that much of the recent scholarly discussion on the early Roman expansion has been generated precisely by increased interaction and cross-fertilization between ancient historians and archaeologists. Nonetheless, I would argue that recent integrated theories of early Roman imperialism and Roman Italy, though still developing, have already come to rely progressively more on material and indeed archaeological approaches – although in a different way than Versluys envisages. Hence we should perhaps in general be less pessimistic about the possibility of fruitfully integrating a focus on material culture into research that explicitly aims to enrich our historical understanding of specific aspects or models of Roman imperialism. But what kinds of research question require which approach to material culture? And what consequences, then, might adopting a specifically material-culture studies approach as proposed by Versluys have on the current scholarly debate, also with regard to the recent ‘historical turn’ in Mediterranean archaeology? Is there still common ground to be found? And should we look for that at all?
That brings me to the point where the two issues I have introduced above converge. A great deal of the aporia concerning them, and also arguably surrounding discussions of ‘Romanization’ generally, resides, I think, in the assumption that all these issues can and should be studied in a single holistic framework or model. It is perhaps worth thinking again about this classic question in an explicit manner. Indeed, rather than try to do away with Roman imperialism and power when attempting to ‘reinvigorate the Romanization debate’, might we not gain more by acknowledging that different research questions require different sets of theories and approaches that are better suited to answering them? Might not an object-oriented approach answer certain questions, yet fall silent when other questions are asked? I would propose that we could take the discussion forward by engaging more directly with the diverse research questions (rather than general traditions and political agendas, though these are of course related) that underlie both previous and current scholarly projects.
Different research questions lead to wildly different conceptions or representations of what happened on the level of (material) culture – but should we aim for consensus in the first place? Critiques of previous studies for their general conception of Romanization sometimes seem to presuppose that there is one all-embracing model that explains it all. But can we really integrate all different levels and perspectives – as laid out, for instance, in Slofstra's (Reference Slofstra2002a, 20–21) ‘simple diagram’ of the ‘dimensions of the romanization process’ – in a single framework? And perhaps more importantly, what outcome is envisioned in such an enterprise? What explanatory value is added? To what deeper insight does considering everything everywhere simultaneously and contextually lead us?
Precisely the term ‘Romanization’ has been particularly unhelpful through its obfuscation of this fundamental diversity of research questions. Perhaps the best argument for abandoning Romanization is less its political connotations than the fact that it can simply refer to too many things – and on entirely different conceptual planes: it means and has meant many things to many scholars, from explanation to apology, from side effect to conscious strategy, from cultural process to research question, and might even just indicate a historical period. Romanization is not a debate, but a term that has been put to use, with varying success, in a series of partly separate debates centred on widely different research questions and aims. The status of Romanization in various argumentative structures has varied even more widely. Arguably, a clearer vision of the different research aims at play may not only help to clarify the lack of communication and comprehension between different schools of thought, but also legitimize to a certain extent particular choices in studying the ancient Mediterranean world or indeed only certain parts or aspects of it.
Through a rough sketch of the development of modern approaches to the early Roman expansion in the Italian peninsula and its cultural implications, I will now try to briefly illustrate how some new perspectives and methods interact productively, while others do not. This occasional incompatibility need not be a problem. Both historical imperialism and strict material-culture perspectives are valid in their own right and can produce important results – and in some specific instances may even complement one another – but in order for them to work most effectively, we should perhaps not insist on integrating them into one holistic, conceptual/explanatory framework (such as Romanization, however defined), but rather choose to work on the basis of specific, explicit research questions.
Early Roman expansion and the making of Roman Italy
Background
The history of research on the development of Italy in the Hellenistic period holds a particular place in the historiography of Romanization studies. It is the ideology of 19th-century German and Italian unification, rather than modern imperialism and colonialism, that set the agenda for the most influential, all-encompassing scholarly works, such as those of Niebuhr and Mommsen. It should be stressed that developmental and often teleological notions have also been key in these works, but somewhat different goals and trajectories were envisioned, as cultural convergence prior to Roman domination, rather than the imposition of Roman culture on the colonized (or ‘Roman enlightenment’), was the guiding principle here.
Although it is true that actual archaeological evidence has played a fundamentally passive role in the creation of the larger historical framework, as for instance Mouritsen (Reference Mouritsen1998) and Terrenato (Reference Terrenato, Hurst and Owen2005) somewhat pessimistically remark, the role attributed to culture, material and otherwise, has been far from passive in the broader conceptualization of the whole process: the Annäherung (Kiene Reference Kiene1845, 120) of the Italic peoples and Rome already prior to actual political integration is indeed posited as a crucial precondition for the smooth and, as it were, inevitable fusion of Romans and Italians. It is not Rome that brings (about) new culture, as envisioned in blunt, modern colonialist ideologies; it is rather the spontaneous convergence of Romano-Italic culture that facilitates and paves the way for Roman political leadership, a topos explored in depth by Mouritsen (Reference Mouritsen1998, 59–86).
A rather different strain of thought can be recognized in representations of the rationale and effect of Roman colonization, especially, and by no means coincidentally, those developed over the course of the 20th century. Put simply, this view imagines the founding of Roman colonies as the establishment of small islands of Roman civilization from which Roman culture in turn would have radiated into the non-Roman hinterland. This line of thought undeniably has a closer relationship with the archaeological evidence, although this interpretation, especially with regard to the early phases of Roman expansion, has been heavily biased by particular imperialist readings (see especially Brown Reference Brown1980; Fentress Reference Fentress2000). In a wave of statist and imperialist interpretations of republican Rome, archaeology was selectively used to support such a picture: a focus on urbanism, public buildings, roads and so on was the predictable result (cf. e.g. Terrenato Reference Terrenato and Bispham2008).
In sharp contrast to the study of the Roman provinces, however, the archaeology of early Roman Italy has not experienced real development of a starkly ‘post-colonial’ or, as I have called it, ‘anti-colonial’ wave of interpretation à la Bénabou (Stek Reference Stek2004, 29; Reference Stek2009, 3). Italian municipalismo and modern regionalism have always inspired a different focus: on pre-Roman cultures rather than on what happens in the Roman period; in other words, a focus that is more in line with the general framework that posits the end of Italic cultures well before the rise of Rome. Less sophisticated notions of native resistance – the famous ‘inversion of the paradigm’ (cf. the 1978 review of Bénabou by Thébert (1978)) are visible in popular culture and local politics in some areas, but these have essentially been irrelevant to the main scholarly debate. In contrast, both explicitly and implicitly post-colonial archaeological approaches that place material culture first have naturally been extremely important. These include, to name but a few, the revolutionary studies by Van Dommelen (e.g. Reference Van Dommelen1998), especially on Sardinia, and the studies of southern Italy by Yntema, Attema and Burgers (cf. now Attema, Burgers and Van Leusen Reference Attema, Burgers and van Leusen2011). These scholars deliberately take material culture and its meaning in local contexts as their point of departure: this research question and the related approach have opened up whole new vistas in our understanding of conquered areas in the republican period and the diverse ways local people dealt with their situation. That such an approach to material culture in context does not necessarily lead to underestimating developments at ‘the centre(s)’ is illustrated by the work of Torelli (e.g. Reference Torelli1999). Even if his work has a very different ideological background, the duttilità or malleability of (Roman and other) models and their application and meaning in local contexts has been central to his analysis.
It is important to note, however, that this development goes hand in hand with similarly contextualizing studies in ancient history. Indeed, especially for early Roman colonization studies, the post-colonial turn has influenced historiographical analyses at least as much as it has archaeological analyses, indeed with groundbreaking results (e.g. Crawford Reference Crawford and Storchi Marino1995; Dench Reference Dench1995), yet initially, relatively little – albeit increasing – emphasis has been placed on archaeological evidence in its own right. This increase, however, is arguably a logical and natural development, as we will now explore further below.
Sensitivity to chronology and the Romanization of Rome
An enhanced sensitivity to chronology has been one salutary consequence of great importance. Whereas previous narratives typically suffered from a tendency to conflate different types of (mostly literary, but also archaeological) evidence from wide-ranging periods, the historiographical critique has drawn greater attention to chronology in assessing developments of all kinds. Focus has shifted away from developmental and teleological historical models toward synchronic analysis of what really happens on the ground in specific temporal and spatial contexts. This naturally taps into our appreciation of the character and development of Rome itself in the republican period (e.g. Curti Reference Curti, Keay and Terrenato2001) and permits us to connect contemporary events in Rome with developments elsewhere. This realization is essential for any period and area, but the situation was exceptionally dire for republican Italy, where images of Rome were largely based on disparate pieces of imperial evidence (the misuse of Aulus Gellius’ 2nd-century A.D. image of Roman colonies to interpret republican colonization is a notorious example). The development of Rome itself has become an extremely important research question for understanding processes elsewhere, especially now that historical reconstructions of the pre-Hannibalic period appear to be highly fragile.
Combined with the important insight that material culture does not have a static or uniform, intrinsic meaning, but can be invested with different significances according to sociopolitical and cultural context, this development has led to a particularly dynamic and promising field of research, in which the contextual study of material culture can be put to good use in historical analyses of selected sociopolitical and cultural processes at work in republican Italy.
Decentring Rome
One major development in recent years has undoubtedly been the decentring of Rome in explanations of sociopolitical, economic and religious–cultural change in republican Italy. Interestingly, this development cannot be described as a phenomenon that is restricted to one discipline or the other; that is, for instance, in terms of the emancipation of archaeology from history. In fact, the deconstruction of historical narratives has been of primary importance here, and this in turn has led to carefully contextualized historical studies, not only in a chronological but also in a geographical sense – one of the traditional points of critique from archaeologists (Fronda (Reference Fronda2010) is a good recent example). But, at the same time, archaeology has played an extremely important role in providing much more contextual regional information on several trends in material culture that once were necessarily biased by a predominantly Roman perspective. We might think, for instance, of the development of what can be called the Hellenistic farm phenomenon: in light of the huge increase in field-survey data available today, it should evidently be understood as a Mediterranean-wide development rather than as a consequence of Roman colonization (e.g. Attema, Burgers and Van Leusen Reference Attema, Burgers and van Leusen2011). The same goes for the multicentric and pluriform regional production of black gloss pottery, and indeed also for the presence of what were previously thought to be Roman guide fossils par excellence, such as anatomic votives. Similar arguments can be made for the appearance and occupation history of hill forts or villas (for further discussion and references see Stek (Reference Stek and DeRose Evans2013)). Archaeology is certainly taking an active, indeed seminal, role in this development. But the reframing of Rome and Italy, and Roman Italy, as part of a wider, pan-Mediterranean Hellenistic world can be seen as a joint movement, in which archaeologists and ancient historians are closely collaborating: an excellent recent example is the volume The Hellenistic West (Prag and Quinn Reference Prag and Quinn2013), in which historical and strictly archaeological approaches are utilized in combination to rethink the East–West dichotomy. This convergence of archaeologists and historians in addressing similar research questions, which in my view has been highly productive, will be taken up again further below.
Local identities and Roman power
The emergence and continued importance of local, civic and ethnic identities under growing Roman influence has attracted renewed scholarly interest over the last few decades, in part because scholars have broken with the traditional historiographical model that assumed the dissipation of Italic identities prior to Roman expansion. The special interest in ethnic identities over others, such as urban, civic and other aggregative identities, is certainly a result of specific modern concerns. These have been influenced both by studies of other areas of the (Roman) world and, albeit to a lesser extent, by modern political configurations. If one thing has become clear, it is that the importance of such ethnically coloured identities seems to increase over the period of growing tensions with Rome and other powers in the Hellenistic age. Examples of the creation of new ethnic categories in a Roman framework exist, for instance, in northern Italy (Williams Reference Williams2001). Such categories come to be manipulated to a point where ethnic categories are turned into legal ones, and these in turn can be referenced by the selective use of material culture by local communities far from Italy itself (e.g. on the ius Latii see Stek (Reference Stek and DeRose Evans2013)). Therefore the emergence of local identities cannot be seen apart from Roman agency: on the contrary. This is, of course, and not coincidentally, in perfect harmony with current thought on modern globalization and on understanding local developments within it. Be that as it may, it is often the contextual analysis of literary and epigraphic sources that allows us to appreciate the complexity of the archaeological record in terms of its relationship with Roman influence in the peninsula (see e.g. Yntema (Reference Yntema2006)). Without the historical framework, in many cases we would be unable to appreciate the intricate way in which material culture delicately plays with models in terms of creative adaptation, inversion or indeed subversion (for nice examples see e.g. Jiménez (Reference Jiménez Díez, van Dommelen and Knapp2010)). To understand the meaning of such changes in the experience of the local people involved, however, a profound appreciation of the existing system of cultural codes is essential. A more typically – and truly – post-colonial, emic point of view becomes essential for approaching this specific question. Archaeological contextualization naturally emerges as the better-suited approach, and not simply because we are usually dealing with pre- or protohistory in such cases (cf., e.g., Van Dommelen and Terrenato (Reference Terrenato, van Dommelen and Terrenato2007) explicitly on this perspective on the ‘local articulation’ of wider Mediterranean processes, including imperial power). According to what we would like to know, we can choose different perspectives.
Mobility and connectedness between material culture and recent historical work
Another, partly related trend has been emphasis on the extent of mobility and connectedness in Italy and the Mediterranean world. The movement of people and of information and ideas, ranging from agricultural technologies to cultural representations and styles, as well as goods, has received a great deal of attention, obviously explainable by contemporary concerns and world views. Again, this line of thought is visible in the work of both historians and archaeologists, from, of course, Horden and Purcell to the explicitly material-culture approach espoused by Van Dommelen and Knapp, who propose to put material-culture studies to better use so as to ‘explore how objects framed and shaped people's life and how their own physicality (their bodies) was intimately entangled with other “things”’ (Van Dommelen and Knapp Reference Van Dommelen and Knapp2010, 4). Interestingly, several historical studies suggest nonlinear development, even if ever-increasing mobility or connectedness throughout the Hellenistic period (or Bronze Age/orientalizing period etc.) has long been taken as a general starting point in scholarly work on Italy (Gosden's ‘shared cultural milieu’; cf. Terrenato's ‘inner circle’ (Reference Terrenato and Bispham2008)), even before it came into vogue in our globalizing world. The inadequate exchange of information documented between Roman officials and communities in the republican period is but one example (Pfeilschifter Reference Pfeilschifter, Jehne and Pfeilschifter2006). At the same time, ever more detailed studies of migration patterns (including seasonal, short-distance versus long-distance, temporary etc.; see Erdkamp Reference Erdkamp, de Ligt and Northwood2008) show the impressive scale of the phenomenon (Scheidel Reference Scheidel2004). One fascinating finding is that legal studies potentially indicate the Roman authorities’ growing concern with containing the phenomenon, trying to enhance fixity (Broadhead Reference Broadhead, de Ligt and Northwood2008). An archaeological view that focuses on the variegated distribution of goods, styles and representational models, and the complex relations between diverse ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’, could certainly have added value in addressing specific questions in these scholarly debates. The case of peninsular Italy in particular is especially interesting for the future course of the debate. It has the potential to assess issues of increased and diversified connectedness in a deep chronological perspective, which encompasses the very emergence of Rome itself and the nonlinear, at times spasmodic, development of Roman expansionism (cf. above, on the Romanization of Rome).
New views on Roman imperialism and colonization: negotiation, rural communities and a renewed appreciation of Rome's impact
It is within the context of the developments outlined above that stale, modern colonialist models of imperialism have already been abandoned for some time. With the deconstruction of the modernizing statist models put forward especially in the second and third quarters of the 20th century, both the naturalness of Roman hegemony and its direct correlation with the notion of superior Roman material culture have been discarded. Recent modelling of Roman imperialism is moving away from static models to more volatile balances of power, from imposition to negotiation, from Roman superiority to common social interests, from state policy to personal benefit. Competition between different relevant entities and groups is viewed as a key factor in the making of society and of power structures, a trend also seen in studies of other complex Old World societies: conflict-based models with fuzzy edges are replacing abstract, monolithic and bounded models (see, e.g., Stein Reference Stein1998; Yoffee Reference Yoffee2005). A focus on the players in the field has been the result, most importantly on the Roman clans or on the agency of individuals, also after the presumed demise of archaic Roman society and the emergence of the Roman ‘state’ (e.g. Terrenato Reference Terrenato1998; Reference Terrenato, van Dommelen and Terrenato2007; Reference Terrenato, Terrenato and Haggis2011; Smith Reference Smith2006; Bradley Reference Bradley, Bradley and Wilson2006).
Such revolutionary models, which have been outlined and explored for early Rome in the greatest detail by Terrenato, tally well with the redating of several developments mentioned above, the consequential decentring of Rome in these processes, and analogies with the archaic and classical periods – rather than the later imperial situation. It is evident that the role that material culture may or may not have played in establishing Roman imperialism, in a conception of Roman power as a tool or vehicle that could be hijacked by different elite groups in Rome or in other communities involved (to paraphrase Terrenato (Reference Terrenato, Terrenato and Haggis2011, 236; forthcoming)), differs radically from the role it could play in statist, top-down models.
Another example is the conception of Roman colonization in the imperial project. After clearing away the layers of unifying or modern colonialist frameworks from the bare literary and archaeological evidence, exciting new possibilities open up. One of these concerns the traditionally assumed, exclusive relationship between urbanism and Roman influence and colonization, a topic I am currently working on together with a research team. Although we are still awaiting the analysis of our fieldwork, it has already become clear that, whereas the traditional ‘Romanness’ of colonial urban centres (especially Fentress (Reference Fentress2000); Bispham (Reference Bispham, Bradley and Wilson2006)) and related territories (Pelgrom Reference Pelgrom, de Ligt and Northwood2008) has been seriously questioned, new interpretations of early Latin epigraphy indicate a clear Roman impact on small rural settlements (Stek Reference Stek2009, 123–70). In some small village settlements, sanctuaries were built for deities such as Victoria, who had just been ‘(re)invented’ in Rome itself, admittedly on the basis of more widely available Hellenistic models – but it seems undeniable that these communities were tapping into the association with Roman power and success. Such a polynuclear model of communities, centred on a new, Roman power structure, presupposes rather different models of cultural change and exchange, far removed from the traditional urban ‘radiation’ model, and suggests much more interaction and negotiation in the creation of these communities on the ground.
As has been hinted above, it may seem that, in the thrill of the late 20th-century deconstruction of traditional models, we have been somewhat overenthusiastic in minimizing Roman power and its visibility for the early period. Demonstrating the erroneousness of the framework through which previous scholarship arrived at a certain view of Roman imperialism does not automatically entail that that view itself is wrong. In fact, even after careful chronological and broader Hellenistic contextualization, Roman imperialist ambitions can be traced back earlier than the 1990s movement may have led us to believe (see especially Dench (Reference Dench2005)). Likewise, the multivalence and malleability of material culture and related styles or models do not preclude that in specific historical contexts objects and styles indeed related to Roman agency and were in fact meant to signal association with the new dominant power, or indeed mark the blunt imposition of Roman rule (Stek Reference Stek and DeRose Evans2013, 343). The actual origin of the objects, styles or models is in fact generally irrelevant for understanding how they were put to use; it is the locus and motives for choosing them that are decisive. In a sense, symbols are seized or even hijacked by creating, or building upon, an association with the new dominant power, both in Rome itself and elsewhere.
Globalization and power
As is now clear from this – necessarily superficial – overview of recent developments in research on the early Roman expansion and Hellenistic Italy, contemporary concerns and trends closely follow globalizing world views. Deconstructing statist interpretations, questioning static boundaries, decentring and fragmenting the motor or causes of change, regarding local and global as inseparable and focusing on connectedness and connectivity in both social and economic contexts – all are central elements of modern globalization. This is unsurprising insofar as these studies are part of that world and its concerns. Globalization can therefore be considered an accurate description of research developments over, say, the last two decades. Importantly, however, newly emerging models of imperialism and the workings of Roman power are also intrinsically part of this same development and have arguably set the course for research on these very topics. The emphasis on the actual actors; on their negotiation, personal benefits and opportunism; and on power relations among relevant competing groups, as well as individuals, clearly resonates with globalizing notions of power structures as consisting of a ‘less dichotomous and more intricate pattern of inequality’ (Balakrishnan Reference Balakrishnan2003, 143). Since, at least for the study of early Roman Italy, there are few influential scholars who still adhere to excessively dichotomizing approaches that treat material culture in an essentialist manner, it does not seem necessary to abandon approaches explicitly concerned with Roman imperialism, because doing so would automatically lead to simplistic representations and a fundamentally ‘passive’ use of archaeology. On the contrary, it seems important to acknowledge the interconnectedness of new research trends and emerging ideas of power and imperialism when pulling things together, whatever the overall framework.
One size fits all?
The interconnectedness of world views and research trends does not, however, in my view, necessarily mean that the Roman world (or early Roman Italy, for that matter) can or should be captured in one single explanatory framework. It is perhaps revealing that an often heard, central argument for a global perspective is (still) defined geographically: it is the atomizing, myopic effect of regional studies that must be redressed by a fusion of local and global. Another way of approaching this dilemma is to start with specific research questions rather than geography and then see which perspective works best: a truly post-colonial (not anti-colonial) perspective for understanding the specific societal circumstances of a given Italic community, for which Rome may have mattered little; a more global perspective when trying to understand developments in newly created settlement networks after incorporation; an elite Roman perspective to understand why certain symbols of power were deemed suitable at specific moments in time; and a local perspective again for explaining why or why not the same symbols seemed suitable to them. Perhaps uniting fundamentally different viewpoints within a single framework stretched to the point where it can accommodate them does not necessarily offer added value for each separate research question. It is one thing to say that all these developments are part of a connected reality, but that vast reality may have limited explanatory power if it is not brought into focus for specific questions.
Of course, as already seen above, it is always the case that research interests and theories direct our attention to particular categories of datasets. But as long as the research methodology is sound, i.e. leaves room for falsification, that bias should not be a different or bigger problem than we would otherwise encounter. An explicit research methodology with specific questions, and the testing of a variety of potential models, are therefore, ultimately, perhaps also more transparent.
An archaeological turn?
As seen above, it can be argued that archaeology is actively contributing to the creation of new perspectives, including explicit consideration of the character of early Roman imperialism. This contribution should not, however, be viewed in isolation or as an emancipatory archaeological movement, but on the contrary in close association with directly related contemporary developments in the research on ancient history. This synergy of developments in historical and archaeological research is certainly no coincidence; we have undeniably witnessed a convergence of research interests in both disciplines. This movement seems to come from both sides. While ancient historians have put their hopes in archaeological evidence to the point where almost every member of a new generation of UK historians is directing a fieldwork project and central debates such as those on demography or the Roman economy increasingly rely on archaeological data, archaeologists seem ever more open to espousing ‘historical’ research questions. The discipline that (at least in the most influential Anglo-Saxon-oriented schools) was geared most towards a strictly archaeological, and in some ways even anti-classical, approach – landscape archaeology – has increasingly engaged in several plainly historical debates, including specific, but key, historical themes regarding Roman demography, colonization and economics. It is true that the more object-oriented and art-historical archaeology has played a relatively small part in all this. And perhaps this ‘historizing’ development is difficult to reconcile with a strict material-culture studies approach. The question, though, is whether this is a bad thing, and I would say that the verdict depends on what we want to know. At any rate, the more ‘historical’ debates do not preclude an active role for archaeology: the recent focus in imperialism studies on actors, negotiation, (personal) exchange and networks and locales that have previously remained out of the picture, such as rural nucleated settlements and economic centres, as well as the sensitivity to chronological and geographical context, brings archaeology confidently to the fore.
One promising avenue of research may be the confrontation (rather than integration) of the outcomes of different approaches to specific themes. The idea of focusing on the process of connectivity in the Roman world in a truly material sense, and especially its heightening (and waning?) at specific points in time, as Versluys proposes, for example, is not only exciting in its own right, but might also contrast in very interesting ways with legal measures to restrict and contain mobility during the same period. In other words, it could illuminate the countervailing forces of Roman power and the mobility of material culture.
