Miguel John Versluys offers a richly textured essay in an attempt to resuscitate the concept of Romanization, which he has found to have been nearly flogged to death, to paraphrase an oft-quoted characterization of the Romanization debate in recent years. To be more precise, he argues that certain quarters of Romanist academia have ‘ganged up’ on the concept over the last decade or so and that others – the implicitly silent majority – have begun to stage a comeback in recent years. Versluys's self-imposed mission is to shore up the Roman resurgence with freshly cut intellectual joists.

Romanization is a topic with a long academic and intellectual history, which has in turn become a subject of debate and study itself (Freeman Reference Freeman and Mattingly1996; Reference Freeman2007; Hingley Reference Hingley, Webster and Cooper1996). The term was invented and elaborated by Francis Haverfield in his study of The Romanization of Roman Britain (1912) and has since been a consistent and often prominent presence in Roman studies. The concept is also a key fixture both on university curricula and in academic and popular accounts, which goes some way to explain its deep roots in scholarship and the reactions elicited by the debate about its relevance. The bibliography is accordingly huge and numerous debates have been convened at conferences and in print over the past several decades, including an extensive ‘archaeological dialogue’ published over ten years ago in this journal (Woolf Reference Woolf2002; Slofstra Reference Slofstra2002a; see Versluys for more references; cf. Gardner Reference Gardner2013).

In Versluys's reading of recent intellectual history, the alleged demise of Romanization is inversely related to the rise of post-colonial studies. The first archaeological use of the latter term can be traced back to the mid-1990s and both Roman and historical archaeologists were instrumental in proposing and exploring the relevance of post-colonial ideas for archaeological research and interpretation (Liebmann Reference Liebmann, Liebmann and Rizvi2008; Patterson Reference Patterson, Liebmann and Rizvi2008; Van Dommelen Reference Van Dommelen2011): crucial early publications were Making alternative histories (Schmidt and Patterson Reference Schmidt and Patterson1995) and the self-consciously styled Roman imperialism. Post-colonial perspectives (Webster and Cooper Reference Webster and Cooper1996), to which we may add the World archaeology issue on Culture contact and colonialism (Gosden Reference Gosden1997), which included several papers that explicitly draw on post-colonial theories. As a result, the term ‘post-colonial’ has become a frequent occurrence in Roman studies over the past two decades, as it has elsewhere in academia. Does that mean, however, that it caused the demise of Romanization? Because coincidence does not necessarily equal cause, I will delve into this nexus of terms and perspectives in my contribution to this ‘archaeological dialogue’.

Having outlined when post-colonial ideas were first introduced and adopted in archaeology and Roman studies, I focus my discussion on the intellectual roots of the Romanization debate and its entanglement with the post-colonial ones. I therefore turn to historiography, despite Versluys's professed wish to steer clear of it. While his preference for focusing on future directions is surely laudable in itself, I take the view that past debates and intellectual genealogies, in Foucault's terms, hold the key to understanding current and upcoming intellectual trajectories. In other words, we need more historiography, rather than less. I contend that the connections between the Romanization debate and post-colonial theories are notably more complex than claimed and that disentangling their connections requires a much more detailed – ‘thicker’, if you like – historical description of academic debates to allow a contextualized reading of intellectual history.

A good starting point is to examine the roots of the recent Romanization debate in more detail. In English-language scholarship, Romanization was first prominently called into question by Martin Millett in The Romanization of Britain (Reference Millett1990). This book has its immediate intellectual precursor in a seminal essay by the Dutch archaeologist Jan Slofstra – incidentally a founding co-editor of this journal – whose 1983 paper ‘An anthropological approach to the study of Romanization processes’ offers a series of sophisticated and theoretically articulate arguments to redefine the term and to draw on anthropological acculturation theory (Millett Reference Millett1990, 1–2). Slofstra's critical discussion of Romanization did not stand on its own at the time, as anthropologists had begun to re-evaluate acculturation in the 1950s (Slofstra Reference Slofstra, Brandt and Slofstra1983, 71–72; see Cusick Reference Cusick and Cusick1998), and the 1970s had already seen classical archaeologists picking up on these debates to reconsider the notion of Hellenization. Clara Gallini (Reference Gallini1973) in particular critically discussed the theoretical premises of acculturation and its reworking as Hellenization, and Gruzinski and Rouveret (Reference Gruzinski and Rouveret1976) explicitly compared Hellenization to acculturation processes in colonial Mexico under Spanish rule.

While there is every reason to think of both Slofstra's article and Millett's book as seminal publications in Roman studies, it is quite something else to label them post-colonial pioneers, even if avant la lettre. In a later discussion of Romanization, Slofstra (Reference Slofstra2002a, 16–17) certainly resisted such a classification and emphasized that the roots of what we might term ‘critical Romanization’ are to be found elsewhere. The trail blazed by Slofstra and Millett, along with other colleagues working primarily on the Roman provinces of north-west Europe, was explicitly headed towards the indigenous inhabitants of the regions conquered and occupied by Rome, as they intended to foreground indigenous contributions to Romanization processes. This included attention to the role of indigenous elites in promoting the adoption of Roman values and material culture, but also a strong interest in indigenous resistance to Roman rule (e.g. Millett, Roymans and Slofstra Reference Millett, Roymans and Slofstra1995). Slofstra (Reference Slofstra, Brandt and Slofstra1983, 73–83) explicitly traced these interests back to sociological, historical and anthropological work on indigenous societies and peasant communities in recent historical and ethnographic situations and their integration in nation states and global commercial networks. References to post-colonial theories are absent from these studies, even if key post-colonial publications had already appeared by that time (Said Reference Said1978; Guha Reference Guha1982; Spivak Reference Spivak1985).

A case for early post-colonial affiliation can be made much more convincingly for the work of Marcel Bénabou, who not only similarly highlighted the indigenous role in the Romanization of North Africa but also emphasized indigenous resistance and the ability to maintain recognizably indigenous cultural traditions in Roman North Africa. Unlike his European counterparts, Bénabou was politically motivated and connected at the time of his writing (1976 and 1978), and his focus on resistance to Roman rule and insistence on indigenous agency were directly inspired by the contemporary North African struggle for independence. For Bénabou and his contemporaries the connection between history and contemporary politics had been spelled out by the Moroccan historian Abdallah Laroui, who fulfilled the role of what we would now call a ‘public intellectual’ in the colonial and early decolonized Maghreb (Bendana Reference Bendana2002).

Such an explicitly political dimension is clearly absent in Millett and Slofstra's work but their publications both represent what may retrospectively be labelled the ‘nativist turn’ (Parry Reference Parry, Barker, Hulme and Iversen1994; Schmidt and Patterson Reference Schmidt and Patterson1995). The nativist turn can be traced back directly to the political decolonization of the so-called Third World in the two decades following the Second World War, beginning with countries like India and Indonesia and involving most of the African continent in the 1950s and 1960s – including, crucially, the Maghreb and the bloody Algerian War of Independence (1954–62). While Bénabou's work is exceptional in Roman circles because of its direct roots in these struggles, the 1960s and 1970s saw a more general trend of emancipation of indigenous peoples and other minorities, including a renewed focus on their relegation from ‘official’ history. The emergence of peasant studies in history, geography and anthropology, as represented by the work of Teodor Shanin (Reference Shanin1971) and Eric Wolf (Reference Wolf1966; Reference Wolf1982) and the establishment of the Journal of peasant studies in 1973, is another cross-disciplinary academic manifestation of this broader trend to write alternative histories (Hastrup Reference Hastrup1992; Schmidt and Patterson Reference Schmidt and Patterson1995). The so-called Subaltern Studies group of South Asian historians and anthropologists was formed in the context of these debates and went on to become one of three foundational strands in post-colonial theories (Guha Reference Guha1982; Van Dommelen Reference Van Dommelen, Tilley, Keane, Kuechler-Fogden, Rowlands and Spyer2006, 107–8). The shift in Roman studies to focus on people without history and to write alternative histories by using a wide range of archaeological evidence rather than relying primarily on the colonial elite's material remains and written sources may thus be seen as part and parcel of broader intellectual and academic trends in both classical studies and beyond that can be captured under the headings of the ‘nativist turn’ and ‘alternative histories’ (cf. Snodgrass Reference Snodgrass2002).

Seen in this light, post-colonial studies and the shift in Romanization studies, as signalled by Slofstra and Millett's work, share intellectual roots, but it is also clear that the one cannot be reduced to the other. A further aspect to take on board is that post-colonial theory is hardly a unified field or school of thought and that it has developed out of a range of intellectual and academic influences (Young Reference Young2001). While Edward Said's Orientalism (Reference Said1978) is universally regarded as the key foundational text, the field of post-colonial studies was also shaped by the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Reference Spivak1985) and Homi Bhabha (Reference Bhabha1994). The already-mentioned Subaltern Studies scholars represent yet another strand in post-colonial studies, which moreover resonates more easily with archaeologists, no doubt because of its historical and ethnographic background (Van Dommelen Reference Van Dommelen, Tilley, Keane, Kuechler-Fogden, Rowlands and Spyer2006, 108). It is therefore in the end not too far-fetched to suggest that the nativist Romanization debates of the 1990s actually prepared the ground for the rapid adoption of post-colonial theories by the end of that decade (Van Dommelen Reference Van Dommelen2011, 1–2).

This perspective undermines Versluys's interpretation that the ‘nativist’ perspective on Romanization provided a useful correction to earlier one-sided approaches but that it was subsequently derailed by post-colonial studies, which drove the anglophone debate towards an anti-colonial stance. As my reading of the ‘critical’ Romanization debate suggests, the ‘nativist turn’ was explicitly motivated by anti-colonial views and aimed to offset long-standing and one-sided elite and colonial biases in Roman studies. The adoption of post-colonial studies subsequently represents an attempt to provide more nuanced accounts that do justice to the complexities of colonial situations and contexts of culture contact. To claim that post-colonial studies inspire anti-colonial and thus anti-Romanization views is therefore misguided in my view, as a key plank of post-colonial studies is, on the contrary, constituted by an emphasis on the intricate and mixed or hybridized nature of colonial and contact situations – overcoming or blurring the colonial divide is a catchphrase of these approaches, as was for instance already evident in the contributions to the World archaeology issue on colonialism (Gosden Reference Gosden1997; cf. Van Dommelen Reference Van Dommelen, Tilley, Keane, Kuechler-Fogden, Rowlands and Spyer2006; Liebmann Reference Liebmann, Liebmann and Rizvi2008; Silliman Reference Silliman2005; Reference Silliman and Card2013).

A secondary question that lingers around Versluys's arguments is why post-colonial studies are apparently so much more prominent in British archaeology. One partial response is that this is perhaps an exaggerated claim, as Dutch, Scandinavian and US archaeologists have not been far behind their British colleagues in engaging with post-colonial ideas, but there has clearly been less interest in these views among Southern and Eastern European scholars. Another possible answer is suggested by the exception of Spain, where post-colonial ideas have been taken up with verve by scholars like Alicia Jiménez Díez (Reference Jiménez Díez2008; Reference Jiménez Díez, van Dommelen and Knapp2010), Alfredo González-Ruibal (Reference González-Ruibal, Lydon and Rizvi2010), Jaime Vives-Ferrándiz Sánchez (Reference Vives-Ferrándiz Sánchez2005; Reference Vives-Ferrándiz Sánchez2008) and Ana Delgado (Delgado and Cano Reference Delgado and Cano2008): I wonder whether a recent colonial past may be the common denominator between the academic communities with a stronger awareness of the colonial legacies?

What emerges from this complex interweaving of intellectual trends and social histories is, in my view, that, despite the frequency with which the term is bandied around, the debate is not really about Romanization. As Gallini and Slofstra (e.g. 2002b, 56) already argued and others have repeatedly pointed out since (e.g. Gardner Reference Gardner2013, 3–6), these discussions are about understanding contact and colonial situations, and Romanization is a mere label to group together those associated with Roman expansion and conquest. The notions and terms of the debate, be they acculturation or hybridization, are rooted elsewhere and have a much broader currency. In the end, I would therefore submit that the preoccupation with the term ‘Romanization’ that has emerged in recent years is less than helpful, because it deflects attention from the real theoretical and interpretive issues at stake. More seriously, it seems to me that it also discourages comparison of Roman colonial situations with others beyond the Roman world and thus risks reifying Roman contact and colonial situations, the effective result of which might be to isolate Roman studies intellectually (Van Dommelen Reference Van Dommelen2012, 397; cf. Snodgrass Reference Snodgrass2002, 192). My contention is therefore that the problem with the current Romanization debate is not so much about post-colonial studies but rather about Roman studies themselves and their tendency to reify, if not ‘fetishize’, Roman culture and Romanization.

Arguments about the relevance or otherwise of Romanization are therefore not just a trivial terminological spat. The underlying reason is to be sought in the strong classical tradition that is an integral part of Western culture, including academic scholarship – all the more so when it comes to Roman and classical studies (Marchand Reference Marchand1996; Dietler Reference Dietler and Stein2005; Reference Dietler2010, 27–53). While this is undoubtedly an intellectually very rich tradition, which has much to offer, post-colonial studies have also made it clear that it is organized in certain ways that are profoundly implicated in the colonialist past of the West and that Roman and Greek achievements have systematically been foregrounded at the equally methodical expense of other cultures, regions and periods of the Mediterranean and European past (Goff Reference Goff2005; Greenwood Reference Greenwood, Boys-Stones, Graziosi and Vasunia2009). As archaeologists recognize that the contemporary contexts of both academic research and the archaeological record cannot and should not be ignored, it seems to me that a narrow classicist perspective on the Mediterranean past can no longer stand on its own – at the very least it has to be embedded in its broader contexts, both past and present.

To conclude, these are major issues that rightly are discussed in connection – but their interconnections are multiple and complex and as much partially overlapping as confusing. Even if they involve Roman studies in important ways, I have argued that many of the theoretical and intellectual developments are not specifically Roman and that they may best be grasped from a more distant vantage point. To return to the question of Romanization, therefore, whether or not to use the term is in my view not a pertinent question but rather a case of barking up the wrong tree. Instead, Romanists should look up, as Gallini, Slofstra and others have done before, and look beyond their own disciplinary tradition to engage with the humanities and social sciences at large. Versluys's essay and this ‘archaeological diaglogue’ are a timely reminder of the intellectual riches that may be gained from such engagements.