This article contextualizes the unique display of two colossal Roman copies of Hellenistic sculptures at the lavish villa of Herodes Atticus at Loukou, located in Arcadia (Peloponnese, Greece). The estate at Loukou is notable for its extensive decorative program, including elaborate mosaics and a large sculpture collection that juxtaposed bespoke copies of famous works with others that were already antiquities at the time of their display in the 2nd c. CE. Both sculptural compositions discussed here belong to the former category and depict two mythological figures in interlocking arrangements (symplegma). The choice of these two sculptures and their unique display at Loukou reflects the preferences of their patron: the sophist, politician, and cosmopolitan benefactor Herodes Atticus. This paper argues that the two paired colossal groups formed the crux of Herodes’s custom decorative program at Loukou, where he fostered elite discourse around themes of conflict and loss.

An altar-shaped name stamp from the workshop of Avillius was found in a mid-first-century CE context at the site of Podere Marzuolo (Tuscany, Italy). Among the known repertoire of name stamps on Italian terra sigillata, this stamp stands out both in terms of size and complexity.

Recovered from a coastal villa in north-eastern Spain, fragments of a vessel with a snake-headed handle provide insights into religious influences that reached western territories of the Roman Empire. Based on formal comparisons, laboratory analysis and 3D modelling, the authors argue that the iconography links this vessel to the cult of the god Sabazios, the private worship of whom may have spread from the nearby city of Emporiae. This artefact is one of only a few of its kind found in the Iberian Peninsula, though compositional analysis of its paste suggests its origins might not lie in Europe.

The excavations at Liberty Southwark (LDM21) carried out by Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) have yielded one of the largest assemblages of Roman wall-painted plaster in London. In the assessment and reassembling of the plasters, the building material specialist discovered two inscriptions unique to Roman Britain and likely to the study of Roman wall paintings in general. Pit (423) yielded what looks to be a signature by the painter while (135) produced a near-complete Greek alphabet scored into the plaster. Both inscriptions were analysed in the greater context of the Roman world in which comparisons of similar inscriptions were made.

While modern scholarship defines Etruscan Veii as a symbol of success, it interprets its later transformation into a small Roman town as a failure. Yet both written and archaeological records reveal that Veii’s Roman community invested in urban life, albeit on a smaller scale. This article argues that such developments are better understood through the lens of resilience than through binary categories of ‘success’ and ‘failure’. It invites broader reconsideration of how archaeologists apply these labels—often reflecting modern biases more than past realities—when studying historical settlements.

Incense burners are frequently excavated at Roman period sites, attesting to acts of combustion within domestic ritual practices, but what was burnt is still uncertain. Here, the authors use microscopy and spectrometry to analyse burnt residues contained within two censers from domestic contexts in Pompeii and a nearby villa. Their results indicate that woody plants were burnt in both censers, either as fuel or offerings, alongside stone fruit or laurel plants and possibly wine or grapes, while traces of Burseraceae resins, originating from Asia or sub-Saharan Africa, provide the first archaeological evidence of incense offerings in the Pompeian domestic cult.

Despite contemporary relevance in understanding how cities historically overcame demographic, social and economic constraints imposed by the lack of clean, fresh water, the value of estimating aqueduct delivery rates and their potential relationship with population size in the Roman Empire remains uncertain. Here, the authors use settlement scaling theory to examine recent statistics for city size and aqueduct capacity, revealing a systematic but sublinear relationship between these variables, whereby water supply increased at a slower rate than population size. Far from merely ostentatious displays of power, aqueducts were carefully planned to ensure an adequate supply of clean and fresh water.

The history of games is obscured by our inability to recognise indicators of play in the archaeological record. Lines incised on a piece of rounded limestone found at the Roman site of Coriovallum in Heerlen, The Netherlands, evoke a board game yet do not reflect the grid of any game known today. Here, the results of use-wear analysis are used to inform artificial intelligence-driven simulations based on permutations of rules from historic Northern European games. Disproportionate wear along specific lines favours the rules of blocking games, potentially extending the time depth and regional use of this game type.

The Roman occupation of England (AD 43–410), characterised by urbanisation and militarisation, is generally understood to have had a negative impact on population health. Yet our understanding of associated socioeconomic changes is hindered by the comparatively limited analysis of inhumations from the preceding Iron Age. Deploying the DOHaD hypothesis, this study examines negative health markers in the skeletons of 274 adult females of childbearing age and 372 non-adults aged below 3.5 years from Iron Age and Roman contexts, revealing the long-lasting negative influence of urbanisation but with a more limited impact in rural communities implying continuation of cultural norms.

Regular finds of glassware at Roman sites provide a useful dataset not just for constructing glass typologies but for the comparative analysis of base-glass compositions. Here, the authors explore the form and chemical composition of 79 glass fragments from Khirbet al-Khalde, a strategically important site in southern Jordan that was integrated into a major Roman roadway, the Via Nova Traiana, in the early second century AD. Their findings challenge current models, identifying abundant pre-fourth-century Egyptian glassware in an area believed to be predominantly supplied by Syro-Palestine and providing evidence for continued activity at the site into the eighth century.

Recent excavations on the A14 Cambridge-to-Huntingdon Road Improvement Scheme have revealed that pottery-making was an important aspect of the economies of early Roman rural communities living in the densely settled landscape of southern Cambridgeshire, UK. This paper discusses the seven known ‘Lower Ouse Valley’ pottery-making sites as reflective of local rural economy and social interaction, highlighting the different scales at which there is evidence for social networks being in play in the constitution of this newly discovered pottery industry. It is argued that the density of rural settlement in this area helped facilitate the emergence of a coherent but informally defined ceramic tradition, embodied as a system of technical knowledge shared predominantly between neighbours and as features of non-specialised social interactions.

Increasing interdisciplinary analysis of geoarchaeological records, including sediment and ice cores, permits finer-scale contextual interpretation of the history of anthropogenic environmental impacts. In an interdisciplinary approach to economic history, the authors examine metal pollutants in a sediment core from the Roman metal-producing centre of Aldborough, North Yorkshire, combining this record with textual and archaeological evidence from the region. Finding that fluctuations in pollution correspond with sociopolitical events, pandemics and recorded trends in British metal production c. AD 1100–1700, the authors extend the analysis to earlier periods that lack written records, providing a new post-Roman economic narrative for northern England.

Roman amphitheatres were centres of public entertainment, hosting various spectacles that often included wild animals. Excavation of a building near the Viminacium amphitheatre in Serbia in 2016 uncovered the fragmentary cranium of a bear. Multistranded analysis, presented here, reveals that the six-year-old male brown bear (Ursus arctos) suffered an impact fracture to the frontal bone, the healing of which was impaired by a secondary infection. Excessive wear to the canine teeth further indicates cage chewing and thus a prolonged period of captivity that makes it likely this bear participated in more than one spectacle at the Viminacium amphitheatre.

The Terra Ferrifera project investigates the landscape and environmental conditions of mass iron production in one of the oldest iron production centres in central Europe: Mazovia, Poland (fourth century BC–fourth century AD). Spatial analyses, settlement pattern studies, prospection, excavation and archaeobotanical analyses provide insights into one of its microregions.

A brooch found in a mid-first-century AD context at the Roman port of Berenike, on the Red Sea coast of Egypt, represents the southernmost find of an Aucissa-type fibula. The item reflects the identity of its wearer, possibly a Roman soldier, for whom it may have held sentimental value.