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Small finds – the stuff of everyday life – offer archaeologists a fascinating glimpse into the material lives of the ancient Romans. These objects hold great promise for unravelling the ins and outs of daily life, especially for the social groups, activities, and regions for which few written sources exist. Focusing on amulets, brooches, socks, hobnails, figurines, needles, and other “mundane” artefacts, these 12 papers use small finds to reconstruct social lives and practices in the Roman Northwest provinces. Taking social life broadly, the various contributions offer insights into the everyday use of objects to express social identities, Roman religious practices in the provinces, and life in military communities. By integrating small finds from the Northwest provinces with material, iconographic, and textual evidence from the whole Roman empire, contributors seek to demystify Roman magic and Mithraic religion, discover the latest trends in ancient fashion (socks with sandals!), explore Roman interactions with Neolithic monuments, and explain unusual finds in unexpected places. Throughout, the authors strive to maintain a critical awareness of archaeological contexts and site formation processes to offer interpretations of past peoples and behaviors that most likely reflect the lived reality of the Romans. While the range of topics in this volume gives it wide appeal, scholars working with small finds, religion, dress, and life in the Northwest provinces will find it especially of interest. Small Finds and Ancient Social Practices grew out of a session at the 2014 Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference.
The medieval marketplace is a familiar setting in popular and academic accounts of the Middle Ages, but we actually know very little about the people involved in the transactions that took place there, how their lives were influenced by those transactions, or about the complex networks of individuals whose actions allowed raw materials to be extracted, hewn into objects, stored and ultimately shipped for market. Twenty diverse case studies combine leading edge techniques and novel theoretical approaches to illuminate the identities and lives of these much overlooked ordinary people, painting of a number of detailed portraits to explore the worlds of actors involved in the lives of everyday products - objects of bone, leather, stone, ceramics, and base metal - and their production and use in medieval northern Europe. In so doing, this book seeks to draw attention away from the emergent trend to return to systems and global models, and restore to centre stage what should be the archaeologists most important concern: the people of the past.
Studies on finds in Roman Britain and the Western Provinces have come to greater prominence in the literature of recent years. The quality of such work has also improved, and is now theoretically informed, and based on rich data-sets. Work on finds over the last decade or two has changed our understanding of the Roman era in profound ways, and yet despite such encouraging advances and such clear worth, there has to date, been little in the way of a dedicated forum for the presentation and evaluation of current approaches to the study of material culture. The conference at which these papers were initially presented has gone some way to redressing this, and these papers bring the very latest studies on Roman finds to a wider audience. Twenty papers are here presented covering various themes.
What happened to Roman soldiers in Britain during the decline of the empire in the 4th and 5th centuries? Did they withdraw, defect, or go native? More than a question of military history, this is the starting point for Andrew Gardner’s incisive exploration of social identity in Roman Britain, in the Roman Empire, and in ancient society. Drawing on the sociological theories of Anthony Giddens and others, Gardner shapes an approach that focuses on the central role of practice in the creation and maintenance of identities—nationalist, gendered, class, and ethnic. This theory is then tested against the material remains of Roman soldiers in Britain to show how patterning of stratigraphy, architecture, and artifacts supports his theoretical construct. The result is a retelling of the story of late Roman Britain sharply at odds with the traditional text-driven histories and a theory of human action that offers much to current debates across the social sciences.
Rosemary Cramp's influence on the archaeology of early Medieval Britain is nowhere more apparent than in these essays in her honor by her former students. Monastic sites, Lindisfarne and Whithorn, are the inspiration for Deirdre O'Sullivan's and Peter Hill's papers; Chris Loveluck discusses the implications of the findings from the newly-discovered settlement at Flixborough in Lincolnshire; Nancy Edwards describes the early monumental sculpture from St David's in South Wales; Martin Carver reviews the politics of monumental sculpture and monumentality; and Catherine Hills reassesses the significance of imported ivory found in graves. Richard Bailey, Christopher Morris and Derek Craig top and tail the book with tributes to Rosemary Cramp and a bibliography of her work.