Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T00:53:42.757Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The dark side of the Empire: Roman expansionism between object agency and predatory regime

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Manuel Fernández-Götz ,
Dominik Maschek  and
Nico Roymans
Manuel Fernández-Götz*
Affiliation:
School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, UK
Dominik Maschek
Affiliation:
Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford, UK
Nico Roymans
Affiliation:
Department of Archaeology, Classics and Near Eastern Studies, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands
*
*Author for correspondence: ✉ [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This debate piece offers a critique of some recent ‘new materialist’ approaches and their application to Roman expansionism, particularly those positing that the study of ‘Romanisation’ should be about ‘understanding objects in motion’—a perspective that carries important political and ethical implications. Here, the authors introduce the alternative notion of a ‘predatory’ political economy for conceptualising Late Republican and Early Imperial Rome. The aim is to illuminate the darker sides of Roman expansionism in order to produce more balanced and inclusive accounts. Two cases studies—the archaeology of the Roman conquest and of rural communities—illustrate the potential of such a perspective.

Keywords

Roman imperialismobject agencypredatory regimedecolonising archaeology
Type
Debate
Information
Antiquity , Volume 94 , Issue 378 , December 2020 , pp. 1630 - 1639
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Antiquity Publications Ltd

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Barrandon, N. 2018. Les massacres de la République romaine. Paris: Fayard.Google Scholar
Barrett, J. 2016. The new antiquarianism? Antiquity 90: 1681–86. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2016.216CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Breeze, D. 2018. The value of studying Roman frontiers. Theoretical Roman Archaeology Journal 1: 1–17. https://doi.org/10.16995/traj.212CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Camino, J., Peralta, E. & Torres-Martínez, J.F. (ed.). 2015. Las Guerras Astur-Cántabras. Gijón: KRK Ediciones.Google Scholar
Fernández-Götz, M. & Roymans, N. (ed.). 2018. Conflict archaeology: materialities of collective violence from prehistory to Late Antiquity. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315144771Google Scholar
Fernández-Götz, M., Gardner, A. & Díaz de Liaño, G. (ed.). In press. Debating posthumanism in archaeology. Cambridge Archaeological Journal (special issue).Google Scholar
Ferrando, F. 2013. Posthumanism, transhumanism, antihumanism, metahumanism, and new materialisms. Existenz 8(2): 26–32.Google Scholar
Fitzpatrick, A. & Haselgrove, C. (ed.). 2019. Julius Caesar's battle for Gaul: new archaeological perspectives. Oxford: Oxbow.Google Scholar
Gamble, C., Hanan, J. & Nail, T.. 2019. What is new materialism? Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 24: 111–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2019.1684704CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gardner, A. 2016. Changing materialities, in Millett, M., Revell, L. & Moore, A. (ed.) The Oxford handbook of Roman Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199697731.013.028Google Scholar
González-Ruibal, A. 2015. An archaeology of predation: capitalism and the coloniality of power in Equatorial Guinea (Central Africa), in Leone, M. & Knauf, J. (ed.) Historical archaeologies of capitalism: 421–44. New York: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12760-6_18CrossRefGoogle Scholar
González-Ruibal, A. 2019. An archaeology of the contemporary era. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Gosden, C. 2005. What do objects want? Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 12: 193–211. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-005-6928-xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green, H. 2012. Cultural history and the material(s) turn. Cultural History 1: 61–82. https://doi.org/10.3366/cult.2012.0006CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heeren, S. 2015. The depopulation of the Lower Rhine region in the 3rd century, in Roymans, N., Derks, T. & Hiddink, H. (ed.) The Roman villa of Hoogeloon and the archaeology of the periphery: 269–92. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.Google Scholar
Hodder, I. 2014. The asymmetries of symmetrical archaeology. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 1: 228–30. https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.v1i2.26674CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lange, C.H. & Vervaet, F.J. (ed.). 2019. The historiography of Late Republican civil war. Leiden: Brill.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Malafouris, L. 2013. How things shape the mind. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9476.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maschek, D. 2018. Die Römischen Bürgerkriege. Darmstadt: Zabern.Google Scholar
Mbembe, A. 2001. On the postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
McGing, B. 2019. Appian. Roman history, volume I (Loeb Classical Library 2). Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Mignolo, W. 2011. The darker side of Western modernity. Durham (NC): Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822394501Google Scholar
Nielsen, S.V. 2019. The thing-in-itself: a reaction to current use of the term in archaeology. Archaeological Dialogues 26: 123–26. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203819000229CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Olsen, B. 2010. In defence of things: archaeology and the ontology of objects. Lanham (MD): AltaMira.Google Scholar
Peralta, E., Camino, J. & Torres-Martínez, J.. 2019. Recent research on the Cantabrian Wars. Journal of Roman Archaeology 32: 421–38. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1047759419000217CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pitts, M. 2019. The Roman object revolution. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.5117/9789463728201Google Scholar
Pitts, M. & Versluys, M.J. (ed.). 2015. Globalisation and the Roman world. New York: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107338920Google Scholar
Preucel, R. 2012. Archaeology and the limitations of actor-network theory. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/10272554/ Archaeology_and_the_Limitations_of_Actor_ Network_Theory (accessed 12 June 2020).Google Scholar
Rekret, P. 2016. A critique of new materialism: ethics and ontology. Subjectivity 9: 225–45. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-016-0001-yCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ribeiro, A. 2019. Against object agency 2: continuing the discussion with Sørensen. Archaeological Dialogues 26: 39–44. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203819000011CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robb, J. 2015. What do things want? Object design as a middle range theory of material culture. Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 26: 166–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/apaa.12069CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roymans, N. 2004. Ethnic identity and imperial power: the Batavians in the early Roman Empire. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.5117/9789053567050CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roymans, N. 2019. Conquest, mass violence and ethnic stereotyping: investigating Caesar's actions in the Germanic frontier zone. Journal of Roman Archaeology 32: 439–58. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1047759419000229CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roymans, N. & Fernández-Götz, M.. 2019. Reconsidering the Roman conquest: new archaeological perspectives. Journal of Roman Archaeology 32: 415–20. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1047759419000205CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roymans, N., Derks, T. & Heeren, S.. 2020. Roman imperialism and the transformation of rural society in a frontier province. Britannia 51. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0068113X20000148Google Scholar
Selsvold, I. & Webb, L. (ed.). 2020. Beyond the Romans: posthuman perspectives in Roman archaeology. Oxford: Oxbow.Google Scholar
Snyder, T. 2017. On tyranny: twenty lessons from the twentieth century. London: Bodley Head.Google Scholar
Stockhammer, P. 2019. Appropriation of effective and changing things: a prehistorian's perspective, in Abu-Er-Rub, L., Brosius, C., Meurer, S., Panagiotopoulos, D. & Richter, S. (ed.) Engaging transculturality: concepts, key terms, case studies: 264–76. Abingdon: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429430060-22CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Dyke, R.M. 2015. La intencionalidad importa: una crítica a la agencia de los objetos en la arqueología, in Acuto, F. & Franco, V. (ed.) Personas, cosas, relaciones: 151–74. Quito: Abya-Yala.Google Scholar
van Oyen, A. 2017. Material culture in the Romanization debate, in Lichtenberger, A. & Raja, R. (ed.) The diversity of Classical archaeology: 287–300. Turnhout: Brepols.Google Scholar
Versluys, M.J. 2014. Understanding objects in motion: an archaeological dialogue on Romanization. Archaeological Dialogues 21: 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203814000038CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Versluys, M.J. 2017. Discussion. Object-scapes: towards a material constitution of Romanness? in van Oyen, A. & Pitts, M. (ed.) Materialising Roman histories: 191–99. Oxford: Oxbow.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Witmore, C.L. 2014. Archaeology and the new materialisms. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 1: 203–24. https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.v1i2.16661CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolf, E.R. 1982. Europe and the people without history. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Woolf, G. 2017. Roman things and Roman people, in van Oyen, A. & Pitts, M. (ed.) Materialising Roman histories: 211–16. Oxford: Oxbow. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1v2xtgh.20CrossRefGoogle Scholar