This paper focuses on a century of interaction between a colonial agent (Rome) and an indigenous people (known in classical texts as the Laietani) who inhabited the area before the arrival of the conquerors. It investigates how contact between the two societies may be detected in the archaeological record, and, where possible, what changes in local culture resulted. The first part, which presents the archaeological sites of the Cabrera de Mar valley and its material culture, documents the contacts over time between those that occupied the valley and those who arrived from the Italian peninsula. A number of indices of such contacts are considered: architecture, construction techniques, imported pottery, epigraphy, and the monetary system. The second part considers whether it is possible to detect in the valley not only cultural contact but also cultural change.

The timber roof and suspended ceiling of the marble room in the House of the Telephus Relief were discovered during a larger project to enhance Herculaneum’s ancient shoreline, one of many initiatives undertaken by the Herculaneum Conservation Project (HCP). Preliminary work to drain rain and groundwater led to the cleaning of the E part of the ancient shoreline, an area never fully investigated during previous excavations (fig. 1). The work was carried out between August 2009 and June 2010 in the area between the S corner of the Suburban Baths and the adjacent wing of the House of the Telephus Relief. Beneath the layer of solidified volcanic material from the eruption of A.D. 79 was discovered a collapse of timbers, covering an area about 55 m. Thanks to the particular conditions of its volcanic burial, the wood was perfectly preserved and not carbonized (fig. 2). Tests carried out by CNR-IVALSA showed that almost all the samples were from the silver fir species.

Pompeii’s urban fabric presents a complicated palimpsest of construction, amalgamation, fission, renovation, and destruction, each being a reflection of the current social, economic and political realities at the moment the work was accomplished. Taken together, these data reveal how changing socio-cultural values gradually altered the face of the urban environment over time. However, while the overall transformation of the urban fabric is clearly a collective reflection of shifting concerns, it was really the actions of individuals that served to translate these trends into the physical reality that survives in the archaeological record. It was their particular decisions, undertaken in response to localised stimuli but expressing broad cultural trends and fashions, that served to produce, piece by piece, the complex and layered tapestry of the urban environment. Yet archaeological data only rarely provide the detail necessary to be able to identify the specific, small-scale motivations behind structural changes and the sequence of development, much less the ability to assess the positive or negative outcomes of particular decisions. Cases where it is possible to do so provide a rare window onto the localised, small-scale and often personal dynamics taking place wthin the broader process of urbanisation. Such cases emphasize the central rôle of individual actors in reacting to and reifying the forces of urban transformation through their private construction activities.

The Late Republican villa acted as a scene for the projection and contestation of moral values. Villas continued a long-standing association between the physical appearance and the concept of the house, on the one hand, and the moral positioning of its owner, on the other. Ancestral homes in particular proved symbolically salient mechanisms for claims of identity. In a Late Republic characterised by the extension of citizenship and influx of new wealth, this moral and socio-political representation became more contested. Physically and conceptually at some distance from Rome, rural estates provided a canvas for self-definition by old landed aristocrats and nouveaux riches alike, on which the boundaries of an ever-changing ‘elite’ were sketched, as well as the sense of belonging to that élite.

For at least the first two centuries of empire, marriage for most soldiers during their years of active service was legally banned by the state. It is equally clear that the law forbidding iustum matrimonium did not stop some auxiliary soldiers from forming de facto relationships and creating families whilst in service. In some cases, families will have traveled with soldiers who were in service. Whether they dwelt within the forts or in extramural settlements, family members formed an integral part of the military community.

The hierarchy of workers’ incomes and wages in the Roman world has long drawn the attention of scholars. The series of workers’ wages we have at our disposal comes mostly from Roman and Byzantine Egypt: account books, labour contracts, and orders or receipts of payment on papyri and ostraca. Since the 1930s, lists of wages and prices have been compiled, firstly, to study the purchasing power of the working population and, secondly, to classify the trades according to the workers’ qualifications and to the location of employment.

Con queste parole il biografo della vita di Lucio Vero, nella Historia Augusta, documenta la presenza di una dimora di notevoli proporzioni e magnifico aspeto fata costruire dall’imperatore, coreggente con il fratello Marco Aurelio tra il 161 e il 169, sul tracciato della via Clodia/Cassia nel II sec. d.C. (fig. 1). Non sono molti i luoghi che, lungo la strada consolare, possono essere a ragione inseriti nelle proprietà imperiali per imponenza delle struture e ricchezza dei reperti custoditi; così i resti da sempre visibili al V miglio della strada, in località Acquatraversa, su una modesta altura che domina la valle (89 m s.l.m. è il punto più alto a nord-ovest), sono ormai riconosciuti in modo unanime dagli studiosi come appartenenti al complesso di proprietà imperiale.

The 3rd-c. interventions in the Villa of Lucius Verus on the Via Cassia included the laying of a black-and-white mosaic in the irregular space 32 in Sector D, which forms a passage or vestibule between exedra 24/25 to the north and the small baths (41–48) to the south (fig. 1). The mosaic shows a series of figures and small groups; most are athletes of various sorts, but they also include musicians, comic and tragic actors, and a prize-table with crowns or wreaths and busts of the three Capitoline deities, as well as other figures whose identification is sometimes not immediately obvious (fig. 2). The combination of athletic, musical and theatrical events is the characteristic mark of a Greek agon; the mosaic therefore takes its place among a small group of monuments that portray such agones. As a detailed description of the mosaic was presented by E. Caserta in NSc 22 (2010–11), the object of the present article is to place the mosaic in the context of related monuments, discuss the more problematic figures, and consider iconographic parallels which not only help to clarify some of the problems but can also indicate the artistic context within which its designer was working. Finally, it will consider the overall interpretation of the mosaic and its relationship to the agonistic culture of Rome in the 3rd c. A.D.

Pandemic events are surpassingly rare in human history. Yet the period we call late antiquity could be considered the age of pandemic disease. It began and ended with the Antonine plague that erupted in the mid-160s A.D. and the Justinianic plague of the mid-6th c. Modern interest in these pandemics has waxed and waned. It was long taken for granted that these events played a major rôle in the fate of the Roman empire. In the mid-20th c., however, attention subsided. Historical demography struggled to make inroads into the discipline of ancient history. In the case of the Antonine plague, a critical article of J. F. Gilliam turned focus away from the disease for a generation. Only in the last 20 years, with the rise of historical demography in ancient studies, and a broader interest in environmental history, have the Antonine and Justinianic plagues received their proper due. Attention has focused on the epidemiology and impact of these events. The Antonine plague is most plausibly identified as smallpox, based on the presentation of the disease described by the contemporary physician Galen, and should qualify as the first pandemic in all of human history. It struck the empire at the apex of its power and prosperity. Its severe demographic effects now seem widely accepted, although there is lively debate about its long-term geopolitical and social consequences. For the Justinianic plague neither its demographic scope nor the long-range consequences are in doubt. Securely identified by both clinical description and paleomolecular evidence, Yersinia pestis arrived in 541 and struck recurrently for over two centuries; like the Black Death in the 14th c., the first bubonic plague fundamentally reshaped the trajectory of European populations.

In the study of the British countryside in the 4th c. A.D. villas have formed a central component. Their decoration features highly in the scholarship, the tessellated floors cited as evidence for the spending patterns and status claims of a wealthy élite. This élite’s desire to spend its surplus funds on lavish interiors created a “boom” in mosaic production, which some scholars have associated with a “flight of capital” from the Continent in the late 3rd c. or others simply with the increasing prosperity of landowners during the 4th c.

Salamanca lies on the right bank of the river Tormes, a tributary of the Douro, on the northern sub-plateau of the Iberian peninsula (fig. 1). Although hardly mentioned in Roman historical sources, it is a reference point for work on Roman territory because the surveyor Frontinus (De Agrorum Qualitate [ed. Thulin 1971] 1–2) used Salmantica (in Lusitania) and Palantia (in Citerior) to exemplify ager per extremitatem mensura comprehensus, the system of land organization characteristic of stipendiary cities. Frontinus was writing in Flavian times, but the creation of ager mensura comprehensus in Lusitania occurred in the Augustan period, as is confirmed by remarkable epigraphic documentation. In N Lusitania, a total of 11 boundary-stones (termini Augustales) are known, nine from the reign of Augustus (and two of these provide explicit reference to Salmantica) and two from that of Claudius. The dates provided by Augustus’ tribunicia potestas allow us to date the surveying operations delimiting the urban territories to between A.D. 4–5 (the inscriptions from Peroviseu and Ul) and A.D. 5–6 (the inscriptions from Sao Salvador, Ledesma, Ciudad Rodrigo, and the new one from Jarandilla de la Vera). The Augustan ager mensura comprehensus may have conditioned the model of the subsequent rural settlement by creating a framework for territorial occupation being organized around the villa from the Flavian period on. The villa would dominate the rural countryside, until it disappeared around the first decades of the 5th c. as part of a process that can be associated with the breaking down of imperial authority and the arrival of the Germanic peoples in the year 409. Almost nothing is known about Salamanca’s territory during the Islamic occupation until the first official repopulation took place under the king of Leon, Ramiro II, in 939–49. The lack of attested settlements in the Douro valley between the 8th and 10th c. is a key question for the organization of the border area between the Islamic state of Al-Andalus and the kingdom of Leon, but scholars generally reject the thesis formulated in 1966 by C. Sánchez Albornoz, which tended to present the lands of the Douro valley as practically depopulated.

In 1904–5, French railroad engineer Paul Gaudin conducted a campaign of excavation focusing on the SE sector of Aphrodisias where a villager had found a relief fragment. Gaudin there uncovered (fig. 1) the tetrastyle façade of a fountain, which he incorrectly designated a “gymnasium”. The intercolumniations were decorated with re-used relief panels, which are now on display in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. The structure was further excavated, studied and reconstructed in 1989 by K. Görkay, but has yet to be fully published. “Gaudin’s Fountain” was built in late antiquity entirely of spolia from other monuments. It thus provides insights into late-antique practices of spoliation and re-use; it also illustrates late-antique renovations undertaken in the city’s final, Christian phase.

This is the first part of a two-part article; the second, “A first inventory of mass graves from late antiquity”, will appear in JRA 29 (2016) as well as on the CJO website.

The Roman empire was more than a system of institutions, beliefs and socio-economic structures; it was a concentration of human capital, physically located in the demographic strength of the population. Human health and mortality crucially affected, and reflected, the economy. As less optimistic interpretations of Late Roman history regain traction, it becomes important to find ways to test such interpretations, including their biological manifestations and implications. One approach would be to map over time and space large-scale violence and disease-driven surges in mortality, as well as chronic factors that may have more gradually eroded the empire’s human capital. Biomolecular archaeology and pathogen genetics are sparking novel explorations of ancient diseases, which ranged from the spectacularly acute to the chronic – malaria, leprosy or tuberculosis –, not to mention seasonal spikes in more routine gastrointestinal infections and the like. Individually and especially cumulatively, the impact of acute and chronic factors could have been of considerable magnitude. The same is true for environmental conditions; thanks to the advances of paleoclimate science, we now know that they too varied unexpectedly, and surely could affect population health.

Dedicated in 28 B.C., Octavian’s Palatine sanctuary of Apollo remained one of the most important religious sites throughout the empire. Textual sources suggest that its site, at least partly, was sacred ground beforehand, as it accommodated one or several earlier cult places, but the pre-Augustan construction phases, as well as the archaeology of its cultic prehistory, remain largely unknown. One of the main reasons is a lack of a comprehensive architectural documentation ever since G. Carettoni’s excavations between 1956 and 1984. In this preliminary field report I present the new architectural documentation of an area that is located in front (southwest) of the temple of Apollo, the sanctuary’s focal point (figs. 1–2). This documentation was produced during fieldwork campaigns conducted in 2009–13 by kind permission of the Soprintendenza Archeologica di Roma. My architectural survey revealed the fragmentary remains of a previously-excavated but never-identified site of the Archaic period. I will first discuss the discovery of the Archaic site through on-site documentation and a possible reconstruction of its plan as a small shrine. Next, I analyze the long-term development and the spatial complexity of the site’s architectural context in a series of evidence-based digital models. In contrast to previous contentions, my analysis suggests that the assemblage of structural remains in this area was intentionally preserved on this spot over the course of centuries. Thus the evidence presented here sheds new light on the architectural history of the site of the Palatine sanctuary of Apollo.

Asperitas, a key term of Hellenistic-Roman art criticism for the assessment of columnar architecture, is anchored in two passages in Vitruvius, which both point to ‘asperity’ as the decisive criterion for achieving an unparalleled, truly eye-catching visual effect. In the best known of the two passages (3.3.8–9), praise is piled on Hermogenes for having systematically established this effect in the design of temples. In fact, he is credited with the invention of the theory (ratio) of pseudodipteral temple colonnades. And this column arrangement, with ambulatories of greatly increased (double) depth around the cella, is supposed to have been invented to provide dignified grandeur (auctoritatem) in its appearance propter asperitatem intercolumniorum: 3.3.9. This visual effect came with the practical advantage that those deep pseudodipteral colonnades also provided rain-protected space for crowds to circumambulate around the temple’s cella (in aede circa cellam). Vitruvius’ other reference to asperitas, in a visual sense, appears in the context of wall-painting (7.5.5), where a certain Apaturios of Alabanda is reported to have created a deceptively dazzling effect propter asperitatem in his rendering of colonnades and temples, so much so that the visual effect of the painting outshone its deficiencies in logic (which, when pinpointed by the mathematician Likynos, the artist hastened to correct: 7.5.6–7). Here we will analyze a reconstructed 3D computer model of Hermogenes’ well-documented pseudodipteral temple at Magnesia in order to tease out the visual effect and on-site experience of that asperitas which is described by Vitruvius in such tantalizing terms.

Traditionally, the study of Roman cultural imports to Roman Iron Age societies in Scandinavia has been based on analysis of the artefactual record. The starting point has been artefacts held to be high-status objects deriving chiefly from funerary contexts and, to a lesser degree, from settlement sites. Although the existing evidence at Uppåkra, a high-status settlement site in Scania province, Sweden, comes only from residential contexts, we will address the ongoing debate concerning Roman cultural imports with ecofactual evidence, to consider which aspects of Roman culture were introduced, which parts of Roman society were mediators, and the underlying social reasons for the introduction of the archaeobotanical remains into indigenous Iron Age society.

At the time of the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79, the site known as Villa B at Oplontis contained sufficient amphoras to ship over 30,000 liters of wine. Though the study of J. T. Peña and M. McCallum rightly recognized the site as a bottling facility, this note uses recent data to argue that its function went beyond that to include significant export and distribution of Vesuvian area wine, and possibly the import of foreign wine. The data has been accumulated by the ongoing study of the facility by the Oplontis Project, using geoprospection, excavation, and a census of amphoras at the site. The findings suggest that the immediate proximity to the coast, the design of and modifications made to the courtyard area and the sheer number of transport amphoras it contained enabled it to fulfill an important rôle as one of the primary wine distribution centers on the Bay of Naples.

The field of demography addresses the composition of human populations, their size, structure and development. The sources with which to conduct demographic analysis in archaeology can incorporate proxy data from areas of settlements, historical or ethnographic sources such as census data or parish burial registers, radiocarbon date densities, or human skeletal remains. The present study aims to use data from human skeletal remains to address questions relating to the size of the population of Roman York.

Roman Sardis, like other cities of W Asia Minor, reflects the distinctive cultures of different peoples who had long lived in its vicinity. Of these varied populations, the Jewish community seems to have been especially notable. Written sources cited by Josephus establish the presence of diaspora Jews in Lydia and Phrygia by the end of the 3rd c. B.C., when Antiochus III relocated 2000 families here from Babylon and Mesopotamia. By the Late Republic, their descendants at Sardis and other regional centers are known to have acquired civic privileges and rights. The local prominence of the Jewish community at Sardis was dramatically confirmed in the 1960s by the discovery in the city’s NW region of a large assembly hall, along with inscriptions, menorahs and other artifacts that clearly establish its use as a synagogue in the 4th-6th c. Further evidence of Jewish life has been noted during excavation of nearby houses, shops and streets in this peripheral quarter. The recent discovery of a marble relief plaque depicting a menorah and other symbols near the center is an important addition to the material culture of ancient Judaism in Asia Minor.