1. On Romanization 2. Roman power and the Gauls 3. The civilising ethos 4. Mapping cultural change 5. Urbanising the Gauls 6. The culture of the countryside 7. Consuming Rome 8. Keeping faith? 9. Being Roman in Gaul.

This paper develops an argument for the agency of objects, looking at the effects objects have on people. Groups of related objects, such as pots or metal ornaments, create stylistic universes which affect producers and users of new objects, bound by the canons of style. For an object to be socially powerful in a recognized manner, the form of the object lays down certain rules of use which influence the sensory and emotional impacts of the object. Formal properties of artifacts are influenced by the genealogy of the object class, including historical continuities and changes, and also its perceived source. The forms of objects, the historical trajectories of the class of objects and their perceived sources combine to have social effects on people, shaping people as socially effective entities. Britain’s incorporation into the Roman Empire between 150 BC and AD 200 provides an excellent case study through which to look at the changing corpora of objects, which had continuities and changes in form, a set of subtle attributions of sources and a complex range of social effects.

Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul

What Do Objects Want

Greek artefacts, craftsmen and artists had penetrated Rome since regal days; from the second century BC this trickle had become a continuing and influential flood, contributing together with Italic and Etruscan architecture and art, and the developing central Italian and Roman concrete architecture, to the rich tapestry of the art of the capital. Vespasian (69-79), founder of the Flavian dynasty, showed an astute pragmatism in his handling of architecture and art. In the provinces the architectural and art forms characteristic of the Flavian era continued to flourish. Dynamism returned to imperial commissions with the Romano-Spanish Trajan. The age of Hadrian (117-38) proved to be extraordinary, largely because of the extent to which he was able to impress upon it his own many-sided personality: ruler, philhellene, architect, dilettante, poet, traveller and romantic. The rich artistic harvest of the Flavian to the Antonine ages was not just an imperial, but a corporate achievement, one which offered a worthy inheritance to following generations.

Art and architecture

▪ Abstract Since the late 1980s, language endangerment and death have been discussed as if the phenomena had no connection at all with language birth. More recently the phenomena have been associated almost exclusively with the intense and pervasive economic globalization of same period, a process that some authors have reduced too easily to the McDonaldization phenomenon. Moreover, the relation of globalization to different forms of colonization has been poorly articulated. As a matter of fact, little of the longer history of population movements and contacts since the dawn of agriculture has been invoked in the literature on language endangerment to give some broader perspective on the mechanisms of language birth and death and on the ecological factors that bear on how they proceed. This review aims to remedy these shortcomings in our scholarship.

background

Language Birth and Death

Preface. 1 Latin and Indo-European. 2 The Languages of Italy. 3 The Background to Standardization. 4 'Old' Latin and its Varieties in the Period c.400--150 BC. 5 The Road to Standardization: Roman Latin of the Third and Second Centuries BC. 6 Elite Latin in the Late Republic and Early Empire. 7 Sub-Elite Latin in the Empire. 8 Latin in Late Antiquity and Beyond. Glossary. Appendix: The International Phonetic Alphabet. Bibliography of Reference and Other Works. Index.

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The Blackwell history of the Latin language

Revell examines questions of Roman ethnic identity and explores Roman imperialism as a lived experience based around the paradox of similarity and difference. Her case studies of public architecture provide an understanding of how urbanism, the emperor and religion were part of the daily encounters of these communities. Revell applies the ideas of agency and practice in her examination of the structures that held the empire together and how they were implicated within repeated daily activities. Rather than offering a homogenized 'ideal type' description of Roman cultural identity, she uses these structures as a way to understand how encounters differed between communities, thus producing a more nuanced interpretation of what it was to be Roman. Bringing an innovative approach to the problem of Romanization, Revell breaks from traditional models, cutting across a number of entrenched debates such as arguments about the imposition of Roman culture or resistance to Roman rule.

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Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul

Citations

What Do Objects Want

Art and architecture

Language Birth and Death

The Blackwell history of the Latin language

Roman imperialism and local identities

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