New Approaches to Ancient Material Culture in the Greek & Roman World

2021 ◽  
Britannia ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 135-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa A. Lodwick

ABSTRACTIn tandem with the large-scale translocation of food plants in the Roman world, ornamental evergreen plants and plant items were also introduced to new areas for ritual and ornamental purposes. The extent to which these new plants, primarily box and stone-pine, were grown in Britain has yet to be established. This paper presents a synthesis of archaeobotanical records of box, stone-pine and norway spruce in Roman Britain, highlighting chronological and spatial patterns. Archaeobotanical evidence is used alongside material culture to evaluate the movement of these plants and plant items into Roman Britain, their meaning and materiality in the context of human-plant relations in ornamental gardens and ritual activities. Archaeobotanical evidence for ornamental evergreen plants elsewhere in the Roman world is presented.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martínez Jiménez ◽  
Isaac Sastre de Diego ◽  
Carlos Tejerizo

The vast transformation of the Roman world at the end of antiquity has been a subject of broad scholarly interest for decades, but until now no book has focused specifically on the Iberian Peninsula in the period as seen through an archaeological lens. Given the sparse documentary evidence available, archaeology holds the key to a richer understanding of the developments of the period, and this book addresses a number of issues that arise from analysis of the available material culture, including questions of the process of Christianisation and Islamisation, continuity and abandonment of Roman urban patterns and forms, the end of villas and the growth of villages, and the adaptation of the population and the elites to the changing political circumstances.


2003 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 12-31

This chapter is in three sections. The first sets out the proposition that movements in ancient oral, written and material culture themselves involved reception and refiguration of material from inside and outside the Hellenic and Roman world. The second section looks at some aspects of these receptions and at the scholarly and critical tools which were developed in association with them and which have often set the parameters for subsequent investigation and evaluation. The third section identifies some important examples of how different aspects of reception within antiquity have contributed to the patterns of reception with which scholars and practitioners have engaged in subsequent periods. Overall, the model used is one which will be taken forward in later chapters of the book. It consists of an axis between reception as activity, as ‘doing’, ‘making’, ‘responding’ and ‘creating’ and reception as selecting, analysing and evaluating. The points of intersection are many but the more divergent areas of the model are also significant and may also contribute to dialogue between ancient and modern. Many critical terms and categories set out in the ancient world have fed into modern systems and in turn many aspects of modern practice, of reception ‘activity’, have prompted further analysis of cultural practices in the ancient world.


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