Abstract
Over the period in which the ancient Roman empire grew to its greatest extent, religion in the provinces underwent change. In this article, the author argues that glocalization as an explicit modern conceptual framework has added value to the analysis of religious material culture. First, the glocalization model is discussed in the context of a wider debate on the biased concept of Romanization. Second, a rationale is presented for interpreting Roman religious change with a glocalization perspective. Third, two concrete bodies of archaeological source material are re-interpreted within the glocalization framework: first the little studied rural sanctuary of Dhronecken near ancient Trier and second a particular form of religious gifts that appeared on an empire-wide scale as a ritual with respect to the salus, the well-being of the emperor. Based on the application of the glocalization framework to these sources, the author concludes that religious material culture in these cases can be seen as a process in which new forms of religious communication were created out of an interrelated and ongoing process of local and global cultural expressions.
Highlights
In the period between ca. 50 BC and AD 300, the Roman Empire gained control over a territory incorporating large parts of modern Europe, North Africa and East Asia
This article began by engaging in theoretical discussions on Romanization, globalization theory and Roman religious change
By connecting the analytical framework of glocalization with the idea of Van Andringa for seeing religious change as the creation of a whole new and common religious communication language, I proposed using the framework of glocalization as an explicitly modern interpretative model to study the material culture presented in the two subsequent case studies
Summary
In the period between ca. 50 BC and AD 300, the Roman Empire gained control over a territory incorporating large parts of modern Europe, North Africa and East Asia. Pitts (2008) argues that this framework adds more sophistication to the understanding of the homogenizing supply of pottery vessels in Roman Britain, as it was shaped by the integration of both local and global cultural elements Another justification for applying a glocalization framework to the Roman world is explicitly or implicitly made by scholars who have shown processes of globalization—in the form of increased connectivity—being active in the ancient Roman society (cf Horden and Purcell 2000; Versluys 2014; Pitts and Versluys 2015; Hodos 2014). This dominant culture was widely recognized as Roman, as it was closely connected to citizenship, and it evolved around shared notions of Roman identity in which habits of dress, speech, manners and conducts became more important than ethnical descent (Woolf 2005). Gardner (2013) argues that glocalization is able to analyze how transformation in the speed and reach of communication, movements of goods and people, information, and identities occurred differently in various places in the Roman empire, creating new forms of local identities
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