Styling Romanisation: Pottery and Society in Central Italy by Roman E. Roth

Abstract

BOOKREVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 429 Styling Romanisation: Pottery and Society in Central Italy. By Roman E. Roth. New York: CambridgeUniversityPress. 2007. Pp. 237. Styling Romanisation is a revision of Roth's doctoral dissertation (University of Cam bridge, 2003), devised as "an exercise in making pottery work as a source for understanding important historical issues" (1)?in this case, analyzing black-gloss wares to study "how the Romanisation of Italy affected the behaviour of regional and, in particular, non-elite populations in different areas of non-formalised, social discourse" (38). Roth has chosen black-gloss wares because their "cultural meaning is in many ways conditioned by their cheapness and wide use" (1); that is, theygive insightinto a broad spectrumof the population rather than simply the elite, whose influences and priorities were not necessarily those of thepeople at large. Rather thanfocusingon themost highlycrafted vessels, Roth is specifically interested in the more common products that were both produced and distributed within central Tyrrhenian Italy from the early second century b.c. onwards (7). This region's adoption of black-gloss wares was part of a homogenous development throughout much of Italy (Chapters Two andThree), yetRoth's specificcase studiesof locally-produced potteryatVolterra (ChapterFour) and Capena (ChapterFive) high light the heterogeneous circumstances and adaptations that simultaneously occurred at themicro level (Chapter Six). As such,Roth has produced awork that will appeal to social and economic historians, ceramicists, and archaeologists in general. The author's thoughtful testing ofvarioushypothesesandmodels, including ones drawnfromsociology and other disciplines, also makes this study a useful educational tool for graduate stu dents. The firsthalf of thebook isdevoted to reviewingthemain argumentssurrounding Romanization (Chapter One) and thestudy ofblack-glosspottery(Chapter Two), setting up Roth's own methods (Chapter Three). In Chapter One, "Romanisation," Roth asserts that so much scholarship has been devoted to arguing about this term that it has now become a neutraland usefuldescriptor, divestedof itsoriginalbaggage (10). This view seems premature.1 Roth's own definition of Romanization becomes clear through his critique of recent models of Romanization (particularly those ofMario Torelli, Martin Millet, Greg Woolf, and Nicola Terrenato), combined with concepts of "social power" and individualagency (especiallyfollowing AnthonyGiddens's CentralProblemsinSocial Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis [Basingstoke and London 1979]). Chapter Two pays tribute to the contributions of the two pre-eminent black gloss specialists, Nino Lamboglia and Jean-Paul Morel, but also points out how their individual research aims limit their applicability here. For instance, in his Ceramique campanienne (Rome 1981),Morel was interested in thebroad socio-economic implications ofpopular types. On the basis of observingwidespread standardization, Morel concluded that production was controlled by the elite, but carried out by a slave or otherwise oppressed labour force which had no creative input into its products. Morel's study was never intended to address the situationat the localor regionallevel, which is where Roth's investigation takes over. In Roth's view, it is precisely at those lower levels that one can assess not onlyhow controlledproductionactually was, but also howmuch variability existedin the consumption and use of vessels from one area to the next (59-60). Roth contends that the adoption ofblack-glosspotteryand itsplace in thecommunity were the resultof local, 1 See, for instance, my review of H. E. M. Cool's Eating and Drinking in Roman Britain (Cambridge 2007) in Mouseion51 (2007)171-174. 430 PHOENIX socially-informed decisions, rather than submission to the elite or to a blanket Roman fashion. In the second half of the book, Roth presents his case studies and conclusions. His study of the ceramics from Volterra (Chapter Four) reveals that, in the second century B.C., local black-gloss potters split their focus into two branches, one following themore formal, Volterran heritage of fine ware production and the other introducing a grittier fabric for turning out larger quantitiesofvessels, the shapesofwhichwere largelyinspired by local plain and coarse wares. With these products, individual non-elite households began to have two sets of locally-made black gloss wares, one in a mediocre fabric for routine use, and a second in a less common, finer ware for special occasions and more specialised usage. Roth argues that, since the products carried different associations, those made in the mediocre fabric cannot...