Abstract
In recent years archaeologists have put forward explanations of the design and impact of mythological and allegorical scenes in mosaics as part of elite Roman visual culture. While scenes of labor have served as evidence to accompany archaeological data on rural life, depictions of labor have received comparatively less attention as part of Roman ideological structures. Through an analysis of mosaics of the imperial period, this article demonstrates the value of adapting Timothy Ingold’s concept of ‘taskscape’ for explaining shared similarities in the communication strategies underlying depictions of agricultural work in Roman art and showcases an approach to the Roman economy rooted in this body of anthropological theory. Elites were able to reinforce normative values about the agricultural world by controlling not just what was seen, but what was not seen. Their mosaics present certain generic and hidden views of work that allowed fellow elites to use their own imaginations to continually ‘fill in the gaps’ and reinforce their control over agricultural production, a strategy that endured across the Roman world for generations.
Highlights
In recent years, there has been growing interest in the role that Roman visual culture played in creating and maintaining power structures through strategies of representation on various media (Clarke 2003; Trimble 2011; 2016), including mosaics
Elites were able to reinforce normative values about the agricultural world by controlling not just what was seen, but what was not seen. Their mosaics present certain generic and hidden views of work that allowed fellow elites to use their own imaginations to continually ‘fill in the gaps’ and reinforce their control over agricultural production, a strategy that endured across the Roman world for generations
Agricultural mosaic scenes share a number of features that had an important impact on Roman social life
Summary
There has been growing interest in the role that Roman visual culture played in creating and maintaining power structures through strategies of representation on various media (Clarke 2003; Trimble 2011; 2016), including mosaics. The reader of an archaeological publication will see a square and may imagine a house, a landscape of rooms and objects imbued with meanings by people, an array of tasks including years of processes of building, cleaning, cooking, and socialization, and a set of social relations between relatives, friends, neighbors, and even the state. Argument meets imagination whenever images evoke and enact complex sets of expectations, memories, and normative values What this basic understanding of taskscape does is create space to investigate how these images, processes, relations, and narratives interacted with one another in the Roman world. Separating the taskscape from the landscape as a heuristic tool allows these features and discrepancies to become apparent to us
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