Craft, Industry, and Landscape, in the Roman Imperial Marble Trade

Summary

This paper provides an introduction to the session and its associated topics, while also presenting a case study of marble quarries in the Roman empire. Long regarded as an example of imperial power shaping craft production in provincial settings, the case study presented here explores these political and social relationships as located practices that play out in a landscape context. The dynamic interplay between local environmental conditions, existing social practices, and political power demonstrates a marked influence on the creation of a coordinated imperial industry – the Roman marble trade. The development of an imperial craft or industry runs alongside substantial changes to settlement dynamics and changes to the very landscape itself. These changes to industrial landscapes and to the coordination of skilled and unskilled labor, however, operate in a fashion dissimilar to how other parts of the Roman provinces were incorporated into the imperial polity, while also demonstrating variability between stone-working sites. This paper therefore explores the influence of landscape and social context on the form of imperial craft production.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• The Imperial Craft: Comparative Perspectives on Production and Society in Empires

Keywords

Spatial Coverage