Storage And Empire: Choreographies of Time and Matter at Rome’s Harbours

Summary

The capacity for storing surplus has been a key parameter in the hierarchical rankings of socio-political evolution, with empire at the apex. With its large-scale ports and massive warehouses, the Roman empire easily fits this bill. Models of socio-political evolution, however, not only build on top-down templates of power, but also adopt a view of things (i.e. stored goods) as passive resources. But in the light of recent material culture theory, storage becomes a more complex mediation of time and matter than the ‘surplus model’ could fathom, with power emerging from localized mediations of assemblages of humans and things, although with historical implications that were no less far-reaching.

This paper empirically traces the temporal and material choreographies of storage practices at Ostia and Portus, the main ports of the city of Rome. It investigates how things’ trajectories through these ports and their warehouses articulated control and calculability, and it traces the resulting landscape of power. In so doing, it challenges old readings of an opposition between state control and private interests at these centres, and instead proposes a kaleidoscopic model of power, rooted in the material and metaphorical assemblage of the family.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 18740