Roman Slavery

Summary

In the last 20 years, Roman archaeologists have analyzed the remains of Roman streets, counted graffiti, benches, and doorways in Pompeii and Herculaneum, and mapped the spaces of houses, workshops, and villas, and examined as well as the location of objects. Archaeologists have turned the material remains into facts and assembled an archive of the traces of human activities—traffic, movement, work, rituals, etc. How this scholarship has furthered our understanding of a heterogeneous population of men and women, rich and poor, free and slaves, Romans and foreigners is another matter. In The Material Life of Roman Slaves, Lauren Petersen and I sought to retrieve and represent the physical environment and lives of Roman slaves by setting in dialogue the textual record of Roman law and literature on slaves and the archaeological remains and by drawing on the work of archaeologists and historians of slavery in other periods and places. I want to focus on the Haitian historian and theorist Michel-Rolph Trouillot to Roman archaeology. The goal is to think about what counts as facts, the interpretation of those facts, and how some interpretations are regarded as factual history while others are seen as works of fiction.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22453