Water and Urbanism in Roman Britain

Water and Urbanism in Roman Britain
Author: Jay Ingate
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2019-03-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351797832

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The establishment of large-scale water infrastructure is a defining aspect of the process of urbanisation. In places like Britain, the Roman period represents the first introduction of features that can be recognised and paralleled to our modern water networks. Writers have regularly cast these innovations as markers of a uniform Roman identity spreading throughout the Empire, and bringing with it a familiar, modern, sense of what constitutes civilised urban living. However, this is a view that has often neglected to explain how such developments were connected to the important symbolic and ritual traditions of waterscapes in Iron Age Britain. Water and Urbanism in Roman Britain argues that the creation of Roman water infrastructure forged a meaningful entanglement between the process of urbanisation and significant local landscape contexts. As a result, it suggests that archetypal Roman urban water features were often more related to an active expression of local hybrid identities, rather than alignment to an incoming continental ideal. By questioning the familiarity of these aspects of the ancient urban form, we can move away from the unhelpful idea that Roman precedent is a central tenet of the current unsustainable relationship between water and our modern cities. This monograph will be of interest to academics and students studying aspects of Roman water management, urbanisation in Roman Britain, and theoretical approaches to landscape. It will also appeal to those working more generally on past human interactions with the natural world.

Water and Roman Urbanism

Water and Roman Urbanism
Author: Adam Rogers
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2013-04-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004249753

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Water and Roman Urbanism: Towns, Waterscapes, Land Transformation and Experience in Roman Britain offers a new perspective for investigating Roman settlement and how urban spaces were created and experienced by focusing on the relationship between settlement and water and the meanings attributed to these places. Rather than a descriptive approach to the urban fabric it emphasises social context and cultural meaning through interpretative frameworks of analysis. Central are the cultural and experiential implications of water forming part of towns, rather than economic and practical arguments, and the way in which these places were used and altered over time. The book emphasises a social approach and has considerable implications for our understanding of life in the Roman period as a whole.

Alien Cities

Alien Cities
Author: Dominic Perring
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Cities and towns
ISBN: 9780955884696

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This book examines the economic and social impact of early Roman towns on the landscape of south-east Britain. Utilising the unusually rich database generated by rescue excavations in the region dominated by Colchester and London, it asks how the creation of these cities affected rural landscapes and communities in the first 200 years of Roman administration and control. In addressing these questions the authors hope to give impulse to improvements in the ways that archaeological data are collected, described and disseminated. The results of this detailed study offer little support to the idea that cities were conceived as market centres for their surrounding territories. Instead, the distribution of goods is suggestive of an economy in which rural surplus flowed towards urban centres as a result of tribute, rent and taxation, with minimal reciprocal exchange. While past studies have cast the south-east as a 'Romanised" heartland, the authors contend that the major cities of Roman Britain stood apart as alien places of government and culture, where the exercise of imperial power made exaggerated call on available resources.

The Archaeology of Roman Britain

The Archaeology of Roman Britain
Author: Adam Rogers
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2014-10-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317633857

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Within the colonial history of the British Empire there are difficulties in reconstructing the lives of people that came from very different traditions of experience. The Archaeology of Roman Britain argues that a similar critical approach to the lives of people in Roman Britain needs to be developed, not only for the study of the local population but also those coming into Britain from elsewhere in the Empire who developed distinctive colonial lives. This critical, biographical approach can be extended and applied to places, structures, and things which developed in these provincial contexts as they were used and experienced over time. This book uniquely combines the study of all of these elements to access the character of Roman Britain and the lives, experiences, and identities of people living there through four centuries of occupation. Drawing on the concept of the biography and using it as an analytical tool, author Adam Rogers situates the archaeological material of Roman Britain within the within the political, geographical, and temporal context of the Roman Empire. This study will be of interest to scholars of Roman archaeology, as well as those working in biographical themes, issues of colonialism, identity, ancient history, and classics.

Beyond the Romans

Beyond the Romans
Author: Irene Selsvold
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2020-04-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1789251397

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This latest volume in the TRAC Themes in Theoretical Roman Archaeology series takes up posthuman theoretical perspectives to interpret Roman material culture. These perspectives provide novel and compelling ways of grappling with theoretical problems in Roman archaeology producing new knowledge and questions about the complex relationships and interactions between humans and non-humans in Roman culture and society. Posthumanism constitutes a multitude of theoretical positions characterised by common critiques of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism. In part, they react to the dominance of the linguistic turn in humanistic sciences. These positions do not exclude “the human”, but instead stress the mutual relationship between matter and discourse. Moreover, they consider the agency of “non-humans”, e.g., animals, material culture, landscapes, climate, and ideas, their entanglement with humans, and the situated nature of research. Posthumanism has had substantial impacts in several fields (including critical studies, archaeology, feminist studies, even politics) but have not yet emerged in any fulsome way in Classical Studies and Classical Archaeology. This is the first volume on these themes in Roman Archaeology, aimed at providing valuable perspectives into Roman myth, art and material culture, displacing and complicating notions of human exceptionalism and individualist subjectivity. Contributions consider non-human agencies, particularly animal, material, environmental, and divine agencies, critiques of binary oppositions and gender roles, and the Anthropocene. Ultimately, the papers stress that humans and non-humans are entangled and imbricated in larger systems: we are all post-human.

Romans and Barbarians Beyond the Frontiers

Romans and Barbarians Beyond the Frontiers
Author: Sergio Gonzalez Sanchez
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2017-03-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1785706071

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This first thematic volume of the new series TRAC Themes in Roman Archaeology brings renowned international experts to discuss different aspects of interactions between Romans and ‘barbarians’ in the north-western regions of Europe. Northern Europe has become an interesting arena of academic debate around the topics of Roman imperialism and Roman:‘barbarian’ interactions, as these areas comprised Roman provincial territories, the northern frontier system of the Roman Empire (limes), the vorlimes (or buffer zone), and the distant barbaricum. This area is, today, host to several modern European nations with very different historical and academic discourses on their Roman past, a factor in the recent tendency towards the fragmentation of approaches and the application of post-colonial theories that have favoured the advent of a varied range of theoretical alternatives. Case studies presented here span across disciplines and territories, from American anthropological studies on transcultural discourse and provincial organization in Gaul, to historical approaches to the propagandistic use of the limes in the early 20th century German empire; from Danish research on warrior identities and Roman-Scandinavian relations, to innovative ideas on culture contact in Roman Ireland; and from new views on Romano-Germanic relations in Central European Barbaricum, to a British comparative exercise on frontier cultures. The volume is framed by a brilliant theoretical introduction by Prof. Richard Hingley and a comprehensive concluding discussion by Prof. David Mattingly.

The Bioarchaeology of Urbanization

The Bioarchaeology of Urbanization
Author: Tracy K. Betsinger
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 539
Release: 2020-11-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030534170

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Urbanization has long been a focus of bioarchaeological research, but what is missing from the literature is an exploration of the geographic and temporal range of human biological, demographic, and sociocultural responses to this major shift in settlement pattern. Urbanization is characterized by increased population size and density, and is frequently assumed to produce negative biological effects. However, the relationship between urbanization and human “health” requires careful examination given the heterogeneity that exists within and between urban contexts. Studies of contemporary urbanization have found both positive and negative outcomes, which likely have parallels in past human societies. This volume is unique as there is no current bioarchaeological book addressing urbanization, despite various studies of urbanization having been conducted. Collectively, this volume provides a more holistic understanding of the relationships between urbanization and various aspects of human population health. The insight gained from this volume will provide not only a better understanding of urbanization in our past, but it will also have potential implications for those studying urbanization in contemporary communities.

The Power of Urban Water

The Power of Urban Water
Author: Nicola Chiarenza
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 518
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110677121

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Water is a global resource for modern societies - and water was a global resource for pre-modern societies. The many different water systems serving processes of urbanisation and urban life in ancient times and the Middle Ages have hardly been researched until now. The numerous contributions to this volume pose questions such as what the basic cultural significance of water was, the power of water, in the town and for the town, from different points of view. Symbolic, aesthetic, and cult aspects are taken up, as is the role of water in politics, society, and economy, in daily life, but also in processes of urban planning or in urban neighbourhoods. Not least, the dangers of polluted water or of flooding presented a challenge to urban society. The contributions in this volume draw attention to the complex, manifold relations between water and human beings. This collection presents the results of an international conference in Kiel in 2018. It is directed towards both scholars in ancient and mediaeval studies and all those interested in the diversity of water systems in urban space in ancient and mediaeval times.

Towns in Roman Britain

Towns in Roman Britain
Author: Julian Bennett
Publisher: Shire Publications
Total Pages: 88
Release: 2001
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

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Many of Britain's towns and cities originated in the Roman period, established as part of a systematic programme to urbanise the island. Why imperial Rome initiated this programme is the first of many topics examined in the third edition of this introduction to the towns of Roman Britain.