Overview

Literary and archaeological evidence suggests that the Roman world was profoundly unequal. What did this mean in material terms for people at the bottom of the social hierarchy? Astrid Van Oyen here investigates the lived experiences of non-elite people in the Roman world through qualitative analysis of archaeological data. Supported by theoretical insights from the material turn, development economics, and feminist studies, her study of precarity cuts across the experiences of workers, the enslaved, women, and conquered populations. Van Oyen considers how precarity shaped these people's relation to production, consumption, time, place, and community. Drawing on empirically rich archaeological data from Roman Italy, Britain, Gaul, and the Iberian Peninsula, Van Oyen challenges long-held assumptions and generates new insights into the lives of the non-elite population. Her novel approaches will inspire future studies, enabling archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists to retrieve the unheard voices of the past.

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9781009726061

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Reviews

With her new book Astrid Van Oyen cuts right through the fog of decades of historical and archaeological debates to bring to the fore the lives of people on the receiving end of the Roman economy and society. The scalpel she expertly wields to do so is precarity, which, as she rightly asserts 'cuts to the heart of what it means to be vulnerable'. Peter van Dommelen, Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology and Professor of Anthropology, Brown University What did it mean to live with risk and uncertainty in the Roman world? Van Oyen's compelling study shows us how Romans' experience of precarity was a frequent source of creativity and development at an individual level. This book is theoretically sophisticated, superbly researched, and remarkably, even radically, human. Seth Bernard, Professor of Classics, University of Toronto

Author Information

Astrid Van Oyen is Professor of Archaeology at the Radboud Institute for Culture and History, Radboud University. A Roman archaeologist with expertise in socio-economics, the non-elite, and materiality, she is the author of How Things Make History: The Roman Empire and its Terra Sigillata Pottery (2016) and The Socio-Economics of Roman Storage: Agriculture, Trade, and Family (2020).

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