The habit of honouring outstanding individuals with statues was common throughout the Roman Empire. Yet after the end of the Severan reign at the beginning of the third century AD, a decrease in honorific statues is generally assumed to have taken place. This thesis aims to evaluate this hypothesis, focusing specifically on the years AD 222-285. The thesis is assessing the contemporaneous imperial remains for the Roman Empire as a whole and the evidence from four exemplary cities that are particularly conspicuous in their statuary production and display, both before and after the time frame under investigation (Leptis Magna, Athens, Ephesus, Aphrodisias). The purpose is to explore the standards, conventions, and limitations of statuary practice in Roman society in a synthetic and comparative analysis and thereby to evaluate its political and social role during a state of internal and external instability, labelled 'the third century crisis'. By providing concrete figures, the practice of the third century can be juxtaposed with both the antecedent and subsequent centuries and this will facilitate a more coherent insight into the overall development and changes in Roman honorific statuary practice. The results suggest that the assumed decline in the number of statuary installations might have to be re-evaluated. It has become apparent that in order to obtain comparable numbers, the inclusion of imperial family members in any statistical evaluation is indispensable, a factor which has previously been disregarded. A gradual decrease cannot be supported and neither can a decrease in the appreciation of honours.

This thesis investigates the rural landscape of the Vale of the White Horse in the late Iron Age and the Roman period. Its three aims are to place the Roman temple, amphitheatre and cemetery at Marcham / Frilford within the context of the wider rural landscape, to document the nature of the Romano-British social and economic structure and its relationship to earlier Iron Age systems, and to compare the rural community of the Vale with other communities in the upper Thames Valley. The first aim is addressed by analysing the archaeological data for the neighbourhood of the religious complex at Marcham / Frilford, integrating recent geophysical survey and commercial archaeological evaluations. It is considered whether the site's function was restricted to an extensive religious complex, or whether it can be classed as a small town. Although there is no evidence for urbanism in terms of densely packed buildings, market activities are possible. It is suggested that the cemetery might be a 'managed cemetery'. The second and third aims are addressed by presenting and evaluating the archaeological evidence for the use of the landscape. The development of the Iron Age into the Romano-British landscape is seen through changes in settlement density, structure and form, buildings such as villas, ditched field systems, communication via roads and trackways, increasing population and agricultural intensification. Variations in settlement forms in the Vale of the White Horse are considered within the wider context of settlement in the upper Thames Valley. The Iron Age landscape of the Vale appears similar to that of the gravel terraces north of the river Thames. In the Roman period it differs from the gravel terraces to the north by becoming a region of villas and local centres, which suggests differences in landholding and in social and economic structures. In addition, the late Iron Age and Romano-British settlement in the Vale of the White Horse is compared with other regional studies.

The Roman town of Herculaneum, due to its burial by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD79, provides the rare opportunity to study the diet of middle and lower class Romans living in an urban context in mid-1^st century AD Italy. Knowledge concerning Roman diet, prior to the growth of bioarchaeology in the 1960s and 1970s, was derived from the ancient texts and focused primarily on the elite diet. The diets of the poorer classes have often been considered monotonous and unhealthy and consequently, malnutrition is believed to have been widespread in urban centres. Collaboration between the numerous sub-disciplines of bioarchaeology, including archaeobotany and zooarchaeology, has begun to take place amongst scholars working on the Vesuvian sites and diet is currently being studied using a more holistic approach. The ancient sources act as a secondary resource and it is now the physical food remains that play a crucial role in examining Roman diet and associated topics such as trade, health and nutrition. This thesis investigated the bioarchaeological remains from the Cardo V sewer that ran beneath the shop/apartment complex of Insula Orientalis II in Herculaneum. It is the first large scale study to combine both new and existing bioarchaeological material from Herculaneum in an effort to provide the site with its own bioarchaeological data set, particularly with regards to food and diet. In total, 220L of soil was examined for carbonized and mineralized seeds, seashells, eggshells and fish bones. 194 taxa were identified, included including 94 botanical, 45 fish, 53 shellfish and two bird taxa. 114 of the 194 taxa can be considered edible foodstuffs. The statements of the ancient authors concerning dietary diversity have been examined in light of these findings and found to be comparable. The material displayed little taphonomic bias when compared to Pompeian bioarchaeological assemblages. The excellent preservation of the material, combined with data from modern food sciences, has allowed for much needed interpretation to take place in the areas of health and nutrition. The variety of cereals, fruits and seafood indicate close connections with the nearby land and sea and consequently, the economic implications of such extensive resource exploitation have been considered. A nutritional analysis of the finds have shown that diets were nutrient dense and healthy, enabling the people of Herculaneum to achieve modern day stature as well as survive and recover from illness. Thus it can no longer be assumed that those of moderate means ate an unhealthy and monotonous diet, that malnutrition was widespread in urban centres, and finally, that descriptions of foodstuffs in the ancient sources apply only to the wealthy.

This thesis focuses on the economies of Roman ports and their role in the facilitation and organization of maritime trade, combining both terrestrial and maritime archaeological evidence as well as literary and epigraphic material. The first half of the thesis examines Mediterranean ports from a panoptic level in order to address questions of systems of trade, connectivity and economic development. In doing so, I focus on three particular areas of material culture: ceramics, shipwreck cargoes (typically composed of amphorae, metal ingots or stone) and epigraphy. The second half of the thesis focuses on two case studies, southern Turkey and southern France. For each region, I explore the economic factors which led to the development of each region and the ways in which ports enabled this development. I consider the impact of landscape, the usage of natural resources and the extent of production for both local consumption and export. Importantly, I examine the regional connections of the two regions and their interactions within the wider Mediterranean. I develop a model for the development of ports along each coastline and their degree of integration into the trading network of the Roman Mediterranean. Building on this, it becomes possible to assess the extent and scale of extra-regional interaction and market integration. From the evidence presented in this thesis, I argue that ports were at the core of the Roman market economy and that the development of a port network allowed for the integration and interdependence of Mediterranean markets. This allowed for regional economic growth through the specialization in the production of goods for which a region had a comparative advantage.

Despite the recent interest in late antique archaeology and the increasing number of publications on the transformations of towns (both in Spain and in the Roman world as a whole), the concern shown towards aqueducts has been almost non-existent. Some studies have focused on exceptional local examples, such as Rome or Constantinople, but there have been neither general nor regional syntheses of the chronology of the abandonment of aqueducts on a broad regional scale. This thesis consequently fills this gap in our knowledge by offering an all-encompassing study and compilation of the available material and written evidence for aqueducts in Spain in Late Antiquity, it looks at aqueducts in the late Roman period, and how they evolve through the Visigothic and the Umayyad centuries. For this purpose, each aqueduct in the Iberian Peninsula is assessed according to the available information and studied in its wider urban context. By the end of the thesis it is possible to put forward some clear results on the degree of continuity of aqueducts in Spain. The information is used to analyse how the presence or absence of aqueducts affected the development of urban settlement and housing patterns away from a traditional Roman context. Aqueducts had not been at first an essential part of urban life, yet by Late Antiquity they had become so intimately related to it that the end of aqueduct supply modified urban landscapes. Finally, I present various scenarios to explain why aqueducts ceased to function and how the various elite groups of the period (urban aristocrats, the Church, the Visigothic monarchy and the Umayyads) tried to take over the control of the aqueducts, as they were not only extremely useful functional monuments, but also reminders and legitimising links to the Roman past.

The Roman festival of the Lupercalia is one of the most discussed issues in the field of pre-Christian Roman religion. Hardly a year goes by without an article on the subject appearing in a major Classics journal. But the festival presents a range of issues that individual articles cannot address. This thesis is an attempt to present a modern analysis of the phenomenon of the Lupercalia as a whole, including literary, archaeological and historical evidence on the subject. The first section presents the ancient sources on the Lupercalia, and is divided into five chapters, each analysing a particular aspect of the festival: fertility, purification, the importance of the wolf and the foundation myth, the mythology of Arcadian origins, and Caesar's involvement with the Lupercalia of 44 BC. The second section places the Lupercalia in a wider context, discussing the festival's topography and the course of the running Luperci, its relationship to other lustration rituals, and its position in the Roman calendar, ending with an appraisal of the changes it underwent in late Antiquity. The third section employs methods from linguistics, anthropology and comparative religion to show that the Lupercalia involved a ritual of initiation, which was also reflected in the Roman foundation myth. The central chapter of this section discusses the methodology used in comparative Indo-European mythology, and offers a case study that parallels the god of the festival (Faunus) with Rudra of Vedic Hinduism. The last chapter considers other parallels with Indian religion, especially the relationship between flamen and brahmin. The thesis challenges a number of established theories on the subject and offers new evidence to show that the festival has Indo-European origins, but also that it played an important role throughout Roman history.

This thesis examines the changing form and function of non-funerary cult buildings in early Latial and Etruscan settlements in order to better describe and understand the advent of monumental temples in the archaeological record. It draws on a significant quantity of material excavated in the past forty years and developments in relevant theoretical frameworks to reconstruct the changing appearance of cult buildings from huts to shrines and temples (Chapters 2 to 4), and to place monumental examples within wider religious, topographical, and functional contexts (Chapters 5 to 7). This broader perspective allows a more accurate assessment of the extent to which monumental temples represent continuity and discontinuity with earlier religious architecture, and furthermore clarifies the respective roles of Latium and Etruria in the transformation of cult buildings into distinctive, prominent parts of the built environment. Although it is possible to find many different accounts of religious monumentalisation in existing scholarship, this thesis holds that traditional narratives no longer accurately reflect the archaeological evidence. It sets out a sequence of developments in which early religious architecture was a dynamic, rather than conservative, phenomenon. It demonstrates that temples were not the inevitable product of a natural progression from open-air votive deposition to monumentality, or simply an imported concept, but rather a deliberate response to the opportunities offered by an increasingly mobile Mediterranean population. It also contends that Latium played a more important role in formulating the characteristic components and functions of central Italic temples than previously thought. This thesis consequently offers a new account of early religious architecture in western central Italy as well as an alternative interpretation of its monumentalisation.

This dissertation focuses on images of Christ that date from the first half of Late Antiquity, defined as the three centuries between AD 200 and 500. The cultural dynamics of this period left a distinct impression on Christian art, and this dissertation traces that impact. Unlike other studies that attempt to resolve ambiguity within the corpus of Christ images, the argument here maintains that ambiguity was a key component in the creation and subsequent interpretation of the Late Antique Christian iconography. The dissertation proceeds in three parts, each comprising two chapters. In the first section, the history and historiography of the image of Christ is explored, and a methodology capable of accommodating the diverse meanings assigned to the Christ’s discrepant and ambiguous iconographies is developed. In order to better understand the socio-religious environment in which the first images of Christ were produced and interpreted, the second section of the dissertation moves away from material culture and towards method and theory. The notion that interpretation is a group level phenomenon is critiqued, and a model explaining how individuals in Late Antiquity could have made sense of ambiguous images of Christ is advanced. The final section turns back to the material culture and applies the framework developed in the second section to two artworks: (1) the sarcophagus of Junius Bassus and (2) the floor mosaic from the Hinton St. Mary Roman Villa now in the British Museum. By complementing the standard analyses of Christian art with interpretations grounded in the diverse interactions viewers had with artworks, new perspectives will emerge that provide a fuller picture of Late Antique Christianity and the iconography of its godhead alike.

If as argued the Mediterranean consisted in Antiquity of a unity determined by similar environmental factors and crises which were mitigated through established networks of trade and exchange, the border regions of the Roman Mediterranean, particularly to the South and East, were characterised by a radically different environment. This thesis focuses on the development of three of the arid regions bordering the ancient Mediterranean, namely the Fazzan oases in the Libyan Sahara, the Eastern Desert of Egypt and the region of Palmyra in Syria. These arid regions have received considerable archaeological attention in recent years, and a review of them will highlight the factors which enabled these regions to interact with the Roman Empire through trading dynamics, but also through the development of local resources. Central questions within this thesis concern the extent to which the environment would have tailored the potential of these regions, and if the existence of trade routes and social networks both affected and were affected by settlement and exploitation patterns in the region. Trade was created by geographically much broader social requirements for foreign or exotic goods, yet was restricted by the possibility to pass through these regions. Developments were conditioned by the constant need for balance between the state as a power enforcing and representing peace and security and local entities, and what the local social organisation had to offer in term of rent and stability to the state as an institution. After an introduction (Chapter 1) delineating the aims of the thesis, Chapter 2 defines influential theories and models that will be considered for this thesis, namely environmental factors, social networks and institutional economics. The archaeological evidence is then discussed in each relevant chapter: Chapter 3: The Libyan Sahara; Chapter 4: The Eastern Desert of Egypt; Chapter 5: Palmyra. Chapter 6 discusses major factors that may work as explanations for the development of agriculture, the exploitation mineral resources, and trade in these regions. The choice of regions both inside and outside the Roman Empire also allows a discussion on the rise of economic activities linked to the imperial economy. As such, the thesis moves away from a romano-centric perspective and proposes to look instead for internal factors, such as the development of complex societies with organisational frameworks and social networks which enable them to overcome the challenges of their geo-climatic settings. This study concludes that the developments identified in each chapter were not a factor of environmental changes but human agency. The state, or private individuals or communities successfully organised the resources necessary to integrate the regions into wider networks of intense trade in the imperial period. These concerned both physical infrastructure, and the development of far-reaching social networks.

This study investigates the territories of Neapolis and Nola in order to understand what role they played in the economy of their cities and in Campania. It further explores the difficult relationship between mankind and the fragile landscape of Vesuvius, how eruptions changed settlement patterns, exploitation strategies, and how people dealt with other smaller natural disasters that frequently occurred in that area. The thesis is organised in nine chapters, each describing a separate layer of the landscape. The introduction analyses the reasons for the apparent lack of data for the northern slopes of the volcano and further discusses the theoretical issues pertaining to the economy of the countryside. The history chapter lists the major facts of the histoire événementielle and their connection with the landscape’s longterm history. The third chapter studies the features of the static landscape and the exploitation of bedrock resources. Vesuvius is the subject of the fourth chapter, in which are discussed its shape and the eruptions' effects on the static landscape. Chapter five discusses the river Sebethus and how the intermingled action humans and nature created the marshes. Agriculture and animal breeding are analysed in chapter six, settlement patterns in chapter seven, trade in chapter eight. Through archival research and field survey it has been possible to plot 820 sites from ancient southern Campania, 263 of which from the territories of Neapolis and Nola. This evidence has been matched with environmental and archaeological datasets to provide estimates on agricultural produce and population, thus defining surplus and dependance for certain products. The results reveal a high compartmentalisation and degree of dependence of each micro-regional area on the others, for which one can deduce a high specialisation of each economic agent but not necessarily a high productivity for each of its units.