The Material Life of Roman Slaves - Softcover

Joshel, Sandra R.; Petersen, Lauren Hackworth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0521139570 ISBN 13: 9780521139571

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2015

Synopsis

The Material Life of Roman Slaves is a major contribution to scholarly debates on the archaeology of Roman slavery. Rather than regarding slaves as irretrievable in archaeological remains, the book takes the archaeological record as a key form of evidence for reconstructing slaves' lives and experiences. Interweaving literature, law, and material evidence, the book searches for ways to see slaves in the various contexts - to make them visible where evidence tells us they were in fact present. Part of this project involves understanding how slaves seem irretrievable in the archaeological record and how they are often actively, if unwittingly, left out of guidebooks and scholarly literature. Individual chapters explore the dichotomy between visibility and invisibility and between appearance and disappearance in four physical and social locations - urban houses, city streets and neighborhoods, workshops, and villas.

About this title

Book Description:

Although slaves were ubiquitous in the fabric of Roman daily life, contemporary visitors to archaeological sites walk through landscapes that appear untouched by slavery. The Material Life of Roman Slaves retrieves and represents the physical environment and lives of Roman slaves. Through the scholarly collaboration of a historian and an art historian, the book interweaves, and sets in dialogue, the textual record of Roman law and literature on slaves and the archaeological remains of the houses, workshops, streets, and country villas that slaves inhabited in Pompeii, other sites on the Bay of Naples, and Ostia outside Rome.

About the Author:

Sandra R. Joshel is Professor of History at the University of Washington. A scholar of Roman slavery, women, and gender, she is the author of Work, Identity, and Legal Status at Rome: A Study of the Occupational Inscriptions, and editor of Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman Culture: Differential Equations (with Sheila Murnaghan) and Imperial Projections: Ancient Rome in Modern Popular Culture (with Margaret Malamud and Donald T. McGuire).

Lauren Hackworth Petersen is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Delaware. A scholar of Roman art and archaeology, she is the author of The Freedman in Roman Art and Art History and editor of Mothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greece and Rome (with Patricia Salzman-Mitchell). She has received an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship, a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Getty Foundation, and a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0521139570
• ISBN 13: 9780521139571
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 317