The Archaeology of Household Activities

Chapter Five Labels for ladles: Interpreting the material culture of Roman households Penelope M.Allison INTRODUCTION On a general level, Roman domestic behaviour is perceived to be a relatively well understood phenomenon. It is widely believed that problems which face investigations of household behaviour in other archaeologies are easily solved for the Roman world (e.g. Ascher 1961: 324 n.21; McKay 1977:6; Schiffer 1987:237). To some extent this is true. Textual references abound and the extraordinary site formation processes at Pompeii and Herculaneum provide an archaeological record of domestic material which inspired generations of scholars to concern themselves with Roman social life. In fact, in times when other branches of archaeology had been restricted—by the nature of their data, the state of their methodology and the impetus of their theories—from concerning themselves with such mundane and specific levels of inquiry as household behaviour, the nature and extent of the material remains of the Roman world were leading scholars to confront questions concerning the domestic lives of individuals in the past. However, I would like to demonstrate that this wealth of data and this long history of research has resulted in current perspectives of Roman domestic life which are still entrenched in antiquarian approaches to material culture, and which, to a large extent, have tended to ignore changing approaches to the archaeological record (see Hijmans 1996). While other disciplines (e.g. social history and anthropology) and other branches of archaeology have been re-evaluating the principles behind their own perceptions on past domestic life, these antiquarian approaches to Roman domestic life have continued to be embellished unquestioningly. I would also like to demonstrate that such traditional perspectives of Roman domestic life do not fully exploit the available archaeological data, but that they are based on levels of analogy- based inference which, in branches of archaeology which are less well-endowed with data, would have been the subject of much critical soul-searching (e.g. Wylie 1985; Davidson 1988). At the same time, I would like to emphasize that these perspectives continue to present a static view of domestic life in the Roman world—a view based on nineteenth- and early twentieth- century perspectives that a named and identified culture, i.e. a Roman culture, is a unified phenomenon with a specific historical relevance, which can even be used to set up parameters for the investigation of domestic behaviours of other cultures (e.g. the foundation of anthropological kinship studies in Roman law: see Saller 1997). On the contrary, the term ‘Roman culture’ must surely stand for what was a very multicultural society spanning many continents and many centuries. •58• Penelope M.Allison In this chapter, I want to discuss the roles of nineteenth-century scholarship, textual analogy and contemporary analogy in current identifications of Roman household objects, and the importance of such identifications in interpretations of Roman household space and Roman household activity. I want to show, particularly, that the material culture of South Italian towns of the first century AD, like Pompeii, has been taken to represent a concept of Roman domestic life which displays little sensivity to regional, social or chronological differentiation. I would also like to demonstrate that little consideration has been given to the role of the archaeological context of this material culture in providing a fuller picture of household behaviour in this specific region, before these archaeological remains can be employed for any credible presentations of more generalized perspectives of Roman domestic life. POMPEIAN HOUSEHOLD ASSEMBLAGES I am specifically concerned with the investigation of household assemblages in Pompeian houses towards a better understanding of Pompeian domestic life. I have carried out a study of the artefact assemblages in a sample of thirty Pompeian houses (Allison 1992b),1 and, more recently, I have been carrying out a detailed study of the artefacts in the assemblages from one urban block in Pompeii, the Insula del Menandro. This block of residential and, possibly, non-residential units was excavated in the 1930s (Maiuri 1933; Elia 1934) and is now being reinvestigated by the British Pompeii Research Committe (Ling 1997). The purpose of my study of these finds is to produce a detailed catalogue and an analysis of the room and house assemblages from the units in this insula, towards a better comprehension of the use of space and of the state of occupancy in these buildings at the time of the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in AD 79. The presentation of material culture from excavations of Roman settlement sites usually consists of the allocation of the loose finds to specialists to write typological catalogues of each artefact category, with the objective of facilitating studies concerned with the production and trade patterns of each category (e.g. Stead and Rigby 1986; Sackett et al. 1992; Harris 1993). The aim of my current project is to present the finds as they were excavated, in the location of their end-use. Rather than a typological catalogue, it will include a provenance- oriented catalogue which is concerned with the specific context and with the consumption of each artefact. Thus, the objective of employing this format is to systematize these artefacts according to house floor assemblages and to use these for investigations of the spatial distribution of activities around the houses. To date, studies concerned with spatial function in Roman houses have been dominated by investigations which concentrate on the relationship of architectural remains and their decoration to textual references to Roman houses (e.g. Thébert 1987; Clarke 1991:1–30; Wallace-Hadrill 1994:3–41). The actual house contents, which constituted the house floor assemblages, have long been removed for typological catalogues. At the same time, at sites like Pompeii and Herculaneum, it has been assumed by non-Romanists (e.g. Schiffer 1985:18) that these house floor assemblages constitute ‘artefacts of a systemic inventory’ which give valuable insights into human activity (cf. Allison 1992a). However, these artefacts have actually received little attention in studies of Roman household activity. As Dunbabin has noted (1995) in her review of Wallace-Hadrill (1994) ‘a history of Pompeii and Herculaneum which makes full use of the archaeological material’ has yet to be written. In order to employ artefacts and artefact assemblages in an assessment of the spatial distribution of household activities, a reliable system for ascertaining the functions of the artefacts in these assemblages is required. Through my assessment of prior research into Roman The material culture of Roman households •59• artefacts and their functions, for such usable resources, I have become sceptical of the process by which Roman, and Classical, artefacts have been ‘labelled’ and thereby given a function. In addition, I have also been frustrated by the attitudes of more recent scholars who, in their studies of Roman artefacts, may justifiably claim to have abandoned such labelling, but who have chosen to limit their investigations on questions concerning artefact production and have not considered artefact consumption as an important part of their inquiry (Allison 1997b). APPROACHES TO ROMAN MATERIAL CULTURE The concentration on the use of Roman artefacts for production-oriented studies was part of a mid-twentieth-century shift in Roman archaeological research from antiquarianism towards an increased concern for the impact of presumed Roman technological achievements and innovations on the Roman political and economic world. However, as seems to be the main problem for Roman archaeology and its wealth of data, while archaeologists in other branches of the discipline have since moved on to concern themselves more with social contexts, the Romanists seem to feel too weighed down with these quantities of data to absorb and apply fully and successfully new lines of inquiry to it. On the other hand, Roman archaeologists have always been concerned with social history. Since the first excavations in the Campanian region revealed objects of daily life, scholars have been isolating individual artefacts, usually of intrinsic or aesthetic value, for antiquarian study. However, during this ‘ransacking’ of the ancient remains of Pompeii and Herculaneum in particular, the excavators could not help but be aware that these sites were not merely repositories of ancient works but that they represented the materialization of ancient daily life (e.g. Marquardt 1886). A relationship between Roman material culture and the contribution it can make to understanding social systems of the past has long been part of Roman archaeology. It is just that much past scholarship and many of its methodologies are still being used to investigate this relationship, without critical reappraisal. The following discussion has arisen from problems and frustrations which I, personally, am facing in trying to use the Pompeian catalogues, and the mountains of past scholarship in Roman archaeology, to produce a meaningful study of the distribution of Pompeian household material culture. If I appear to be criticizing terms and scholarship, considered outmoded by some Romanists, it is because more recent scholarship hasn’t dealt more usefully with this material and these questions. If the last twenty years of research

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