Abstract

From Antiquarian times to the present day, studies of the Roman world have often concentrated on the violent aspects of this civilization. This is a consequence of the military and imperial background of many nineteenth-and twentieth-century scholars, the focus of fieldwork upon military structures, and until the shift in archaeological discourse to Processualism, the majority of textbooks focused on the civilizing effects of conquest on “barbarian” peoples (Gosden 2006; Hingley 2000; James 2001, 2002).