Benjamin P. Luley, Continuity and Rupture in Roman Mediterranean Gaul: An Archaeology of Colonial Transformations at Ancient Lattara. Oxford & Philadelphia: Oxbow Books, 2020. 9781789255669.
Reviewed by Vivian A. Laughlin, Wake Forest University, laughlv@wfu.edu.
This book is a study about Ancient Lattara, an ancient Etruscan port city in southern France, south of Montpellier, that synthesizes over 35 years of archaeological data from 500 BC to AD 200, which includes transformations between the Celtic, Etruscans, Greeks, and Romans. The study discusses how local structures of power and forceful domination were tools of agency that contributed to ancient forms of colonialism. Because similar ancient studies about colonialism have been broadly examined, to have such a study elucidated at a local level is paramount for leading the discussion of other local community-focused studies on ancient colonialism. To this end, publications about Lattara, historically, have been predominantly in French. Therefore, having English scholarship that also includes broad discussions of the impact of colonialism within the archaeological transformations helps fill the scholarship lacunae.
Chapter 1, the Introduction, sets the framework and intentions for the study. Luley explains how he sought to examine how colonialism created material changes evident in the archaeological record and identifies the larger power structural changes that resulted “from the violent creation and maintenance of Roman rule in Mediterranean Gaul” (p. 5). Careful attention was utilized while drawing from various modern methodologies of colonialism, structuration, and agency to create an amalgamated methodological approach. Crucial to this study are the intentional usages of deeper engagement with these methodologies and the contrasting examples of similar usages by colleagues in the field that are “anti-colonial” scholarship, thereby showcasing the necessity to employ modern methodologies and theoretical approaches like those utilized in this study. Luley addresses this debate while employing post-colonial theory and modern terms such as “colonialism” and simplifies the rationale (p. 7). To truly understand the colonial archaeological trajectory of transformations, a solid theoretical methodological approach was necessary to illuminate the use of agency by the agent, and to display how the material culture acted as sub-agents of cultural production.
Chapter 2, “They Make a Desolation and Call It Peace,” provides the historic background of Lattara, its inhabitants, and trade, and also describes the violent acts that became a foundational structure of the Roman conquests in the region, which resulted in multiple rebellions from the inhabitants. Consequently, the local economy faced the imposition of various taxes and levies, forced army drafting, and even land confiscations and redistributions. Including the colonial history of Lattara and its neighboring regions before the Roman conquest provides sociopolitical data about the local communities, which established a base to note the colonial changes during and after the Roman conquest. The author also employs various methodologies of colonial theory that were introduced in the Introduction. Importantly, this chapter elucidates the employed use of structuration and agency in each space, which inevitably contributes to showcasing the trajectory of colonialism throughout time and space up to and after the Roman conquest.
Chapter 3, “Living Together, Living Apart,” concerns housing, settlements, and the social structure modifications that affected Lattara’s inhabitants. Housing communities progressively became replaced by urban monumental landscapes that displayed the imperialism of the Romans. These housing and building plans contributed to significant changes not just in strata but in material space, organization, and social relationships within the community. Ultimately, the Roman conquest changed the sociopolitical-housing and landscape-strata constructs. While Luley does not posit this bluntly, these acts resemble what we today call gentrification. Essentially, Luley has provided multiple examples of gentrification displayed in Lattara’s Roman conquest, including the displacement of its long-standing inhabitants and the exploitation and expurgation of the local landscape.
Chapter 4, “From Home to the Villa,” shows the growth and expansion of the local economy through the lenses of trade goods and its effects on the local identity of Lattara. A crucial aspect of this chapter was showcasing trade imports and exports such as terra sigillata ceramics and wine. There are abundant sources about viticulture in Italy and eastern Mediterranean lands during antiquity, but little is known about viticulture from the south of France in antiquity. Even less is known about the various colonial transformational effects that trade and imports had on Lattara’s society. Luley tackles these difficult aspects and includes intricate details about the maltreatment of wage laborers and the enslaved—the former were inadvertently forced to work because of the debt from the Roman taxation and levies, and the latter were forced indigenous laborers used for the mass production of goods. The prior chapters were structured to introduce the intricate layers of the “emergence of a class society” (p. 113). This is pertinent because scholars historically posit classism as an applicable term and activity that is only employed after antiquity. Luley provides evidence to show otherwise. Importantly, Luley displays how classism was “directly linked to Roman rule” in antiquity (p. 114).
Chapter 5, “Turning People into Things,” is about the economy and the rise of coinage: the author undertakes a numismatic study which reveals the social transformations that impacted Lattara during the Roman period. Luley unveils the differences in how coinage production usually represents a growing economy; however, in Lattara, coinage production was representative of an economy that “exploited” and “debilitated” its inhabitants (p. 120). Again, a comparison was performed (in brief) of coinage production and usage before and after Roman colonialization.
Chapter 6, “Community and Cosmology at Lattara,” begins by revisiting the economic issues detailed in the prior chapter and discussing how they are entangled culturally with religious identity, material culture, and praxis. Key to the chapter is how the colonialization of a new Roman society centralized expressions of religious belief, resulting in religious identity issues in various aspects of ancestor veneration, household deities and spirits, and the divinities of the sacred landscape. Usually, imperial Romanization implements hybrid material culture that incorporated a syncretization of pre-existing local deities with the Roman deities. However, although there were no concrete examples uncovered from the excavations (p. 171), there were Latin inscriptions uncovered that mention Mercury and Mars (p. 169). Lattara’s Roman colonialization exhibited “elements of both continuity and rupture” for the local inhabitants (p. 148).
Chapter 7, “Feasting, Power, and Money,” the last chapter, is a natural place to hone in on the sociopolitical instabilities that developed in Roman Lattara. The power structure and imbalance throughout the trajectory of the book imply significant political benefits to those in power. Luley dives into the politics employed throughout various time periods at Lattara by treating assorted political strategies, including a discussion of the heterarchy and hierarchy that emerged from the implementation of a class structure and consequent system of privilege. The chapter moves into the political transformations that affected the status, political systems, and the socio-economy of Lattara.
The book was an enjoyable read that kept my attention. It is an extensively detailed study that kept me wanting to understand more about Lattara. While Luley paid careful attention to detail by revisiting crucial aspects of prior chapters and providing a consistent flow connecting each chapter, each chapter can also be read individually. The historiography incorporated into the study was comprehensive. The argument that violence and social disruption were implicit in the Roman conquest of Mediterranean Gaul was thoroughly proven. This book is an instrumental reference for anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, and is essential to fill the gap in the scholarship on ancient uses of colonialism. While the book focused on the local identities and community of Lattara, the study can be used for comparative analyses on ancient forms of colonialism exhibited on other ancient identities and communities.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction (1–19)
2. “They Make a Desolation and Call It Peace” (21–47)
3. Living Together, Living Apart (49–83)
4. From the Home to the Villa (85–117)
5. Turning People into Things (119–146)
6. Community and Cosmology at Lattara (147–178)
7. Feasting, Power, and Money (179–213)
Epilogue: After Lattara (215–222)
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