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Becoming Roman on the Berkshire Downs: the Evidence from Alfred's Castle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2011

C. Gosden  and
G. Lock
C. Gosden
Affiliation:
Institute of Archaeology, Oxford, [email protected], [email protected]
G. Lock
Affiliation:
Institute of Archaeology, Oxford, [email protected], [email protected]
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Extract

Romanization is a term that people currently love to hate. Few these days approve of the view that Romanization was about bringing an inherently superior Roman civilization to the natives. Many would go further and attempt to replace the term altogether — the most successful of these attempts being Woolf's focus on what it meant to become Roman. The heart of Woolf's argument is that being Roman was not a static quality that people embraced or rejected, but rather a set of cultural forms always in the process of ‘becoming’ and that all within the Empire participated in its creation. ‘Gauls were not “assimilated” to a pre-existing social order, but participated in the creation of a new one’. Roman culture was an entity created anew in different parts of the Empire at different times, through the actions of all groups, and it was not just native peoples who were being Romanized through the expansion of Empire, but also the Romans themselves. The view of mutual creation is one we find attractive. However, there is one element of the argument that we would like to qualify and that is that the process is seen as primarily happening through the élites and the new urban centres created within the Empire — ‘A symbolic system did exist in the Roman cultural system, but it was not located in any one place or region but rather in the set of manners, tastes, sensibilities and ideals that were the common property of an aristocracy that was increasingly dispersed across the empire’.

Type
Articles
Information
Britannia , Volume 34 , November 2003 , pp. 65 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © C. Gosden and G. Lock 2003. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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