The Archaeology of Roman Slavery

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
• Convenor and tutor: Professor Jen Baird
• Assessment: coursework of 1000 words (20%) and a 4000-word essay (80%)

By many estimates, as many as a third of the inhabitants of the Roman empire were slaves. For most elite free Romans, perhaps, slaves were nothing more than ‘talking tools’, devoid of humanity or agency. The invisibility of slaves in Roman archaeology, however, could also be argued until very recently to be a wilful blindness on the part of scholars.

This module seeks to expose what might be learned of Roman slavery and the experiences of enslaved people from archaeological evidence, ranging from artefacts, to architecture, to landscapes.

Indicative module syllabus

• The history of the study of Roman slavery
• Becoming a slave: enslavement and trafficking
• The material culture of slavery 1: confinement and control
• The material culture of slavery 2: hidden lives
• The enslaved body
• Slaving landscapes
• Comparative approaches to the archaeology of slave societies
• Violence and Roman imperialism
• Manumission and Freedmen
• Visualising slavery

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

• display a good knowledge of the key themes and debates in ancient slavery
• display a good knowledge of, and ability to handle with confidence, the most central relevant primary sources
• understand the conceptual and methodological problems which arise in the study of historically distant theories, paradigms and practices
• situate the conceptual questions and issues arising from such study in the context of later and contemporary debates
• engage knowledgeably and critically with the main strands of recent scholarship and different methodological approaches to the subject.