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Project

Between the 3rd c. BCE and the 1st c. CE, Rome expanded rapidly, conquering most of the territories of today’s Western Europe and dominating the Mediterranean Sea. As a result, the first ever “global” market was created, changing forever the life, economy and culture of the Indigenous populations. The archaeological record provides evidence of this interaction between Romans (colonizers) and the native people (colonized) by showing what they produced and consumed. Yet, the evidence is fragmentary and requires a complex process of identification, classification, and interpretation that will serve as the foundation to construct successful historical narratives. These accounts are the only voice of the colonized people, as they did not leave written texts. The macroscopic study of material culture alone has failed to produce accurate identifications, tending to oversimplify the number of participants and productions partaking in these transactions and therefore our understanding of commercial circuits and trade networks. A complementary approach that tackles these issues is needed.

The Mediterranean Connectivity: Trade and Commercial Circuits in the Roman West (2nd c. BCE - 1st c. CE) (MedConTaCCt) project aims to develop a new interdisciplinary and multi-perspective methodological approach that will elucidate the role of trade and supply in Rome’s Western territories by employing techniques associated with archaeometry to study the ceramic, more specifically Black Gloss pottery and lead objects. The project started on April 2020 and is funded by a Partnership Development Grant awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Over the next three to four years, the MedConTaCCt project will achieve the following objectives:

  • breaking new ground by employing archaeometry techniques (the application of scientific methods to the analysis of archaeological artifacts);
  • studying trade across ancient cultures and modern borders by documenting new archaeological evidence for commercial circuits and trade networks between the principal confederations of S Gaul (France), Hispania (Spain), and the peoples of the Italian peninsula during the late Roman Republic and the early Empire;
  • exploring the extent to which this ancient global market created asymmetrical socio-economic relationships of domination and exploitation between and within production and consumption centers;
  • introduce the world of ancient trade and archaeological sciences to student audiences by creating an extensive student mentoring plan and the development of a strong Knowledge Mobilization Plan that includes open-access pedagogical and teaching materials.

The objectives of the project will be achieved through the study of two types of ancient commodities that were vastly traded and flooded the markets of the ancient world: Black Gloss pottery and lead ingots and objects. The rationale behind studying these two commodities lies in the fact that they are present in almost every archaeological site of the historical period under study, making feasible the sampling of enough artifacts and sites to make our study statistically meaningful. The provenance study of these artifacts will be done employing archaeometry. Specifically, the archaeometric analysis will pursue two different but chronologically and methodologically complementary research lines: (i) Dispersive X-ray fluorescence (WDXRF), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) for the analysis of Black Gloss pottery; and (ii) isotopes analysis (Multicollector-Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer, MC-ICP-MS) for the study of lead objects. Studying the provenance of artifacts is crucial to establishing a vector that connects producers and consumers (both directly and indirectly due to redistribution), and delineating possible trade networks and commercial circuits.

The project also contemplates the creation of the MedConTaCCt databank, a major database that will host indefinitely all the analytic and archaeologic data created by the project, as well as any archaeometric analysis on black gloss ceramics, lead objects and galena ores already published. The MedConTaCCt databank will lead to enhanced methods in Digital Humanities and will follow the steps of similar successful initiatives such as the immensaaequora and the OXALID database, creating a major new scholarly and teaching resource and making data easily accessible and searchable for academic and non-academic users after the project is completed.

Our work is structured to facilitate interdisciplinary knowledge on cultural and economic exchange between stakeholders in Canada, Spain, France and Italy. The project involves the participation of an interdisciplinary team of ten researchers from four different universities, two public research centres and one private company across two continents, as well as the creation of a key partnership between the University of Barcelona (UB), the Servicios Generales de Investigación, Universidad del País Vasco (SGIker) and the University of Victoria (UVic).