This lecture is part of the City of Rome programme, an intensive eight-week residential course coordinated by Dr. Christopher Stephen Siwicki, designed for postgraduates from selected British partner universities. The programme is aimed at students at the Master’s or early Doctoral level studying classical archaeology, art history, ancient history, and the transformation of antiquity in the Middle Ages and modern period.
How cults shaped early Roman colonialism
Our understanding of Roman colonialism and its impact on conquered peoples and landscapes has been rapidly transforming in recent years. The confiscation of land and the establishment of colonies have long been recognized as among the most effective and incisive instruments of early Roman expansionism. Recently, historiographical studies and archaeological fieldwork have considerably reshaped this picture, especially in terms of its chronological unfolding.
As in all ancient Italian communities, religious rituals and cults were central to the foundation and well-being of new Roman colonial settlements, leaving a tangible imprint in material, epigraphic, and literary sources. This paper seeks to reconstruct and interpret this religious and cultic imprint through case studies from southern, central, and northern Italy, exploring how it contributes to our understanding of the mechanisms of Roman colonialism during its formative phase in the Republican period.
Tesse D. Stek is the Director of the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome and professor of Mediterranean archaeology at the Groningen Institute of Archaeology (GIA), Groningen University. His research focuses on ancient pre-Roman societies in the western Mediterranean during the first millennium BCE, with particular interest in the transformations brought about by the rise of Roman imperialism and colonization in the Republican period. He has worked extensively on religion, cult places, and landscape archaeology. Together with international colleagues, he coordinates several fieldwork projects in central-southern Italy and eastern Portugal. Publications include Cult places and cultural change in republican Italy, The state of the Samnites, The archaeology of Roman Portugal, Roman republican colonization: new perspectives from archaeology and ancient history, The impact of Rome on cult places and religious practices in ancient Italy, and The archaeology of imperial landscapes: a comparative study of empires in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean world.
See the full programme here.
