Stage settings for a connected scene. Globalization and material-culture studies in the early first-millennium B.C.E. Mediterranean

Miguel John Versluys has produced a stimulating and thought-provoking
agenda to reinvigorate study of the Roman world, with its myriad social,
political and economic connections between Rome and the diverse cultures
and communities that fell within and beyond the boundaries of its empire.
He teases out the explicitly anti-colonial nature in recent decades of
specifically Anglo-Saxon discussions of Rome and its empire in response to
∗Tamar Hodos, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol. Email:
t.hodos@bristol.ac.uk.http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 29 May 2014 IP address: 137.222.167.109
Stage settings for a connected scene 25
Romanization. He also sets these particular understandings of what it meant
to live within that empire in a comparative context with other scholarly
traditions that engage with Roman studies. He advocates both globalization
theories and material-culture perspectives to reconsider aspects addressed
by Romanization as a means of pushing the discussion beyond Romans
and Natives, where ultimately it still lingers in the guise of much more
recent perspectives, which emphasize imperialism. The critical evaluation of
Romanization of the 1990s in the Anglo-Saxon tradition was not a unique
process for Anglo-Saxon scholarship engaged in study of colonizing cultures,
however. Parallels can be seen in contemporary Anglo-Saxon scholarship of
the Greek world as well. Does this mean that the potential Versluys sees
for Roman studies in the marriage of globalization and material-culture
approaches can apply to Greek studies too?