Water in the Roman World: Engineering, Trade, Religion and Daily Life offers a wide and expansive new treatment of the role water played in the lives of people across the Roman world. Individual papers deal with ports and their lighthouses; with water engineering, whether for canals in the north-west provinces, or for the digging of wells for drinking water, and for multiple other purposes; with baths for swimming; and with spas. Further papers explore religion in water-sanctuaries and the deposition of objects in rivers as well as deities connected with water, including river gods and nymphs. A final chapter provides an overview of subjects not fully covered elsewhere, including warships and naval battles, trade and navigation, aqueducts, fishing and fish-farming, and literary response to watery landscapes, rivers and lakes. The latter include works by great landowners such as the younger Pliny with his Laurentine villa beside the sea west of Rome or by poets, among them Catullus enjoying Lake Garda and Ausonius with his loving description of the River Moselle. The contributors address the subject in a variety of different ways, as Classicists drawing largely on literature, archaeologists with experience of excavating the watery environment, and art-historians. The papers range from the theoretical, with particular interest in materiality, to more lyrical approaches which address the Romans with their problems as well as their pleasures.

This book collects together data concerning copper alloy vessels from Roman Britain and relates this evidence to prevailing theories of consumption, identity and culture change in Britain during this time. The aims of this study are to collect a catalogue of copper alloy vessels from England and Wales, categorise them by form, typology, context, chronology and geographic distribution, offer interpretations concerning their cultural associations, manners of consumption, functionality and development over time before commenting upon their value as small finds material reflective of culture change more broadly within Britain during the Roman period. Copper alloy vessels from the Roman period in Britain have not been the subject of focused scholarly study for over 50 years and have never had a focused examination in English. This report not only rectifies this gap in the literature, but proceeds to directly apply this data analysis to the greater theoretical discourse of the development of material culture in Britain during the Roman period, thereby demonstrating the validity and importance of small finds studies to the larger historiographic and theoretical discourse.