Archaeological interpretation is an imaginative act. Stratigraphy and artefacts do not tell us what the past was like; that is the task of the archaeologist. The diverse group of contributors to this volume address the relationship between archaeology and imagination through the medium of historical fiction and fictive techniques, both as consumers and as producers. The fictionalisation of archaeological research is often used to disseminate the results of scholarly or commercial archaeology projects for wider public outreach. Here, instead, the authors focus on the question of what benefits fiction and fictive techniques, as inspiration and method, can bring to the practice of archaeology itself. The contributors, a mix of archaeologists, novelists and other artists, advance a variety of theoretical arguments and examples to advance the case for the value of a reflexive engagement between archaeology and fiction. Themes include the similarities and differences in the motives and methods of archaeologists and novelists, translation, empathy, and the need to humanise the past and diversify archaeological narratives. The authors are sensitive to the epistemological and ethical issues surrounding the influence of fiction on researchers and the incorporation of fictive techniques in their work. Sometimes dismissed as distracting just-so stories, or even as dangerously relativistic narratives, the use of fictive techniques has a long history in archaeological research and examples from the scholarly literature on many varied periods and regions are considered. The volume sets out to bring together examples of these disparate applications and to focus attention on the need for explicit recognition of the problems and possibilities of such approaches, and on the value of further research about them.

Archaeological interpretation is an imaginative act. Stratigraphy and artefacts do not tell us what the past was like; that is the task of the archaeologist. The diverse group of contributors to this volume address the relationship between archaeology and imagination through the medium of historical fiction and fictive techniques, both as consumers and as producers. The fictionalisation of archaeological research is often used to disseminate the results of scholarly or commercial archaeology projects for wider public outreach. Here, instead, the authors focus on the question of what benefits fiction and fictive techniques, as inspiration and method, can bring to the practice of archaeology itself. The contributors, a mix of archaeologists, novelists and other artists, advance a variety of theoretical arguments and examples to advance the case for the value of a reflexive engagement between archaeology and fiction. Themes include the similarities and differences in the motives and methods of archaeologists and novelists, translation, empathy, and the need to humanise the past and diversify archaeological narratives. The authors are sensitive to the epistemological and ethical issues surrounding the influence of fiction on researchers and the incorporation of fictive techniques in their work. Sometimes dismissed as distracting just-so stories, or even as dangerously relativistic narratives, the use of fictive techniques has a long history in archaeological research and examples from the scholarly literature on many varied periods and regions are considered. The volume sets out to bring together examples of these disparate applications and to focus attention on the need for explicit recognition of the problems and possibilities of such approaches, and on the value of further research about them.

The Changing Landscapes of Rome's Northern Hinterland presents a new regional history of the middle Tiber valley as a lens through which to view the emergence and transformation of the city of Rome from 1000 BC to AD 1000. Setting the ancient city within the context of its immediate territory, the authors reveal the diverse and enduring links between the metropolis and its hinterland. At the heart of the volume is a detailed consideration of the results of a complete restudy of the pioneering South Etruria Survey (c. 1955-1970), one of the earliest and most influential Mediterranean landscape projects. Between 1998 and 2002, an international team based at the British School at Rome conducted a comprehensive restudy of the material and documentary archive generated by the South Etruria Survey. The results were supplemented with a number of other published and unpublished sources of archaeological evidence to create a database of around 5000 sites across southern Etruria and the Sabina Tiberina, extending in date from the Bronze Age, through the Etruscan/Sabine, Republican and imperial periods, to the middle ages. Analysis and discussion of these data have appeared in a series of interim articles published over the past two decades; the present volume offers a final synthesis of the project results. The chapters include the first detailed assessment of the field methods of the South Etruria Survey, an extended discussion of the use of archaeological legacy data, and new insights into the social and economic connectivities between Rome and the communities of its northern hinterland across two millennia. The volume as a whole demonstrates how the archaeological evidence generated by landscape surveys can be used to rewrite narrative histories, even those based on cities as familiar as ancient Rome. Includes contributions by Martin Millett, Simon Keay and Christopher Smith, and a preface by Andrew Wallace-Hadrill.

This text presents the proceedings of the Seventh Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference held at the University of Nottingham in April 1997.