Illuminating Roman Britain.

A wide range of evidence for artificial lighting has survived from the Roman period in Britain. This book provides the first catalogue of all clay and metal lamps, lampholders and candlesticks found in Roman Britain and offers a typological, chronological and spatial analysis of this material. The book provides an illustrated catalogue as well as distribution maps for all major types.
The volume also aims to achieve a fuller understanding of artificial lighting in Roman Britain by placing lamps and candlesticks into their wider social and economic context. The concept that identity is constructed and negotiated through the daily and ritual use of objects is employed here to examine the ways in which a particular group of material culture – lighting equipment – may relate to Romano-British identities. The continual need for fuel clearly has implications beyond the mere acquisition of imported objects and the presence of lamps on a site can also be understood to relate to specific cultural practices and active social behaviour. Identity and status in Roman Britain are defined through the use of this very “Roman” object.
Identities are continuously created and reworked by people and the ways in which the use of lighting equipment changes through time (and depending on the object’s raw material) form central parts of this book.
Other issues addressed include the evidence for local production and for the ritual use of lighting equipment as well as the question of whether the decoration on lamps affected the contexts in which they were used. The archaeological context of lighting equipment is studied on an intra-site, provincial and empire-wide level.