Continuity and Rupture in Roman Mediterranean Gaul: An Archaeology of Colonial Transformations at Ancient Lattara

By Benjamin P. Luley

With the decline in popularity of the term “Romanization” as a way of analyzing the changes in the archaeological record visible throughout the conquered provinces of the Roman Empire, scholars have increasingly turned to the important concept of “identity” to understand the experiences of local peoples living under Roman rule. Studies of identity in the Roman Empire have thus emphasized how local peoples, rather than simply passively copying Roman culture, actively created and recreated complex and multi-faceted identities that incorporated local traditions within the increasingly connected and “globalized” world of the empire. How did the violent nature of Roman rule in the provinces impact local communities and the ways in which individuals interacted with one another? This book provides a detailed study of the ways in which the Celtic-speaking peoples of the ancient settlement of Lattara in Roman Mediterranean Gaul fashioned their lives under two centuries of Roman rule,and in particular the ways in which the creation of these lived experiences wasentangled in the larger processes of Roman colonialism.

The important archaeological settlement and port of Lattara (located today in modern Lattes in Mediterranean France), was occupied from ca 500 BCE to 200 CE, and has been the focus of extensive excavations by international teams of archaeologists for over 35 years. The author seeks to understand the ways in which the daily lives of the inhabitants of Lattara were shaped and constrained by the particular historical circumstances of Roman rule, involving the violent conquest of the province between 125-121 BCE, the pacification of numerous revolts in the in the first half of the first century BCE, and the imposition of an oppressive system of taxation, land redistribution, and grain levies.

Through a detailed analysis of the large corpus of archaeological evidence dating from ca. 200 BCE to 200 CE at Lattara, the author argues that the violent establishment of Roman rule in Mediterranean Gaul engendered very different forms of social relationships and interactions that structured the community during the late first century BCE and onward. This involved a new organization of domestic space and living arrangements, new relationships structuring the production and exchange of material goods, different relationships between the community and the wider spiritual world, and new strategies for acquiring political influence and power, based upon the increasing importance of material wealth. All of this occurred by the very end of the first century BCE despite the continued persistence of many aspects of local identity, particularly evident in religious practices. Furthermore, these new social relationships were arguably paramount in the daily practices of reproducing Roman rule at Lattara, and in the larger province of Mediterranean Gaul more generally; practices that were in particular rooted in an ever-increasing socio-economic hierarchy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Sep 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781789255676

Benjamin P. Luley

Benjamin P. Luley is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Department of Classics at Gettysburg College, PA. He has previously held positions at the York College of Pennsylvania and Messiah College, PA and has taught in France. He obtained his PhD in Anthropology (Archaology) in 2011 from the University of Chicago.

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Chapter 1

Introduction

Structure, Agency, and Power in Roman Mediterranean Gaul

For my part, if I have recalled a few details of these hideous butcheries, it is by no means because I take a morbid delight in them, but because I think that these heads of men, these collections of ears, these burned houses, these Gothic invasions, this steaming blood, these cities that evaporate at the edge of the sword, are not to be so easily disposed of. They prove that colonization, I repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it.

Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism¹

The Mediterranean Sea has always brought together diverse groups of people, although the exact nature of these connections has varied throughout time, from the establishment of small trading enclaves to the creation of vast empires – most notably the Roman Empire. Lying near these connecting shores in the region that the French today call le Midi, the artifacts and remains from 700 years of occupation at the ancient settlement of Lattara certainly attest to a long and complex history of interaction and exchange with the wider Mediterranean world. Largely forgotten until its rediscovery by archaeologists in the 1960s, the layers of history at the site, spanning a period from approximately 500 BC to AD 200, reveal interactions and exchanges between the local Celtic occupants of the town and various outsiders – first Etruscans, then Greeks, and then finally Romans.² In contrast to the relative autonomy Lattara enjoyed during the period of contact with the Etruscans and Greeks, the settlement came under direct Roman rule by the end of the second century BC. Between 125 and 121 BC, Roman armies violently subjugated the peoples of what is today Mediterranean France, and then put down a series of uprisings against Roman rule over the course of the next half century. In the decades following the suppression of these revolts, Roman influences became more and more noticeable at Lattara: public buildings in the center of the town, courtyard houses with red roof tiles and white-washed walls, and eventually, temples dedicated to Roman deities like Mercury. At a more quotidian level, new goods also began to appear, such as the shiny red gloss ceramic known as terra sigillata, olive oil, and the pungent fish sauce known as garum that was so loved by the Romans.³

In the past, scholars have often interpreted the appearance of Greek or Roman material at sites throughout the Mediterranean as evidence for the Hellenization or Romanization of local peoples, supposedly resulting in a decline in local identity and the adoption of foreign practices and beliefs.⁴ However, over the course of the past several decades, researchers have sought to either significantly nuance this paradigm of Hellenization and Romanization, or to reject it entirely.⁵ In particular, a growing number of works have come to an appreciation of how the native inhabitants of the Roman Empire actively constructed complex and multi-faceted local identities within the conquered provinces.⁶ Similarly, in the broader field of the archaeology of colonialism, there has also been a heightened awareness of the dynamism of indigenous societies both before and after colonial contact, as well as the active role that local people can play in the creation of complex identities that do not conform to a strict binary divide between native/colonized vs. foreigner/ colonizer.⁷ Indeed, anthropologists for the most part have long ago done away with the myth of the static and timeless native, living in a state of primordial bliss until the arrival of disruptive foreign invaders and colonizers.⁸

However, in so far as the focus within scholarship has shifted to an analysis of the diversity of local identities and experiences within the Roman Empire, there is ironically an overall dearth of extended, detailed analyses of the experiences of different individuals and groups of people living within a single community.⁹ Instead, scholars have often examined the issue of identity at the analytical level of entire provinces – or even multiple provinces – potentially obscuring the varied experiences of different communities within the Roman Empire, as well as the divergences in social life amongst those within the same community.¹⁰ Furthermore, understanding the potentially darker side of empire – what those recording history wish to forget or ignore – in particular means understanding colonialism not at the level of provinces or vast swaths of territory, but at the local level of towns, villages, and households, where communities of individuals lived and died with the realities of foreign rule.¹¹ Along similar lines, the traditional and lamentable emphasis that researchers have often placed on understanding above all the experiences of the highest socio-political echelon of people in the provinces – those who would have had the most stake in the Roman Empire – has often persisted in many recent works. As a result, scholars are still left with a quite incomplete understanding of how the less fortunate experienced life under Roman rule in specific contexts.¹² In part, this is arguably the result of the overall incompleteness of the archaeological record, with few sites producing sufficient data on daily life for a truly local analysis, and with elite sites often much more visible in the archaeological record.¹³

The extensive results from over 35 years of excavations across the town and port of Lattara in the Roman province of Mediterranean Gaul thus offer an important means to conduct a bottom-up analysis of the impact of Roman rule in the provinces. Here, at a settlement like Lattara, archaeologists can comprehend the long-term effects of Roman rule not as impersonal global history, but rather as the local experiences of real people whose lives under the Roman Empire left countless traces in the layers of history unearthed at the site. Although looking at the small-scale experiences of a single community at first glance could seem to be overly focused, it is precisely at this level that we can fully comprehend the articulations between local and global within a larger system of structural asymmetries in control and power. In this way, through a study of the intricacies and details of the experiences of those living under Roman rule at one community, the site of Lattara offers the possibility for the kind of thick description famously advocated by the noted anthropologist Clifford Geertz, without it ever being simply a study of just one community.¹⁴ As Geertz writes, The locus of study is not the object of study. Anthropologists don’t study villages (tribes, towns, neighborhoods…); they study in villages. You can study different things in different places, and some things – for example what colonial domination does to established frames of moral expectation – you can best study in confined localities. But that doesn’t make the place what it is you are studying.¹⁵

This book thus hopefully offers a detailed analysis of the various changes in social life within one specific community in the wider world of the provinces following the Roman conquest. At the same time, this work seeks to build upon earlier works on identity by moving beyond the issue of agency to more fully examining how larger structures of power can constrain individual choices. In particular, this means investigating the changing nature of social relationships which provided the context for the creation and articulation of specific kinds of diverse and multi-faceted local identities within the wider Roman Empire. In so much as the creation and recreation of identity is a constant and active process – rather than something static and unchanging – the creation of these locally situated identities and social relationships emerge from specific historical events and circumstances. It follows, then, that the historically specific events of the Roman conquest – so different from the arrival of Etruscan and Massaliote merchants at Lattara three to four centuries earlier – had an important effect on local relationships within the community during the first century BC. How, then, did the Roman conquest potentially impact the structuring web of social relationships linking together the people of Lattara in culturally and historically specific ways? Certainly at the level of specific communities in the provinces, scholars of the Roman world have not always intensively examined in any critical manner the potential links between the creation of local identities in the Roman provinces and the long and often violent processes by which Rome asserted its authority over formerly autonomous peoples.¹⁶ In some sense, this lack of understanding between violence, power imbalances, and local social relationships should be surprising, since the establishment of Roman rule in the provinces was based upon violent conquest and was often met with considerable resistance by local natives – this is certainly true for Mediterranean Gaul as we will see in the next chapter.¹⁷ Furthermore, the ongoing process of maintaining local Roman rule – at least for an initial extended period – was often dependent upon a strong military presence, making it far different from, for example, the globalized world of today.¹⁸ In the case of Roman Mediterranean Gaul – where several major revolts broke out throughout the first century BC – Roman armies were regularly present in the province from the time of the initial conquest in 125–121 BC to the elevation of the province to senatorial status in 21 BC, or some 100 years, roughly akin to the amount of time the French army occupied Algeria or the British did so in India.¹⁹ As we will see further in Chapter 2, the changes in material culture so evident at Lattara in the second half of the first century BC thus occurred in a context of approximately a century of violent conquest, revolts, taxation, and land confiscations.

In many ways, the development of identity as a focus in Roman archaeology has been part of the growing influence of post-structural thought on the social sciences emerging by the 1980s, emphasizing individual agency and the creative capacity of these individuals to articulate local meaning and identity through the selective consumption of both foreign and local material goods in a way that is not predetermined by any larger structure.²⁰ In this regard, these post-structural works on consumption have certainly succeeded in bringing out questions of agency and local meaning that had been largely absent from the macro- and structuralist analysis of many scholars working within the earlier framework of Dependency Theory or World-Systems Theory.²¹ At the same time, however, the increasing emphasis on agency also meant that any deep analysis of structural power that had been so central to more traditional Marxist analyses also often went by the wayside.²² In fact, an overemphasis on the actions of individuals, all seemingly pursuing their own goals and motivations in order to create local meaning for themselves, seems to mirror a great deal of traditional economic theory going back to Adam Smith.²³ Indeed, Karl Polanyi has argued that the very notion of an independent, self-regulating market requires – both conceptually and practically – the presence of individual actors all seeking to maximize their economic gain.²⁴ He writes, To separate labor from other activities of life and to subject it to the laws of the market was to annihilate all organic forms of existence and to replace them by a different type of organization, an atomistic and individual one.²⁵ Given in particular the links between modern colonialism and the emergence of this kind of market, the risk is that an overemphasis on the autonomy of individuals as social actors in scholarly analyses can actually tend to recapitulate the very bourgeois ideology implicit behind colonial and neo-colonial projects of development. What can start off as a critique of colonialism can come to seemingly reinforce key aspects of Western colonial thought.²⁶

To avoid practicing what noted ethnographer and social theorist David Graeber in his characteristic wit has referred to as, anthropology as it might have been written by Milton Friedman, ²⁷ requires understanding the changes in the material record at Lattara after the Roman conquest as part of a larger structure of power that was constantly being articulated through the material practices of people living in the province. This perspective is certainly central to the recent work of Louise Revell in her study of urbanism in Roman Britain and Hispania that examines precisely this relationship between structure and agency.²⁸ Her analysis thus focuses on, the way in which Roman power and Roman culture were actively reproduced at a local level through the agency of those incorporated within its sphere of influence … The day-to-day encounters within the provincial town formed the point of reproduction, when the power of Rome was recreated in the lives of its subjects.²⁹ Somewhat similarly, David Mattingly has also recently pointed out that, While native agency was clearly a significant factor in many colonial situations, we should not lose sight of the distorting effect of imperial power, and elsewhere he adds, negotiation and the choices taken by subject peoples (collectively or as individual bodies) were thus not made in a power vacuum.³⁰ Finally, Andrew Gardner has also recently argued that, There is a danger that if we limit our application of postcolonial theory to attempts to describe provincial cultures as composites of fragmentary, fluid and hybrid identities, seemingly involving a fair degree of choice and flexibility, we will fail to analyze the power relationships that create and sustain inequality. Partly this requires us to recognize the continuing role of violence in imperial society, but also it necessitates a deeper engagement with theories of agency, personhood and the significance of material transformation to everyday life, and a concomitant interest in the structural characteristics of Roman imperialism as a process.³¹

This book, then, seeks to examine the ways in which the material changes evident in the archaeological record at Lattara were part of larger structural changes in power resulting from the violent creation and maintenance of Roman rule in Mediterranean Gaul. Specifically, I argue that the extensive and varied archaeological evidence from over 35 years of excavations at the site, which we will see presented throughout this book, suggests that quite different social relationships and forms of interactions emerged at Lattara in the course of the first century BC in the wake of the Roman conquest. This involved a new organization of domestic space and living arrangements, new relationships structuring the production and exchange of material goods, different relationships between the community and the wider spiritual world, and new strategies for acquiring political influence and power, based upon the increasing importance of material wealth. All of this occurred by the first century AD despite the continued persistence of many aspects of traditional, local identity. Furthermore, these new social relationships were arguably paramount in the daily practices of reproducing Roman rule at Lattara and in the larger province of Mediterranean Gaul more generally, practices that were in particular rooted in an ever-increasing socio-economic hierarchy.

Ancient Rome and Colonialism

Before pursuing these themes further within the context of Lattara, it is useful here to first define several key terms, most notably colonialism, and to address the debate within Roman archaeology concerning the applicability of post-colonial theory and comparative terms such as colonialism to the study of the ancient world. As scholars became increasingly skeptical of the efficacy of Romanization as an explanation for the material changes evident in the conquered provinces, many turned to the field of post-colonial studies as a way of better illuminating the differing experiences of local peoples living under Roman rule.³² However, a considerable debate has ensued concerning the applicability of post-colonial theory to the ancient world, and more generally, the appropriateness of employing terms such as colonialism and imperialism – with their potential modern connotations – when analyzing the Roman Empire.³³ In a large part, this debate has arguably been deeply rooted in a larger divide within the field of Mediterranean archaeology.³⁴ On one side, some archaeologists have advocated an approach rooted in the comparative social sciences and privileging as the goal of analysis a critical understanding of the diversity of human experiences across time and space – and thus not solely focused on the ancient Mediterranean world.³⁵ For projects with this kind of orientation, comparative, heuristic terms are absolutely necessary for the analysis. Conversely, other archaeologists have preferred to maintain more traditional links with classical studies and ancient history, and have eschewed – or at least expressed deep reservations about – the applicability of a broader, comparative framework for analysis.³⁶ In particular, many in this latter camp have raised important objections concerning the presumed links between the ancient Greco-Roman world and modern, capitalist society.³⁷ This long-held presumption about the links between antiquity and modernity was prominent in much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century – when scholars saw classical antiquity as a direct forerunner to modern civilization – and is also still present in many recent popular works reaching out to a wider audience on the value of the classics today.³⁸ In regard to the use of the terms colonialism and imperialism when analyzing the Roman Empire, the typical objection has been that the concepts are so laden with connotations linked up with modern Western colonialism of the past several centuries that any attempt to apply them to the more distant past inevitably produces a biased and necessarily anachronistic interpretation.³⁹

Fig. 1.1: Map of the Roman Empire, ca. AD 120, showing the location of ancient Lattara (map: author).

While some of these reservations are potentially valid, there has also arguably been a certain naivety concerning the very possibility of disentangling modern scholarship from colonial legacies of the past two centuries. This is particularly evident in the suggestion that much of the post-colonial scholarship has supposedly been simply anti-colonial, seemingly implying the need in scholarship for a truly neutral analysis of the ancient Roman world.⁴⁰ In regard to the notion of neutral in the sense that any analysis of the Roman world should be purely empirical, objective, and value-free, a significant body of archaeological theory since the 1980s has cast serious doubt on this very possibility.⁴¹ The material record of the past is on its own always inherently ambiguous, in the sense that it is only through the interpretations of archaeologists themselves – particularly through detailed analyses of contextual evidence – that the data can speak and obtain meaning in a modern context.⁴² In this regard, Richard Hingley, for example, has argued that, "Our knowledge of classical Rome can only exist in a contemporary context.⁴³ Modern scholarship is implicated in modern colonialism not just in terms of its long legacy within academia throughout the past two centuries,⁴⁴ but also more importantly in the sense that colonial legacies persist throughout the world today, to the extent that many scholars – often those intimately familiar with the current state of affairs for formerly colonized peoples – have preferred the term neo-colonialism to describe the contemporary, globalized world.⁴⁵ What often appear as more neutral assessments of colonialism, past or present, are often in part due to their larger position in discourses that tend to recapitulate the socio-economic status quo of the world today. To briefly cite a recent example, the controversy surrounding David Mattingly’s use of the word occupation to characterize Roman rule in Britain is arguably not solely tied to the potential applicability of the term as a valid interpretation; if nothing else, the violent uprisings against Roman rule and the continuing need for the presence of multiple Roman legions in the province points to the notion of occupation.⁴⁶ Rather, the dissatisfaction with the term is seemingly just as much rooted in the way in which the term occupation deeply unsettled the traditional interpretations concerning the Roman Empire of both scholars and the general public alike, in a way that more neutral and safe terms such as arrival, presence, or simply, Roman province would not. Any way we characterize the past, we do so with modern words and symbols that are entangled in a larger web of modern discourses about the world. In this way, our analysis of the past is never neutral." What is arguably continuously needed is a more critical positionality on the part of Roman archaeologists, rather than a turn to a purely empiricist approach that feigns an objective neutrality.

Secondly, in regard to a kind of moral neutrality, it is certainly true that merely reducing Roman imperial rule to a question of good or bad can prove distracting to a deeper analysis of the nuances and complexities of colonial rule in local settings. At least ostensibly for this reason, then, there has often been an insistence on the part of scholars that any analysis of the Roman Empire should remain neutral and refrain from any language that risks portraying Roman rule in an overly negative light.⁴⁷ However, one wonders if this insistence is in fact due more to the convenient vastness of time separating the Roman Empire from the present; when the blood dries and no one is alive to speak out against empire, it is easy to assume an armchair neutrality that scholars can no longer afford to take, for example, in regard to the more recent but equally bloody conquest of the Americas.⁴⁸ If nothing else, one wonders if the insistence that scholars of the Roman world refrain from any hints that the Roman Empire was bad has had the adverse effect of preventing a deeper analysis of the potentially negative effects that Roman rule had on local communities.⁴⁹ Although vast structural differences do exist between the Roman Empire and modern colonialism, the subaltern voices and perspectives of those who have experienced modern colonialism and its enduring legacies clearly attest to the overwhelmingly negative and traumatic effects that colonial rule can and does have on the vast majority of local peoples.⁵⁰ Especially given that these kinds of subaltern voices – the voices of those who did not benefit from the Roman conquest – have not really survived from the ancient Mediterranean world, can scholars afford to ignore these perspectives entirely when seeking to understand the various experiences of those living under the Roman Empire?⁵¹ In regard to a critical application of post-colonial theory to an analysis of the Roman Empire, Jane Webster writes, "At the very least it may help us to remember, where we often seem in danger of forgetting it, that the Pax Romana, like the [modern] Pax Britannica, brought violence, disruption, and the loss of freedom for many indigenous peoples, and was met by resistance as well as consent.⁵² Similarly, in a recent comparative volume on the archaeology of colonialism across space and time, archaeologist Audrey Horning reminds us that, If we can say anything at all about colonialism in different spaces and places and times … it is that colonialism was and is ugly, unfair, violent, and disfiguring. In seeking to understand colonialism and how it reverberates and is still being enacted around the world, we cannot and must not lose sight of that essential fact."⁵³

Lastly, the suggestion that the use of the term colonialism to analyze the Roman Empire is somehow ultimately bound to be solely anachronistic has arguably been something of a red herring; Jane Webster, for example, in an early important work on post-colonial approaches to the Roman Empire was quite emphatic that the use of the term colonialism and the application of post-colonial analyses meant identifying differences between Rome and modern empires as much as similarities, and furthermore, that the ancient Roman Empire was not simply analogous to modern colonialism.⁵⁴ Similarly, Peter Van Dommelen has more recently pointed out that the use of a comparative term such as colonialism for both the ancient and modern world, "does not imply that they are identical overall but that specific aspects can be identified that are similar or contrasting.⁵⁵ If we accept the inherently interpretative nature of archaeology, the crucial issue revolves around the key issues and terms we use as starting point for analysis, which in turn allow for a critical and comparative understanding of the past through a modern lens without ever predetermining the conclusion.⁵⁶ If the goal is to understand the flow of material goods in the Roman Empire and the ways in which individuals assigned local meaning to these commodities, then a term such as globalization does in fact have an important efficacy.⁵⁷ By contrast, when seeking to understand the potential impact that the Roman conquest had on local forms of social relationships, the term colonialism has the advantage of focusing on the asymmetrical power relationships that can emerge in situations in which local peoples fall under foreign rule through violent conquest. Leaving aside for a moment certain key structural differences between ancient Rome and modern colonialism (see below), what underlying elements does Roman Mediterranean Gaul share with, for example, the French in Algeria, the Spanish in the Americas, the British in Ireland, Africa, or India, or the United States in the far west?⁵⁸ In all cases, foreign armies arrived to violently conquer local peoples, claiming territorial control with little or no consent from these indigenous populations. Following the initial conquest, to varying degrees foreign colonists then arrived to settle on this newly conquered land. Furthermore, in all these cases, the attempts at foreign control met significant local resistance. Returning again to a recent comparative work on the archaeology of colonialism, Horning also points out that, Violence, death, poverty, marginality, destruction, and displacement are attendant upon all colonial experiences to varying degrees, given that the one element of colonialism that remains true through time and space is the operation of unequal power relations."⁵⁹

As used in this book, then, colonialism implies this violent and unequal relationship of control between a foreign people and locals,⁶⁰ and here I draw upon a recent definition by Peter Van Dommelen, who writes, In structural terms, the definition rests on two key features, namely, in the first place, the presence of one or more groups of foreign people (the colonizers) in a region at some distance from their own place of origin and, in the second place, asymmetrical socio-economic relationships between the colonizing and colonized groups – inequality, in a single word.⁶¹ In conclusion, to do away with a concept such as colonialism when attempting to analyze Roman Mediterranean Gaul during the first century BC is to risk dismissing the role that violence and exploitation played in the construction of local communities in the Roman provinces, and further risks promoting (at best) a naïve, sanitized version of the past, and (at worst) a vision of ancient Rome that potentially normalizes neo-colonial relationships present in the world today.⁶²

With this in mind, it is also worth pointing out a crucial difference between Roman colonialism – as defined above – and modern examples: the ways in which cultural conceptions of race and ethnicity were or were not used to institutionalize difference and inequality within the colonial provinces. Unlike in much of modern colonialism – with its creation of clear racial and ethnic hierarchies – it is quite apparent that in the Roman Empire, perceptions of ethnic or geographical difference were not a systemic or structural barrier to participating in local rule following the Roman conquest, or even in the larger rule of the empire.⁶³ As Nicola Terrenato has quite rightly pointed out, the documented rise of certain local people from the conquered provinces, including Gaul, to senatorial status in the Roman world would be akin to, an Indian Rajah becoming a member of the House of Lords in the aftermath of the British conquest.⁶⁴ As Greg Woolf has discussed, a far more important criterion for advancement in the socio-political hierarchy of the Roman Empire was the extent to which local peoples acquired the necessary humanitas (a Latin term roughly translating as culture or civilization), involving at once intellectual and moral accomplishments and qualities that would set one apart from the barbarians of the world.⁶⁵ This can be seen, for example, in the remark by the Greek geographer Strabo, writing at the end of the first century BC about the Mediterranean Celts following the Roman conquest: They [the Celts] are no longer barbarians [βαρβάροι] but have changed fully into the type of Romans in both language [τῇ γλώττῃ] and in ways of life [τοῖς βίοις], and some also in civic life [τῇ πολιτείᾳ].⁶⁶ This quote, however, also shows the way in which traditional Celtic language and culture could in fact be potential barriers to successfully integrating oneself into Roman society: although the ethnic origin of someone did not preclude participation in Roman socio-political life, full participation did require humanitas, and that meant acquiring the civilized urban lifestyle of the Roman elite, including a mastery of the Latin language.

Along somewhat similar lines, there is to a certain point a debate amongst scholars concerning the extent to which the Romans were actively prejudiced against non-Roman peoples.⁶⁷ Certainly, at the time of the conquest of Mediterranean Gaul, there were very clear linguistic and cultural differences between the local Celtic peoples and the Roman conquerors.⁶⁸ Based upon the surviving passages in later authors, the now lost ethnographic account of the Celtic peoples by the Greek traveler and philosopher Poseidonios of Apameia, who journeyed in Mediterranean Gaul around ca. 90 BC, illustrated the vast differences the Greeks and the Romans saw between themselves and these Celts.⁶⁹ Furthermore, as the example noted by Strabo seemingly illustrates, these differences did matter in the way Romans perceived the Celtic peoples: when one acquired the trappings of humanitas, including the Latin language, an urbanized existence, and political involvement in the Roman civitas, one was no longer a barbarian. As we shall see in the next chapter, there are furthermore some remarks by the Roman orator and politician Cicero from the early first century BC that express a great deal of antipathy toward the Mediterranean Celts, although the extent to which this is simply oratorical rhetoric meant for the specific context of a trial against a former Roman governor of Mediterranean Gaul has been debated by scholars.⁷⁰

Fig. 1.2: Map of the excavations of Lattara (courtesy of Lattes excavations). The numbers indicate excavation zones that have been excavated from 1983 to the present. The letter s before a number (sondage) denotes an area of the site excavated in the 1970s by the GAP.

Understanding Colonial Transformations at Ancient Lattara

As way of a general background for understanding the impact of Roman rule at Lattara, the region today known as Mediterranean France extends from the shores of the Mediterranean to the rugged uplands of the Cévennes to the north. In turn, the region is bordered on the east by the Alps and on the west by the Pyrenees. In ancient times, the Greeks referred to this land as Keltiké, home of the Keltoí (the Celts), and the Romans would eventually name this same territory Gallia (Gaul). Following the Roman conquest, the Romans specifically designated the region of Mediterranean Gaul first as Gallia Transalpina (literally Gaul on the other side of the Alps to distinguish it from the Gaul of northern Italy), and later as Gallia Narbonensis. From this comes the general term Mediterranean Gaul, which I use here to refer to the region in ancient times. Today, this region incorporates two modern French administrative régions: Occitanie to the west of the lower reaches of the Rhône River (corresponding imperfectly to the historical province of