THE ROMAN OBJECT REVOLUTION IN NORTHWEST EUROPE

The Roman object revolution in northwest Europe began in the final decades of the first century BC with an influx of millions of imported and locally-made standardised objects. The origins of this profound and far-reaching series of changes must be understood in terms of the intersection of two phenomena: a sudden injection of significant quantities of Mediterranean objects and styles, and longer-term developments in later Iron Age European objectscapes. Prior to this important watershed in the late first century BC, several later Iron Age communities were already developing repertoires of progressively standardised objects, as well as becoming susceptible to using scarcer circulating Mediterranean objects and amphoraborne commodities (i.e. wine) in local practices of feasting and funerary display. Although the virtually-identical forms of standardisation seen in Roman-period objectscapes had yet to be achieved, both fibulae and local ceramics had begun to appear in styles that increasingly shared affinities with those in neighbouring regions. Through the movement of people and widely circulating serialised objects such as fibulae, it is possible to trace the beginnings of a loosely-connected pan-regional inter-artefactual domain in the later Iron Age, which among some communities, from southern Germany to northern France and the Channel coast of Britain, seems to have informed increasingly universal logics governing the make-up of funerary objectscapes (illustrated, for example, in Fig. 2.7). The mechanisms underlying these processes were likely an amalgam of waxing networks of clientship and kinship, as well as small-scale state formation, which led to modest rises in human mobility and the circulation of objects.

Caesar's campaigns in the region in the 50s BC did little to affect the rules governing the appearance of essentially Iron Age objects and objectscapes.