This study addresses a major step-change in Eurasian history: the revolutionary boom in standardised objects at the start of the Roman era. Was it really a revolution? The new object-rich environments that emerged matter greatly for how we understand the transition from Iron Age to Roman Europe. They embody major changes in everyday life and social display, from eating and drinking to bodily adornment and the treatment of the dead; they tell stories of cultural transformation through innovative styles of consumption that relied on new combinations of ‘things’; and they reveal new fault lines of regionalism, status, wealth, inequality, and knowledge amongst nascent Roman provincial communities. The object boom did not simply come about through the presence of Roman merchants, soldiers, and colonists, nor did it happen only after conquest. Northern European Iron Age communities were active participants rather than accidental consumers caught at the fringes of the Mediterranean net, despite the popular image of princely ‘barbarian’ graves filled with Italian wine containers and other exotica. The beginnings of object standardisation were well underway in northwest Europe before the arrival of Rome, with the spread of the potter's wheel, and the appearance of fibulae with pan-regional distributions. Roman expansion greatly intensified these developments, with an influx of new people, production technologies, commodities, styles, and customs. The Roman influx of standardised objects was not the end of the story, however. A second watershed involving synchronous transformation in the make-up of object-worlds in the last decades of the first century AD saw the object revolution undergo a major reinvigoration, with significant long-term ramifications for provincial societies.

By considering standardised objects, their stylistic innovations, distributions, local combinations, and changing social uses, this book contributes to a new kind of history in which ‘things’ take centre-stage. A great deal has been written on the historical scenario in which Rome established dominion over the ‘barbarian’ societies of northwest Europe, beginning with the campaigns of Julius Caesar in the 50s BC. Rather than re-tell this story fleshed out with archaeological finds, I have pushed narratives of battles and territorial advance into the background. By exploring the emerging riches of archaeological data on the styles, uses, and associations of a plethora of objects, this book has a different approach to such traditional history, and tells a different story.