Imperium Romanum: Romanization between Globalization and Colonization

Anyone following the debate on “Romanization” in recent years will have noted that North European (especially Anglo-Saxon and Dutch) contributors to the debate have adopted a different perspective from those of Central and Southern Europe. The first group turned their attention away from the city and the urban elites to the countryside, and to the material culture of the peasant and native social groups, developing a position that was defined as "anti-colonial". Other archaeologists (Italians and French, but also Germans), instead, have continued to lay emphasis mainly on the role of local elites in the "Romanization" process, investigating the usefulness of interpretative categories such as "self-romanisation", in an attempt to overcome both the "colonial" and the "anti-colonial" viewpoints. To avoid this dichotomy, some scholars have proposed to explore cultural transformations in the sense of a dialectic between local and global, using the theory of globalization and focusing on aspects of connectivity and interdependence within the Roman Empire. A word analysis in the archaeological bibliography “Dyabola” shows that the term “globalization” has recently been used in classical studies mainly in the English and French language areas, less in German and Italian, while the term “Romanization” continues to be used far more frequently, especially in Italy and even in the English-speaking world. The aim of the seminar was, therefore, to bring a group of north European archaeologists together with those who study "Romanization" and cultural contact in the Mediterranean area. What was expected from the exchange of opinion, is to clarify the possibility of interpreting the "Roman" world as a "globalized world" and how these interpretative categories could be applied. The debate has shown, on the one hand, that we cannot neither framed the problem in a purely theoretical nor purely material-based manner, and on the other hand, that the conditions in different provinces and the distant regions of the Roman Empire were divergent. It is more and more evident that the terms “Romanization” and “globalization” should be examined against the background of individual studies with regard to their efficiency and nuances.