Globalizing the local in Roman Britain: An anthropological approach to social change Martin Pitts * Department of Classics and Ancient History, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Exeter, Amory Building, Rennes Drive, Exeter EX4 4RJ, UK article info Article history: Received 6 February 2008 Revision received 21 August 2008 Available online 1 October 2008 Keywords: Globalization Localization World-systems Roman Britain Consumption Feasting Social practice Pottery abstract This article considers the incorporation of part of Britain into the Roman empire in the context of glob- alization theory and world-systems history. Emphasis is placed on the local effects of the expansion of global systems and their impact on the social practices of eating and drinking at a range of settlements in the southeast of Britain in the Iron Age to Roman transition, c. 50 BC–AD 200. Through the analysis of consumption practices via quantitative pottery assemblage data, it is argued that globalization offers a more sophisticated framework to describe change than current archaeological approaches to Romaniza- tion and identity. The results show that while much of the populace was subject to a progressively homogenizing supply of food-related pottery vessels, the use of such technologies was negotiated within social practices drawing on the integration of both local and global cultural elements. Such findings high- light the potential of critical applications of globalization theory to conceptualize economic, social, and cultural changes in Roman provincial societies. Ó 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Introduction This study aims to explore the potential of globalization theory as a lens to view the impact of global processes on everyday life in Iron Age to Roman Britain. The first section discusses the merits of globalization as an approach to conceptualize cultural, social, and economic changes in the ancient world. A second section seeks to apply this framework to the archaeological case-study of late Iron Age to Roman south-east Britain. Here, emphasis is placed on understanding changing social practices of eating and drinking as acting out the negotiation of global and local cultural trajecto- ries at a broad range of settlements, as approached through the sta- tistical analysis of domestic and funerary pottery assemblages. Contrary to popular perception, globalization is not a new phe- nomenon. Although the term was first coined in the late 20th cen- tury, the process it describes has been underway for several millennia. A compelling range of interdisciplinary visions of the long evolution of large-scale human social organization is pre- sented in the thought provoking volume World-system history: the social science of long-term change (Denemark et al., 2000). Nota- ble among the contributors are Frank and Gills (2000) who argue for a single world-system beginning c. 5000 years ago, and Chase-Dunn and Hall (2000), who suggest that from c. 12,000 BC world history has been characterised by the waxing, waning, merg- ing, and separation of a series of interconnected world-systems. This long-term perspective implies that the process now called globalization has parallels and antecedents long before the advent of global capitalism, and moreover, was not always driven exclu- sively by Europe or the West (Frank, 1998). In this light, it is some- what curious that ancient historians and archaeologists of the Greco-Roman period have been largely reluctant to examine the potential of globalization. Although it has been argued that global- ization should be on the research agenda in Roman archaeology (Laurence, 2001, 101), this call has not been widely heeded, with the notable exception of Hingley (2005) and a few others (e.g. Wells, 1999; Sweetman, 2007; Morley, 2007, 90–102). However, even Hingley’s Globalizing Roman culture (2005) only sparingly deals with the implications of globalization as a concept for bring- ing new understanding of social change, despite introducing much of the conceptual apparatus associated with the term. World–sys- tems analysis has had greater impact on the sub-discipline (Woolf, 1990,1993), not least in the proliferation of core-periphery models popular in the 1970s and 80s (e.g. Hopkins, 1978; Hopkins, 1980; Cunliffe, 1988; Haselgrove, 1987). However, these approaches tended to focus on macro-scale economic inter-relationships, and consequently are less well suited to explaining the localized im- pact of such wide-ranging processes. The utility of globalization: interpretive framework or interdisciplinary folly? Globalization is a word increasingly used to describe a broad spectrum of social, economic, cultural, political, and environmental changes taking place in the contemporary world. Although there are undeniable similarities between Roman imperialism and 0278-4165/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jaa.2008.08.003 * Fax: +44 1392 264195. E-mail address: m.e.j.pitts@ex.ac.uk Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 27 (2008) 493–506 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Anthropological Archaeology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jaa