Jane Webster

Necessary comparisons: A post‐colonial approach to religious syncretism in the Roman provinces

Abstract Questioning existing paradigms regarding religious syncretism in the western provinces of the Roman Empire, this paper addresses the difficulty of reconciling comparative study with historical contingency. It is argued that discourse analysis, as developed in post‐colonial discourse theory, both facilitates comparative study of material culture in colonial contexts, and enables radical new readings of Romano‐Celtic syncretism. It is further suggested that the discursive relationship between Roman imperialism and Western European imperialism ‐ the cycle of interaction between ancient and modern colonialisms ‐ has influenced the study of Romano‐Celtic religion in such a way that we not only can compare colonialisms, but must compare them if we wish both to articulate the nature of religious syncretism in the Roman provinces, and to achieve a reflexive understanding of our own discipline.

Resisting Traditions: Ceramics, Identity, and Consumer Choice in the Outer Hebrides from 1800 to the Present

On a number of levels, “peripheral” status has been imposed on the Outer Hebrides (Scotland) since the Jacobite Rebellion in 1745. Drawing on a series of interviews with Hebridean families, this paper explores the changing meanings of ceramics imported into the islands from the early nineteenth century and displayed on wooden dressers. It is argued that in renegotiating their identity in the face of a series of externally generated economic changes, rural communities in the Hebrides have acted as thoughtful consumers, appropriating mainland material culture to their own ends. Throughout this process, imports have behaved ambiguously. This ambiguity is crucial to our understanding of the relationship—here characterized not as “resistance” but as “resistant adaptation”—between the Hebrides and the mainland.

Less beloved. Roman archaeology, slavery and the failure to compare

Modern and ancient historians have long been willing to engage in the comparative analysis of ancient and modern slave-owning societies, yet archaeologists of both the Greek and Roman worlds have been far less willing to do the same. To the extent that they study slavery at all, they do so almost entirely within Graeco-Roman spatial and temporal confines. Taking Roman slavery as its starting point, this contribution attempts to remove some of the hurdles that archaeologists have placed in the way of a comparative analysis of slavery, and offers some suggestions for new ways forward.

Remembering Slave Trade Abolitions: Reflections on 2007 in International Perspective

The papers brought together in this issue of Slavery and Abolition offer a retrospective analysis of the commemoration of the two hundredth anniversary of the Abolition of the British Slave Trade (1807/2007). Most of these articles were originally presented at the ‘Remembering Slave Trade Abolitions’ conference held in Newcastle in November 2007. This interdisciplinary conference brought together university-based scholars, museum practitioners, government advisors and others, from Barbados, Britain, Ghana, Jamaica and the United States. Looking back over a year of remembrance, as it was drawing to a close, we asked: how was slavery and abolition remembered, and by whom? What did nations, communities and individuals choose to remember, and what did they prefer to forget? What were the flashpoints for conflict, and were these successfully resolved? What choices were made, and what lessons learned, by those tasked with presenting a difficult past, and its contemporary legacy, to the public? The shipping of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic over four centuries was one of the most international processes in world history, involving people from four continents and transforming them all. The British government’s decision in 1807 to ban its citizens’ participation in the traffic did not end the slave trade, but it had significant global consequences, especially in Britain, Africa, the Caribbean, the United States and Latin America. In 2007, two hundred years after the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, British state institutions devoted unprecedented attention to the history and legacy of slavery, the slave trade and the latter’s abolition. The then-Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, convened a committee to advise him on how the bicentenary should be marked. Almost every government department organised some kind of Slavery and Abolition Vol. 30, No. 2, June 2009, pp. 161–167

The Unredeemed Object: Displaying Abolitionist Artefacts in 2007

This article reviews the ways in which two key abolitionist artefacts were displayed in British museums in 2007. The Wedgwood ‘kneeling slave’ cameo (1787) and the broadsheet Description of a Slave Ship (1789) are two of the most familiar icons of abolition, but presented museums with particular challenges in 2007. It is argued that the widely taken decision to limit engagement with the materiality, and above all the textuality, of these artefacts meant that their unique importance as the earliest propaganda tools of the nascent abolition movement was only partially revealed.

Looking for the material culture of the middle passage

More than 3 million African men, women and children are thought to have crossed the Atlantic on British slave ships between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The British carried more Africans into slavery than any other people excepting the Portuguese, and between 1660 and 1807, when the British trade was abolished, every second slave entering the ‘New World’ arrived on a British ship.1 Since the 1960s, the history of Britain’s role in the slave trade has been explored in depth by economic and social historians and (increasingly) by archaeologists too. Yet despite all that has been written, huge gaps remain in our understanding. This is true even for ‘Middle Passage’,2 the initial sea voyage that took captive Africans to the Caribbean and the Americas.

The Artifact as Interviewer: Experimenting with Oral History at the Ovenstone Miners’ Cottages Site, Northumberland

The authors introduce a new artifact-centered oral-history methodology and describe its use in interpreting finds from the 19th-century midden associated with a row of cottages at Ovenstone, Northumberland. The history of settlement and excavation at Ovenstone are described, and the evolution and development of the artifact-centered approach is explored. Four case studies are presented in order to illustrate some of the ways in which oral testimonies have informed the interpretation of artifacts from the Ovenstone midden. Each of these examples draws directly on the memories and experiences of community elders who were interviewed for the Ovenstone Project between 2009 and 2012.

Slavery, archaeology and the politics of analogy

Each of the four discussants of my paper has offered constructive comment on specific points of detail in the piece. I am grateful for their insights, and for their consensus that the time has come to break down the disciplinary restraints that inhibit interdisciplinary cooperation in the study of slavery (and much else). In terms of my central focus on the potentials and pitfalls of a comparative archaeology of Roman slavery, however, I gained most from placing these commentaries side by side and reflecting on them as a group. That is also what I plan to do here.

Collecting for the cabinet of freedom: the parliamentary history of Thomas Clarkson’s chest

ABSTRACT This article discusses a wooden chest used by the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, to display samples of African natural resources and artefacts. It explores the role played by the chest during the 1788–1789 Privy Council enquiry into the slave trade, and suggests that the box (which is usually thought of as travelling showcase employed by Clarkson in public lectures and meetings) was in fact firmly embedded in – and spoke directly to – the 1788–1789 enquiry process. Its initial purpose was to conjure alternate cargoes in the minds of those debating the slave trade; to enable Parliament to visualise an Africa filled not with potential slaves, but with alternate resources, having a multitude of domestic and commercial uses.