Presenting and Negotiating the Evidence: Continuing Debates of Relationships between Text and Archaeology in Roman Social History

My work focuses on Roman Imperial Italy and Germany and on 19th-and 20th - century Australia, rather than on Medieval or Post-Medieval Greece. Nevertheless, Timothy Gregory and I share a concern for interrelationships between textual and material culture in understanding social history, particularly a concern for the problem of past misreadings of the material-cultural record through inappropriate reliance on written sources. Thus, I present to Tim my contribution to recent debates about approaches to the textual and material-cultural evidence towards a better understanding of Roman social history.