The internship placement at the The Roman Inscriptions Of Britain in Schools (RIB) project through the University of Nottingham’s Faculty of Arts Summer Research Programme has been an amazing, eye-opening experience for me that has allowed me to see behind the scenes of an interesting ongoing project. I’ve been able to see the impact that an academic resource such as the Roman Inscriptions of Britain online (part of the LatinNow project) can have on various sectors of society such as the education sector, the museum and heritage sector and the general public.
The homepage of Roman Inscriptions of Britain online
This experience has allowed me to make contact with pedagogy and heritage experts and institutions, helping me to learn key communication skills such as emailing in a formal manner and constantly reporting my finds to the team. Everyone I have interacted with through email and in-person has been extremely helpful in answering my questions, and in encouraging my interest in the ancient world. I have had a brief experience of some of the work that museum staff have to do and have been made to feel like an important part of the RIB in Schools project.
RIB 1319 Altar of Neptune from Newcastle: my favourite object so far!
I have been doing a wide variety of tasks in this placement, given to me by my supervisor Professor Mullen. These have included: helping sort out the respective handling boxes and their objects that will go to local schools for exciting lessons; finding colour images of various prescribed source objects, and emailing the various institutions that hold these objects for permission to use the images for RIB online; creating worksheets for lessons to go with our handling kit; collecting facts for the prescribed sources used by the OCR Ancient History exam board; coming up with ideas for new prescribed sources. Each of these tasks has the goal of encouraging more students and teachers, at all key stages, to take advantage of RIB Online and to explore the diverse and multilingual world of Roman Britain beyond the traditional militaristic narrative we are often taught.
This opportunity has also helped me learn technical skills as well, for example learning how to use different image editing software, and using excel spreadsheets to keep on top of the status of permission requests for the images to be used in the website. I also got to experience teaching. One of the most exciting parts of the placement was when we tried out our handling box materials out on a group of sixth formers from the Sutton Trust Summer school. It was a bit nerve wracking but really fun in the end and I was really pleased with the positive feedback.
The Roman Inscriptions of Britain in Schools project has been an amazing opportunity for me to learn about the world of research and its impact, while also helping to expand my own knowledge of the Roman World and transferable skills that I can take with me for when I properly enter the job market after finishing my University Degree.
A guest blog by Classics For All’s Jane Ainsworth and Hannah Walsh introduces the new project Roman Inscriptions of Britain in Schools, a collaboration between LatinNow and CfA.
During lockdown, pupils became accustomed to the view of their class on a zoom screen; a gallery of faces, or sometimes blank boxes when internet connections were struggling! The aim of Classics for All’s partnership with LatinNow, Roman Inscriptions of Britain in Schools, is to give pupils the skills and information to unlock the stories behind the gallery of individuals from Roman Britain which the Roman Inscriptions of Britain Online contains.
A screenshot of the revamped website, with improvements to user accessibility
Our first task, then, was to think about how we could guide pupils and their teachers around the content of a website originally designed by Scott Vanderbilt nearly a decade ago for people who already used the RIB volumes, without sacrificing the quality and depth of information it contains. We needed to explain why someone would want to look at an inscription in the first place and then how and where that information can be found on the website. The videos we developed, which use accessible examples such as the Insus tombstone from Lancaster, provide an introduction to Roman inscriptions, guidance on how to read a record of an inscription and how to use RIB Online. Given the wealth of material on the site, we also needed to highlight examples from the gallery of RIB individuals whose inscriptions are content-rich and relevant to the topics from the classroom.
Insus monument (RIB 3185), image of reconstruction by Simon James, used with permission
To support busy teachers, some of whom may have no prior experience of studying the ancient world, we knew that it would be important to provide clear lesson plans and a teaching guide to accompany our resources. Although there is enormous potential for the RIB Online corpus to enhance learning across all age groups, we decided to start our work at Key Stage 2 (ages 7–11) with lesson plans and a teacher’s guide. The ‘Romans in Britain’ forms a core part of the National Curriculum for History in England and Wales and there is also a requirement to teach local history, so these resources have been specially tailored to meet teachers’ requests for bespoke resources.
Our lesson plans start by encouraging pupils to think about the art of writing itself, and its value as evidence for a particular historical period. One task is to collect objects from around their classroom with writing on them and Alex, LatinNow’s PI, had enormous fun finding some ancient equivalents within the corpus, such as Hector’s shoe. Regina’s tombstone from South Shields then provides an ideal introduction to the rich and complex lives of people living in Roman Britain. Just like the objects they collected, pupils are encouraged to ask and answer questions about the information coming both from the text of her tombstone and from the object itself, including its production process and decoration.
Two Roman shoes from the Museum of London, the top belonging to Hector (RIB 2445.27), used with permission
The lesson plans also allow pupils to study their local history, a core part of the current National Curriculum requirements for History. There are ‘Local Lives’ lessons (powerpoints and handouts) for North, South, East, and West, where pupils use the skills they’ve learned in the introductory lessons to look in more detail at inscriptions such as Cornelius Castus and Julia Belismicus’ altar from Caerleon and follow a framework of questions to investigate the story behind the inscription. The questions made us wonder whether this altar was unveiled as a marketing opportunity as Cornelius and Julia opened a new establishment near the baths at Caerleon. Pupils then go on to investigate inscriptions from their own area, thinking about how topics such as the landscape, employment, and religion have affected, and continue to affect, local lives. Teachers can celebrate the work their pupils produce by entering it for a Young Historians Award or for accreditation in the new ‘Exploring the Ancient World’ Independent Project Qualification.
Pipes (RIB 2457.1) being studied at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, used with permission
We’ve also provided a range of examples designed for any KS which support thematic teaching – have a look at our favourite examples of migration, such as Iunius Dubitatus’ shield, and evidence for children’s lives, including the pipes belonging to Catavacus and Bellicia. You can even listen to the Roman pipes being played! Next up we will be constructing resources for ‘education’ and ‘language’, which is part of Phase 2 of the Roman Inscriptions of Britain in Schools project, during which we skip to work on KS5 materials.
We don’t always have all the information about an inscription (another useful lesson for pupils – and academics! – to learn), sometimes there’s a blank screen on the zoom gallery of Roman Britain, but the hope is that this ongoing partnership between Classics for All and the LatinNow team will introduce a new audience to the different lives and stories that the Roman inscriptions of Britain contain.
Many of the extended LatinNow team reuniting at the FAIR epigraphy party. L to R Stoyanova, Vanderbilt, Masséglia, Houten, Mullen, Willi, Moncunill. Estarán, Herrera, Salomon
Now that the dust has settled after the international congress of Greek and Latin epigraphy (CIEGL) 2022 in Bordeaux here’s a report from a LatinNow perspective. I sent a gushing tweet one evening stating that we ‘enjoyed every minute of it’. I admit that this was not entirely true…
We had been planning to bring our French version of the VOCES POPVLI tour for many months and the couriering arrangements had started in January. In the fortnight before the conference, everything fell apart. The carnet we needed thanks to Brexit would cost £400 + VAT, suddenly the air freight option was removed altogether due to a lack of airport handlers and the last ditch attempts to organize by-road courier went from looking plausible, if costly, to eye-wateringly expensive in a matter of 24 hours thanks to driver availability (or lack thereof) and fuel costs. So couriering 13 packages would have cost in the region of £4000, several times our budget. I apologised profusely to the organizers and instead packed a smaller display of our research outputs and with the help of the team managed to get this to Bordeaux in one piece.
Setting up our slimmed down offering in the publishers’ room
Janie’s talk explaning successes and lessons learned from the VOCES POPVLI tour
Handily Janie’s presentation of the tour in the outreach panel organized by Silvia Orlandi and Alison Cooley allowed those most interested in outreach attending the conference to get a taster. It was actually Janie’s last working day on LatinNow half-way through the conference and we are so grateful for her genius ideas, support and leadership, dating right back to the planning phase for the ERC grant submission. We’ll miss her, me especially.
Prof. Horster in her closing speech of the congress using Roman Inscriptions of Britain online as an example of best practice in digital epigraphy
At Bordeaux it quickly became clear that this smaller display of our outputs was in fact more appropriate: we had a stream of visitors who were interested in our ebooks, schools’ worksheets in six languages, replica writing equipment, Roman Inscriptions of Britain Online (given several shout outs in the plenaries) and, most importantly the beta version of our webGIS. The webGIS represents a Herculean team effort coordinating around 30 datasets from numerous digital humanities projects together with our own datasets on epigraphy (originally from EAGLE but augmented and enhanced) and writing equipment. The organizers had given us a projector and we demo-ed it to interested parties who wanted to see ‘all the Greek verse inscriptions in Britain’, or ‘defixiones across the west’. We had discussions about why certain objects with certain texts types were in certain locations – ‘perhaps there is a military settlement there?’ ‘Wait, let me just turn on the military layer – ooo, look, a fortlet’ etc…. We’ve been so nervous about launching the webGIS and it had only been delivered on the weekend at the start of the conference so it was a huge relief that it worked so reliably.
Showing our data and outputs to the delegates
Most colleagues just said how much they liked it and that they would show it to their students, a select few spent ages playing with it and giving copious bits of invaluable feedback: ‘would it be better to have this layer renamed’, ‘I don’t like this colour’, ‘could we search for bilinguals?’ and suggesting further data that could be added. All of this has gone into a 3 page document for our brilliant developer Bart Noordervliet. As a result we have password protected the site until we can release the final Open Access version.
Finally a peaceful moment at the end of the day to show Prof Fröhlich the webGIS
A fanastic evening reception inside the Vesunna Gallo-Roman museum
Just with this GIS dissemination the conference would have been exhausting, but we also had to try to attend as many talks as possible, catch up with all our colleagues, several of whom have been writing chapters for us, work to an unexpected deadline on the last day of the conference for final paperwork for Oxford University Press related to our trilogy, enjoy an excursion to beautiful Périgueux and stay up until at least 2 am everyday enjoying the company of friends. It was all wonderfully and tiringly multilingual. The congress proudly has 5 official languages, but there were many more languages represented by the delegates. At the end of the evening Anna Willi, who speaks at least six languages was mixing her Swiss German, French, English and Spanish and creating hybrid forms. At one point Pieter Houten remarked that she was now inadvertently speaking Limburgish (his home dialect). This embracing of multilingualism also carried over to the fascinating papers in the non-Latin and Greek epigraphies session, in which many of our friends were speaking.
But there were also some disappointing aspects too. There were incongruous and unpleasant outbursts of linguistic nationalism which left junior scholars with tears in their eyes. And I witnessed several examples of speakers and respondents using their platform to attack publicly other scholars and outputs. The worst of this involved the ganging up on a project led by a post-doc by professors in the field. By the end of the conference it felt as if a ‘Great Epigraphic Rift’, essentially about digital epigraphy, had formed. It was embarrassing and un-scholarly. A close friend and brilliant digital epigraphist has subsequently quietly remarked that perhaps after all he won’t consider getting into this academic side of things by doing a PhD. It would be great if the gate-keepers and belittlers (none of whom were in the hosting and organizing team I hasten to add) might pause for thought: in a few decades there might not be a field of epigraphy if people don’t feel comfortable entering it. The discipline is big enough for traditional methods and digital ones, and, perhaps most appealingly, a mix. Engagement, constructive criticism and respectfulness will get us much further as we continue to explore the wonderful world of inscriptions.
I finished editing our Social Factors in Latinization volume recently and I keep coming back to the beginning:
This book is dedicated, with the greatest respect and affection, to J. N. Adams (1943–2021), a giant in the field of Latin studies, and beyond. Jim’s influence can be witnessed in every chapter of this book and in our broader research. We shall miss deeply his friendship and mentorship and cherish his scholarship.
It makes me feel simultaneously a tremendous sense of loss and sadness, but also thankfulness for having known Jim. The book wouldn’t have existed without him and he was at the workshop to prepare it. In academia often one has several guiding lights and inspirations. It is less common to be able to call them also both your mentor and friend. Jim was all of these to so many of us.
Jim in 2010 at a party to celebrate his Festschift edited by Anna Chahoud and Eleanor Dickey. Image: Anna Chahoud, used with kind permission.
My first ‘encounter’ with Jim was in 2004 in a garden in Gower, Wales. It was the summer holidays and I’d taken his Bilingualism and the Latin Language as my ‘light’ reading. (Ha – the physical book weighs 1.25 kg!) The breath-taking journey through the Roman world, stopping at Regina’s Latin–Greek–Palmyrene epitaph from Britain, the Gaulish–Latin potters’ records of south-western Gaul, code-switching in Cicero’s letters and the Roman army in Egypt, had me hooked and thinking hard. Since then all of these have provided stimulus for my own research and teaching.
All Souls College, Oxford, where Jim was a Senior Research Fellow. Image: Andrew Shiva / Wikipedia CC BY-SA 4.0
I first met Jim in person for a brief meeting at All Souls a couple of years later. I’d sat on the X5 (the less-than-pleasant bus option westwards to Oxford) for hours and was seriously nervous. I was met with a barrage of evidence and ideas for things I could do with it – it felt a bit like being in one of his books. Subsequently I moved to Oxford and we continued our conversations, we shared a book launch and he handed over the reins of his fantastically rich course on Imperial Latin for Greats (which came with literally hundreds of pages of notes which he turned into his Social Variationand the Latin language and his Anthologyof Informal Latin). I was able to take advantage of some of his numerous invitations to conferences across Europe as he wouldn’t travel (he was Australian, he’d made one massive trip and had not enjoyed it). If he could have travelled he would have done: his support for other Classicists was at times overwhelmingly generous. For my PhD viva, he had prepared two reports: one for the authorities to approve the thesis, the other 20-odd pages of advice on how to turn it into a book.
Some of Jim’s ‘big books’, including, second from left, my barely intact copy of Bilingualism and the Latin Language
His influence was, and will continue to be, phenomenal. As the dedication indicates he is cited in every chapter of our Social Factors volume. It is hard to find much now on the Latin language which doesn’t cite from his oeuvre and he is one of a select few Classicists widely cited beyond our field. His breadth and depth of knowledge of Latin were spectacular and his ability to open new fields striking. Sociolinguistics of the ancient world arguably only started as a field thanks to his impetus. And for me his work unlocked all kinds of doors for interdisciplinary research.
For the last two decades the ground-breaking ‘big-books’ have been coming thick and fast, and he was not letting up on the productivity: he had sent me a huge draft article on the standardization of Latin only in the summer. His loss was a painful shock. I’m reminded of it every day, but also of his wonderful legacy, as I reach for my well-thumbed several kgs of inspiration.
To celebrate the launch of our new multi-media ebook Scripts and Texts(Vol. 1 of the Manual of Roman Everyday Writing), we’re delighted to welcome Prof. Alan Bowman with a guest blog this month.
The volume is co-authored by Prof. Bowman and LatinNow’s Principal Investigator, Alex Mullen, and complements Anna Willi’s volume Writing Equipment, to tell you everything you ever wanted to know about how the Romans wrote in their daily lives. Both volumes are Open Access, and completely free to use and ideally viewed in their Flip-book format. Static PDFs are also available to download from our Publications page. If you like the manual and use it, please drop us a tweet @LatinNowERC – we’d love to hear from you!
This article first appeared in Newsletter 26 (pages 17-18) of the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents, University of Oxford (Autumn 2021). Many thanks to CSAD for allowing us to reproduce it.
This month sees the launch of LatinNow’s first volume (although it’s Volume 2!) in our new series Manual of Roman Everyday Writing, available as an Open Access interactive flipbook:
We’re delighted for Anna and the whole team send our congratulations for completing such a stellar publication in the strangest of years. I’ve nobbled this month’s blog to write about the business of publishing an ebook, and what we’ve learned about getting the new volume into ‘print’.
We were first inspired by the gorgeous publications by the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama in Oxford, who produced their Medea book back in 2016 and their Agamemnon book last year. For academic projects and researchers looking to dip their toes into Open Access publishing, an in-house ebook has a number of advantages:
You can control everything about the look and layout of the book
You can share your work easily online, encouraging a wider readership
You can embed links and videos
You can update your publication instantly
You can track and study the traffic to your site (e.g. using Google Analytics), giving you that all-important data when reporting your research ‘impact’
But there are some areas where it might seem easier to fall back on a traditional Press, particularly peer review and permanency. We’ve been working hard to negotiate our way around these problems, and wanted to share both our new publication and our findings:
Self-publishing isn’t incompatible with Peer Review
It’s now more important than ever that scholars receive acknowledgement for their hard work. We were adamant that we wanted our books to be officially recognised as ‘proper’ Open Access books, and so held in mind the criteria that would allow us to apply for Certification with the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) once they were published. If you can set up a Board of Editors, an Editor-in-Chief, follow the steps to have the manuscript frankly appraised by external experts, and make your processes open and transparent, you don’t need to rely on a traditional Press for your ebook to be peer-reviewed. You just need to be brave!
Get yourself an ISBN number
If you are attached to a University and part of a research project, the chances are that your Library will be able to provide an ISBN number. If not, these can be purchased easily online.
Choose the right type of ebook for your readers
In most cases, preparing an ebook begins with making a PDF. I used Adobe InDesign to prepare the layout, but any word-processor which prints to PDF (including good ol’ MS Word) would work. If you insert logical bookmarks, cross-references and links into your PDF, you make it more interactive and easier to navigate. But there is a snag when dealing with long texts in PDF: all that scrolling. With a hard-copy book, the reader can check a reference or view an appendix before returning to their original location just by putting their finger between the pages. With PDFs and some ebooks, once you’ve followed a link elsewhere, there’s not always an obvious way to get back. Scroll, scroll, scroll.
In the case of Anna’s ebook, she had built a fantastic appendix of literary sources with original texts and translations, and these could be found by following a hyperlink in the main text. How could we get the reader back from the appendix to the original page they were reading? We could have programmed another link, this time from the appendix back to the main text. But what if several places in the main text referred to the same item in the appendix? The manuscript would become littered with options. In fact, there is a way to return to your previous location in a PDF (Alt + left arrow key in a PC, or Command + left arrow key on a Mac) but this manoeuvre isn’t familiar to all users. How could we make the book as user-friendly as possible, retaining the best bits of a traditional book and an ebook? The answer came in choosing an additional software to turn the PDF into a “flipbook”.
What’s a Flipbook?
Flipbook software processes your PDF and gives a smart on-screen interface that also provides helpful navigation buttons and reading features. Very little of the flipbook software on the market is made with long, finger-in-the-page-while-you-check-the-references-type text in mind, so finding one that offers the right features for an academic book is essential. Our wish-list for usability included:
a ‘back’ button to help the reader return to a previous location
the option to have the Table of Contents visible alongside the book while reading
a search box to function as an index
the option to embed videos and media in the text
a standard format which could easily be made available and shared online
We compared lots of software packages by using the free trial version before finally settling on one called FLIP PDF Professional, the only one we could find that really lent itself to the way researchers use books. It uses HTML5 so works like (well, it is) a webpage (cave emptor: avoid any software which only uses Flash, as this is being phased out and you’ll have bought a white elephant). This little video shows these functions in action for Anna’s new book:
Future-proof your ebook
The current trend in flipbook software is for monthly subscriptions. Aimed primarily at the journalism and publicity sectors, these payment plans mean that, for an ongoing fee, users always have the most up-to-date features and have the option to store their publications in the provider’s online repositories. But when the payments stop, the ebooks and brochures disappear. Most academic research projects only last a few years, so it’s important not to become tied to a subscription service. The one we settled on happened to be one of the few services which we could buy outright, up-front, meaning we had complete ownership in perpetuity of our publications.
Finding a permanent webpage to house the ebook was important. LatinNow, like many research projects, uses a subscription-based WordPress blog as our main project site, which is linked to the life of the project. Again, we needed a home for the book which would outlive the blog site. We decided to use GitHub as a cost-free way to store our flipbook permanently online. This did require a bit of IT know-how to get started, but with the help of Jasper Donelan at Nottingham and Jezcentral (you’re never too old to ask your big brother for help with coding), we got there (a tip for other GitHub beginners: do download the GitHub desktop app).
We hope you enjoy the book which you can find online here. Huge congratulations to Anna, and thanks to everyone who helped us find our way from draft to flipbook.
We’ve done our best in the LatinNow family to support one another and our colleagues through this strange period. We’ve had regular online research meetings, joined lots of virtual conferences, given talks, submitted papers and had G&T nights to keep our ‘spirits’ up. We have always supported flexible working and have team members in different countries so we were perhaps not hit as hard as some other projects given our already extensive online resources. But, frankly, we have struggled with anxieties, lack of changes of scenery and personal contact with colleagues, kitchen table work and the sometimes less than helpful input of small humans. There have been several disappointments: plans to head to Vindolanda for research and public outreach had to be shelved, along with an exciting summer outreach events programme; numerous in-person conferences and meetings have been postponed, including a London hook-up with the wonderful EAGLE people and Pieter’s lectures in China; and our work (especially on RTI) with museums in Switzerland and the Netherlands has hit the annoyingly constantly-moving buffers.
A LatinNow research meeting in the new COVID format
But we know that we have so much to be thankful for and there have been some restorative highlights. In the Autumn we welcomed our 7th ‘LatinNow baby’, a boy (for those keeping score it’s 4:3 to the girls), and I’ve been at home more so have caught the first words and steps of LatinNow baby no. 6. We’ve saved money and trees not traveling and have managed to extend the contracts of our two current post-docs, Pieter and Anna, so that we can, together, make up for lost time. We’ve finished several articles that had been long in progress due to the usually very busy LatinNow schedules and Anna, Alan Bowman and I have completed the manuscript for two volumes of the ‘Roman Everyday Writing Manual’ which should be out in 2021. Work is also underway on editing the social factors in Latinization volume – we’ll be releasing cutting-edge chapters in Open Access format as soon as we possibly can. We’ve been particularly delighted to work with early career researchers and others who are preparing projects using our data.
The participants of the LatinNow ‘Social factors in Latinization’ conference in pre-COVID times
We have blogs lined up for your delectation in the New Year on our fancy database and LatinNow insights into the TV series Die Barbaren.
Season’s greetings and our best anti-Granola (as LatinNow baby no. 1 calls it) wishes to you all.
As you’ll have seen from the blogs over the last few months, even with the challenges of childcare and library/museum estrangement, the Great Work of the LatinNow Project continues. This month we thought you might like to meet the team and take a peek into the life of a research project in lockdown.
Meet the Family
LatinNow has a good-sized team, with the day-to-day running of the project in the hands of Principal Investigator, Alex Mullen, and our brilliant group of Research Fellows, Senior Scientists and Collaborators. It was a friendly group to begin with, but our VOCES POPVLI travelling exhibition to Europe last autumn also meant that we’ve cultivated the kind of banter that comes naturally after spending hours together in a van. Here are a few of us posing for the 2020 Philology and Epigraphy Quarterly Allstars calendar:
Clockwise from top left: Camera-shy PI, Alex Mullen’s famous ‘Groovius Maximus’ mug (and a glimpse of a stylus tablet from Vindolanda!); Pieter Houten; Janie Masséglia; Simona Stoyanova; Anna Willi, Morgane Andrieu.
Let them eat cake!
Food is an important part of our team culture and most pre-lockdown project meetings were accompanied by food (and often pizza if the PI had her way). Some of our best thoughts have come over a dinner table. As we’re not currently able to inflict our cooking on each other, some of us have been signing off our emails with virtual baked goods and sending round photos of what we could be enjoying. Except for Anna, who, in an unprecedented move, decided not to send us virtual “slices of the egg-free buckwheat carrot cake we made because it is absolutely disgusting, sorry!” She’s just so thoughtful. Here are just some of the lockdown highlights:
Clockwise from top left: Simona’s lemon posset, Anna’s sweet Easter rolls, Janie’s Dangerous Rainbow Cake (since even the tiniest piece has a highly decorative effect on the digestive system of toddlers),Noemí’sEaster mona, Pieter’s Lênzevlaoj (made to his grandmother’s Limburgian recipe, and most assuredly in no way related to the Linzertorte), and Morgane’s tarte à la fraise,
A Room with a View
We’re used to being in different countries: Scott is based in the US, Noemí and MariaJo in Spain, and Morgane in France. But the restrictions on movement have had a big effect on how we work. Libraries being closed obviously restricts our access to books, especially epigraphic corpora. For several of us, the loss of nurseries or usual help from family members and carers meant learning to work with babies and toddlers in the office. For Morgane, the lockdown meant that she was unable to get to the boxes of potsherds housed frustratingly nearby in the Lugdunum Museum, which are central to her work on ancient graffiti. For Pieter, it meant an accidental change of country. He popped back to the Netherlands in March for what he thought would be a holiday, only to have his return barred and his accommodation in Oxford cancelled. He and his fiancée have been making the best of it, setting up their workstations on the kitchen table and reconstructing a missed trip to Greece on their balcony. One of the first things we started doing when lockdown began was sending each other pictures of what we could see from where we were. We all did it. Considering that we all felt stuck in one place, I suppose we wanted to let each other know what that looked like.
Clockwise from top left: leaf-shaded tennis courts for Simona in London, Noemí’s magicalviews across the Spanish Med, a Greek-style frappé break on the balcony for Pieter in the Netherlands, a peek of the village sports pitch for Janie in Oxfordshire, Happy Easter messages on Alex’s driveway to cheer up fellow villagers in Cambridgeshire, spectacular riverside view for Morgane in Lyon, and building works and bins for Anna in London.
Sociable Media
Views from our windows, pictures of our children (even a first grandchild – hurray, Scott!), scans from hard-to-locate epigraphy corpora… we know what makes each other’s day. The WhatsApp group means we can send all kinds of messages around the group without the formality of email. And being a multinational group ourselves, interested in cultural difference and language exchange, we love hearing about linguistic and cultural transitions.
Take Anna and Simona (brought up in Switzerland and Bulgaria respectively) who, it turns out, are both unsettled by the sound of Ice Cream vans, while the Brits in the team hear the same music and want to ring our mums and ask if we can have a 99, even though it’s nearly dinner time:
And then there’s Pieter’s name. It has been a running joke in the team that Pieter Houten should really be Pieter *van* Houten, after he was signed up to the University of Nottingham with the accidental addition (we’re not sure how this happened but everything points to the PI…). And it seems that his fellow countrymen agree, meaning that lockdown has brought him both an unexpected change of country and a new name:
Wherever you’re reading, greetings and a virtual chocolate brownie from all of us at the LatinNow Project.
For a month now, I have been working with the LatinNow team and leading a new research project in Lyon, the capital of Gallia Lugdunensis. The systematic census of the inscriptions (graffiti) found on the ceramic tableware of the ancient city is an essential component to complete Lyon’s epigraphic collection of Latin and Gaulish inscriptions. Their interest primarily lies in the fact that they are the main and perhaps the only written testimonials of daily life, most of the other perishable supports having disappeared. This documentation, studied for the first time ever as a whole, is a precious source of knowledge for archaeology and epigraphy. While we mainly know well the writing of the elites in the official and funeral texts of the city, this corpus – destined to become one of the world’s largest Roman graffiti corpora – will allow us new perspectives, not only on the writing of everyday life (giving us Gaulish and Latin names, dedications, prices, provenance and content indications, etc.), but also on the penetration of Latin and its diffusion in the different contexts (domestic, religious, commercial, etc.).
A Roman colony founded in 43 BC, Lugdunum (Lyon) became the capital of the province of Gallia Lugdunensis, the seat of imperial power for the three Gallic provinces (Belgica, Aquitania, Lugdunensis) and Caput Galliarum, or “Capital of Gaul”. Located at a strategic junction, at the confluence of the river Saône and the Rhône, this Gallo-Roman city quickly became an important port and the centre of the Gallic road network. In contact with the whole Empire, Lyon was a commercial hub, welcoming visiting emperors and hosting a long-lasting centre for the production of imperial coinage from the late first century BC. Being a bustling place of passage and mixing, it is expected that the city will deliver many epigraphic testimonials, far more numerous than those currently recorded.
The project first consists of identifying all the graffiti from the collections, followed by their identification, their analysis and the creation of an illustrated catalogue (drawing and photography) as well as an open access database.
This material, largely ignored until now, allows us to ask new questions. How does Latin express itself in the different contexts of the city? What role did it play in this effervescent environment? The recording of the graffiti will help us to understand the effects of Latinization and exposure to Roman culture on the population of the capital, the core of which was originally Gaulish-speaking. But this case study does not only benefit our knowledge of ancient Lyon. Its importance applies to different levels of analysis employed in the LatinNow project, and beyond, including comparison with other settlements, detailed sociolinguistic analysis and the exploration of the nature of literacies across the north-western provinces. It may also serve as an example for conducting the same investigations elsewhere and will allow us to broaden our knowledge of languages and writing in the Empire.
As an associate researcher to the ArAr laboratory, Archéologie et Archéomètrie, based in Lyon (UMR 5138), I am benefiting from the experience of several senior archaeologists and researchers such as Michel Feugère, Armand Desbat and Cécile Batigne (Director of the laboratory) as well as working with other scientific members from the Lugdunum museum, the archaeological service of Lyon (SAVL), INRAP, Eveha and Archeodunum which have all been responsible for archaeological operations in the city.
It is an honour to be part of LatinNow which provides the opportunity for interdisciplinary exchanges of knowledge and results at an international level. It is also a great opportunity for the old civitas capital to contribute to our better understanding of the Latinization of the north-western Roman provinces. This new research project has the potential to launch a scientific dynamic in favour of the systematic study of all forms of writing whatever the size or value of their material support. The graffiti not only reflect life in Lugdunum and beyond, but carry the voices of the inhabitants of one of the largest and most important cities of the Empire, the capital of Gaul.
The multicultural and multilingual nature of the Iberian Peninsula is intriguing. As Díaz-Abdreu and Keay once put it: “Iberia is Europe in microcosm. It represents a juxtaposition of north, south, east and west and mirrors a heterogeneous multicultural, multilingual Europe.” (Díaz-Andreu & Keay 1997, 1). It is indeed interesting to realise how diverse the peninsula has been and still is. Despite its nature as one of the meeting places for many Mediterranean cultures, historians define it as finis terrae: the end of the world.
Pieter giving a paper on urban centres
This ambiguity has intrigued me from the very beginning of my studies into this part of the Mediterranean. As a masters student at Utrecht University, I embarked my journey into the fascinating ancient history of the Iberian Peninsula. It is at this time I first encountered its languages and scripts. They seemed too difficult to understand and at that point, I thought, not directly relevant for my studies, which focussed on the Celtiberian cities. Following my MA thesis, I started my PhD research within the ERC-project: “An Empire of 2000 Cities” at Leiden University. The principal aims of my thesis Civitates Hispaniae are to provide a comprehensive reconstruction of the urban systems of the Iberian Peninsula during the High Empire and to explain why these systems looked the way they did. Key themes include continuities and discontinuities between pre-Roman and Roman settlement patterns, the geographical distribution of cities, and the role of cities as nodes in road systems and maritime networks. In addition, I argue that a considerable number of self-governing communities in Roman Spain and Portugal were polycentric rather based on a single urban centre.
Pieter on fieldwork in Spain
As part of the research into the nature of urbanism in the High Empire, I had my first encounters with epigraphy and numismatics as sources. Again, the complexity of the pre-Roman languages and their continuity in the republican period grabbed my attention. In order to understand the development of urbanism in the different parts of the peninsula I studied the different peoples and their urban development and realised that their languages, often studied by a different group of scholars, needed to become part of my research world.
CIL II 3061
I had to respond when the opportunity rose to study the socio-linguistic kaleidoscope of the Iberian Peninsula in its historical context. As the LatinNow-project collaborates with two experienced linguists studying the Palaeohispanic languages up to the Late Republican period, I will focus on the period of the High Empire. My research will focus on the who, how, why, and where of learning, or not, to speak and write Latin in the diverse communities of the imperial-period Peninsula. As part of this investigation I will be exploring the scarce remnants of the Palaeohispanic languages in Latin epigraphy, for instance the local genitive plural for the tribal affiliation in Latin inscriptions, as found in the votive to Mars by Cantaber of the Elguismicos (CIL II 3061): Cantaber / Elguism/iq(um) · Luci · f(ilius) / Marti / Magno / v(otum) · s(olvit) · a(nimo) · l(ibens) · How long did these mixed forms and names continue? Moreover, can we establish specific areas with conservative naming practices? And what does this tell us about the people giving these names to their children? In order to answer these questions we have to step out of our comfort zone and use insights from across the Roman world and from other fields such as modern sociolinguistics.
Another dimension important for LatinNow is the assessment and exploitation, where possible, of not just all forms of written remains, but also writing equipment, to think about Latinization and literacy. I’m interested in exploring writing equipment to investigate the urban/rural and literate/illiterate dichotomies. Following the standard ideas on these dichotomies, we should find literate people in urban areas. On the Iberian Peninsula, we expect to find more evidence for literacy in the valleys of the Ebro and Guadalquivir as these are the urban cores of the Hispaniae. However, the often-considered non- or less urbanised regions such as the three north-western conventus, have an urban epigraphic habit following the standard practices in the major centres. This less clear distinction between urban and rural begs the question of whether the literacy dichotomy might also be false.
I look forward to studying the Latinization of the Iberian Peninsula and working with our Spanish colleagues and the LatinNow team to expand our understanding of the spread of Latin in this historically highly multilingual region and its similarities and differences with the rest of the Roman west.
Pieter in the RMO in Leiden undertaking photogrammetry for our Touring Exhibition in Autumn 2019
