Astrid Van Oyen
Biographic Data
| ID | 377684 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Astrid Van Oyen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Astrid |
| FAMILY NAME | Van Oyen |
| SIGNATURE | VAN OYEN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cornell University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6818-6652 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 53 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Roman Rural Archaeology: Society, Economy, and Culture
The Roman world was a rural world. Most of the Roman population lived in the countryside and had their immediate rural surroundings as their social and economic frame of reference. For much of the Roman period, rural property provided the basis for political power and urban development, and it was in rural areas that the agricultural crops that sustained an expanding empire were grown and many of the most important Roman industries were situated.…
Making or Moving? Rethinking the Role of Marzuolo (Grosseto, IT) in Terra Sigillata Production and Distribution
Podere Marzuolo, a minor rural Roman settlement in northern Etruria, has yielded two distinct assemblages of terra sigillata italica (TSI), each corresponding to different chronological phases. To investigate the potential for local production of early and late TSI at Marzuolo, an integrated analytical programme was conducted on 68 TSI samples, based on elemental analysis with wavelength-dispersive X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy and complemented…
An altar-shaped Italian terra sigillata stamp from Podere Marzuolo, Tuscany, Italy
An altar-shaped name stamp from the workshop of Avillius was found in a mid-first-century CE context at the site of Podere Marzuolo (Tuscany, Italy). Among the known repertoire of name stamps on Italian terra sigillata , this stamp stands out both in terms of size and complexity.
Object Agency
Object agency or material agency refers to the capacity of things to act. Since the 2000s, the material turn has fueled new attention for the role played by objects in forging social relations and in shaping historical developments. Consideration of object agency can generate more accurate and more complex historical narratives and get closer to the different worldviews of people in the past.
The Diversity of Roman Rural Settlement
This chapter reviews the history and recent developments regarding the study of rural settlement, with a focus on Roman Italy, the northwestern provinces, and North Africa, stressing the diversity of regional settlement patterns and trajectories. The chapter discusses the analytical and methodological move from questions of site identification and classification (villa, farm, village) to the reconstruction of integrated landscapes of activity and…
Living Precariously in the Roman World: A Social Archaeology of Inequality
Literary and archaeological evidence suggests that the Roman world was profoundly unequal. What did this mean in material terms for people at the bottom of the social hierarchy? Astrid Van Oyen here investigates the lived experiences of non-elite people in the Roman world through qualitative analysis of archaeological data. Supported by theoretical insights from the material turn, development economics, and feminist studies, her study of precarit…
Roman Concrete
n Contains fulltext :\n 299271.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)\n
Objects Untimely: Object-Oriented Philosophy and Archaeology
Everyone can make mistakes, but not everyone can fail: A response to Price & Jaffe
In Born losers: a history of failure in America (2005), historian Scott A. Sandage traces how, through the course of the nineteenth century, business failures gradually morphed into personal failures. Where losing money initially meant just that by the later nineteenth century, as the narrative of the ‘self-made man’ took hold, it came to be seen by society as a personal shortcoming and framed as a moral judgement. Fast-forward to the big-tech er…
Roman Failure: Privilege and Precarity at Early Imperial Podere Marzuolo, Tuscany
The case of the early imperial small rural settlement of Marzuolo, in south-central Etruria, paints a micro-history of arrested developments: a couple of decades into the site's existence, an abandoned wine-production facility was converted into a blacksmithing workshop, which in turn burnt down and was abandoned soon after. But were both these endings failures ? This article uses the concept of failure as an epistemic lens to examine inequality:…
Forging the Roman Rural Economy: A Blacksmithing Workshop and Its Tool Set at Marzuolo (Tuscany)
n Contains fulltext :\n 252761.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)\n
Welcome from the new editors
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
The Socio-Economics of Roman Storage: Agriculture, Trade, and Family
In a pre-industrial world, storage could make or break farmers and empires alike. How did it shape the Roman empire? The Socio-Economics of Roman Storage cuts across the scales of farmer and state to trace the practical and moral reverberations of storage from villas in Italy to silos in Gaul, and from houses in Pompeii to warehouses in Ostia. Following on from the material turn, an abstract notion of 'surplus' makes way for an emphasis on storag…
Socio-Economics of Roman Storage: Agriculture, Trade, and Family
Innovation and Investment in the Roman Rural Economy Through the Lens of Marzuolo (Tuscany, Italy)
The presence, uptake and economic impact of innovations in the Roman world have been much debated. Not subject to debate, however, is the agency behind innovation, which is assumed to be the large, elite landowner. Evidence of experimentation at the rural terra sigillata production site of Marzuolo (Tuscany, Italy) does not fit dominant models of external investment in the Roman world and challenges the directionality of innovation. Instead, this…
Rural time
Assumptions about rural time have stifled analysis and interpretation of the Roman countryside. As the rural remains Other to the urban, it is trapped either in a backwards past or an eternal present, variably derided or romanticized, and denied future-oriented phenomena such as innovation and social mobility. This article dissects these assumptions and their genealogy and argues that the rural can only ever be 'decolonized' from the urban if its…
What did objects do in the Roman world: Beyond representation
Materialising Roman Histories
Agents and commodities: A response to Brughmans and Poblome (2016) on modelling the Roman economy
This article responds directly to Brughmans and Poblome's (2016a) recent application of agent-based modelling to explore the relative integration of the Roman economy. The response will not only be of relevance to debates about the Roman economy, for it also asks critical questions about the use of formal modelling to interpret archaeological data. In posing open-ended questions rather than presenting definitive answers, it seeks to broaden and f…
Historicising Material Agency: From Relations to Relational Constellations
The R oman City as Articulated through T erra S igillata
Debates on the nature of the R oman city and its relation to the countryside have recently moved towards questioning the validity of the very category of ‘the city’, both analytically and in terms of past reality. While archaeology has long been mobilized within these debates, this paper argues for the unexplored potential of a range of specialist pockets of qualitative knowledge about specific artefact classes. T erra sigillata, the red‐gloss im…
The moral architecture of villa storage in Italy in the 1st c. B.C
The Late Republican villa acted as a scene for the projection and contestation of moral values. Villas continued a long-standing association between the physical appearance and the concept of the house, on the one hand, and the moral positioning of its owner, on the other. Ancestral homes in particular proved symbolically salient mechanisms for claims of identity. In a Late Republic characterised by the extension of citizenship and influx of new …
Actor-Network Theory's Take on Archaeological Types: Becoming, Material Agency and Historical Explanation
Within the recent popularity of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) in material culture studies, scholars tend to lose sight of its origin in ethnography of laboratory work. In particular, ANT studies how scientific facts are constructed and stabilized in laboratories so that they become universally accepted, seemingly platonic, categories. This article returns to this initial insight and links it to the long-standing issue of archaeological types. Analys…
Les acteurs-réseaux en archéologie: État de la question et perspectives futures
La théorie de l’acteur-réseau (ANT pour Actor-Network Theory), originaire dans les études des sciences et technologies, entre de plus en plus fréquemment dans deux discours archéologiques différents: l’un, interprétant le rôle social de la culture matérielle; l’autre, traitant des réseaux comme technique analytique. Malheureusement, ce dédoublement du potentiel des acteur-réseaux n’a pas résulté dans une communication plus intense entre les arché…
Towards a post-colonial artefact analysis
This paper argues that material culture should be brought even more to the forefront in post-colonial archaeology. At present, post-colonial analyses start from a baseline of pinned-down, delineated things as processed through artefact analysis, to proceed to interpretations of how these things were used in fluid, multidirectional, ambivalent social and cultural interactions. But what if thingsthemselvescan be fluid rather than bounded? Can we lo…
Historicising Material Agency: From Relations to Relational Constellations
Actor-Network Theory's Take on Archaeological Types: Becoming, Material Agency and Historical Explanation
Within the recent popularity of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) in material culture studies, scholars tend to lose sight of its origin in ethnography of laboratory work. In particular, ANT studies how scientific facts are constructed and stabilized in laboratories so that they become universally accepted, seemingly platonic, categories. This article returns to this initial insight and links it to the long-standing issue of archaeological types. Analys…
The R oman City as Articulated through T erra S igillata
Debates on the nature of the R oman city and its relation to the countryside have recently moved towards questioning the validity of the very category of ‘the city’, both analytically and in terms of past reality. While archaeology has long been mobilized within these debates, this paper argues for the unexplored potential of a range of specialist pockets of qualitative knowledge about specific artefact classes. T erra sigillata, the red‐gloss im…
Towards a post-colonial artefact analysis
This paper argues that material culture should be brought even more to the forefront in post-colonial archaeology. At present, post-colonial analyses start from a baseline of pinned-down, delineated things as processed through artefact analysis, to proceed to interpretations of how these things were used in fluid, multidirectional, ambivalent social and cultural interactions. But what if thingsthemselvescan be fluid rather than bounded? Can we lo…
The moral architecture of villa storage in Italy in the 1st c. B.C
The Late Republican villa acted as a scene for the projection and contestation of moral values. Villas continued a long-standing association between the physical appearance and the concept of the house, on the one hand, and the moral positioning of its owner, on the other. Ancestral homes in particular proved symbolically salient mechanisms for claims of identity. In a Late Republic characterised by the extension of citizenship and influx of new …
Rural time
Assumptions about rural time have stifled analysis and interpretation of the Roman countryside. As the rural remains Other to the urban, it is trapped either in a backwards past or an eternal present, variably derided or romanticized, and denied future-oriented phenomena such as innovation and social mobility. This article dissects these assumptions and their genealogy and argues that the rural can only ever be 'decolonized' from the urban if its…
Roman Failure: Privilege and Precarity at Early Imperial Podere Marzuolo, Tuscany
The case of the early imperial small rural settlement of Marzuolo, in south-central Etruria, paints a micro-history of arrested developments: a couple of decades into the site's existence, an abandoned wine-production facility was converted into a blacksmithing workshop, which in turn burnt down and was abandoned soon after. But were both these endings failures ? This article uses the concept of failure as an epistemic lens to examine inequality:…
Forging the Roman Rural Economy: A Blacksmithing Workshop and Its Tool Set at Marzuolo (Tuscany)
n Contains fulltext :\n 252761.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)\n
Innovation and Investment in the Roman Rural Economy Through the Lens of Marzuolo (Tuscany, Italy)
The presence, uptake and economic impact of innovations in the Roman world have been much debated. Not subject to debate, however, is the agency behind innovation, which is assumed to be the large, elite landowner. Evidence of experimentation at the rural terra sigillata production site of Marzuolo (Tuscany, Italy) does not fit dominant models of external investment in the Roman world and challenges the directionality of innovation. Instead, this…
Agents and commodities: A response to Brughmans and Poblome (2016) on modelling the Roman economy
This article responds directly to Brughmans and Poblome's (2016a) recent application of agent-based modelling to explore the relative integration of the Roman economy. The response will not only be of relevance to debates about the Roman economy, for it also asks critical questions about the use of formal modelling to interpret archaeological data. In posing open-ended questions rather than presenting definitive answers, it seeks to broaden and f…
Knowledge Systems in the Production of Terra Sigilata . Moving Beyond the Local/Global Paradox
Towards a post-colonial artefact analysis
This paper argues that material culture should be brought even more to the forefront in post-colonial archaeology. At present, post-colonial analyses start from a baseline of pinned-down, delineated things as processed through artefact analysis, to proceed to interpretations of how these things were used in fluid, multidirectional, ambivalent social and cultural interactions. But what if thingsthemselvescan be fluid rather than bounded? Can we lo…
Les acteurs-réseaux en archéologie: État de la question et perspectives futures
La théorie de l’acteur-réseau (ANT pour Actor-Network Theory), originaire dans les études des sciences et technologies, entre de plus en plus fréquemment dans deux discours archéologiques différents: l’un, interprétant le rôle social de la culture matérielle; l’autre, traitant des réseaux comme technique analytique. Malheureusement, ce dédoublement du potentiel des acteur-réseaux n’a pas résulté dans une communication plus intense entre les arché…
Historicising Material Agency: From Relations to Relational Constellations
The R oman City as Articulated through T erra S igillata
Debates on the nature of the R oman city and its relation to the countryside have recently moved towards questioning the validity of the very category of ‘the city’, both analytically and in terms of past reality. While archaeology has long been mobilized within these debates, this paper argues for the unexplored potential of a range of specialist pockets of qualitative knowledge about specific artefact classes. T erra sigillata, the red‐gloss im…
The moral architecture of villa storage in Italy in the 1st c. B.C
The Late Republican villa acted as a scene for the projection and contestation of moral values. Villas continued a long-standing association between the physical appearance and the concept of the house, on the one hand, and the moral positioning of its owner, on the other. Ancestral homes in particular proved symbolically salient mechanisms for claims of identity. In a Late Republic characterised by the extension of citizenship and influx of new …
Actor-Network Theory's Take on Archaeological Types: Becoming, Material Agency and Historical Explanation
Within the recent popularity of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) in material culture studies, scholars tend to lose sight of its origin in ethnography of laboratory work. In particular, ANT studies how scientific facts are constructed and stabilized in laboratories so that they become universally accepted, seemingly platonic, categories. This article returns to this initial insight and links it to the long-standing issue of archaeological types. Analys…
What did objects do in the Roman world: Beyond representation
Materialising Roman Histories
Agents and commodities: A response to Brughmans and Poblome (2016) on modelling the Roman economy
This article responds directly to Brughmans and Poblome's (2016a) recent application of agent-based modelling to explore the relative integration of the Roman economy. The response will not only be of relevance to debates about the Roman economy, for it also asks critical questions about the use of formal modelling to interpret archaeological data. In posing open-ended questions rather than presenting definitive answers, it seeks to broaden and f…
Rural time
Assumptions about rural time have stifled analysis and interpretation of the Roman countryside. As the rural remains Other to the urban, it is trapped either in a backwards past or an eternal present, variably derided or romanticized, and denied future-oriented phenomena such as innovation and social mobility. This article dissects these assumptions and their genealogy and argues that the rural can only ever be 'decolonized' from the urban if its…
The Socio-Economics of Roman Storage: Agriculture, Trade, and Family
In a pre-industrial world, storage could make or break farmers and empires alike. How did it shape the Roman empire? The Socio-Economics of Roman Storage cuts across the scales of farmer and state to trace the practical and moral reverberations of storage from villas in Italy to silos in Gaul, and from houses in Pompeii to warehouses in Ostia. Following on from the material turn, an abstract notion of 'surplus' makes way for an emphasis on storag…
Socio-Economics of Roman Storage: Agriculture, Trade, and Family
Innovation and Investment in the Roman Rural Economy Through the Lens of Marzuolo (Tuscany, Italy)
The presence, uptake and economic impact of innovations in the Roman world have been much debated. Not subject to debate, however, is the agency behind innovation, which is assumed to be the large, elite landowner. Evidence of experimentation at the rural terra sigillata production site of Marzuolo (Tuscany, Italy) does not fit dominant models of external investment in the Roman world and challenges the directionality of innovation. Instead, this…
Welcome from the new editors
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Forging the Roman Rural Economy: A Blacksmithing Workshop and Its Tool Set at Marzuolo (Tuscany)
n Contains fulltext :\n 252761.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)\n
Roman Concrete
n Contains fulltext :\n 299271.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)\n
Objects Untimely: Object-Oriented Philosophy and Archaeology
Everyone can make mistakes, but not everyone can fail: A response to Price & Jaffe
In Born losers: a history of failure in America (2005), historian Scott A. Sandage traces how, through the course of the nineteenth century, business failures gradually morphed into personal failures. Where losing money initially meant just that by the later nineteenth century, as the narrative of the ‘self-made man’ took hold, it came to be seen by society as a personal shortcoming and framed as a moral judgement. Fast-forward to the big-tech er…
Roman Failure: Privilege and Precarity at Early Imperial Podere Marzuolo, Tuscany
The case of the early imperial small rural settlement of Marzuolo, in south-central Etruria, paints a micro-history of arrested developments: a couple of decades into the site's existence, an abandoned wine-production facility was converted into a blacksmithing workshop, which in turn burnt down and was abandoned soon after. But were both these endings failures ? This article uses the concept of failure as an epistemic lens to examine inequality:…
Roman Rural Archaeology: Society, Economy, and Culture
The Roman world was a rural world. Most of the Roman population lived in the countryside and had their immediate rural surroundings as their social and economic frame of reference. For much of the Roman period, rural property provided the basis for political power and urban development, and it was in rural areas that the agricultural crops that sustained an expanding empire were grown and many of the most important Roman industries were situated.…
Making or Moving? Rethinking the Role of Marzuolo (Grosseto, IT) in Terra Sigillata Production and Distribution
Podere Marzuolo, a minor rural Roman settlement in northern Etruria, has yielded two distinct assemblages of terra sigillata italica (TSI), each corresponding to different chronological phases. To investigate the potential for local production of early and late TSI at Marzuolo, an integrated analytical programme was conducted on 68 TSI samples, based on elemental analysis with wavelength-dispersive X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy and complemented…
An altar-shaped Italian terra sigillata stamp from Podere Marzuolo, Tuscany, Italy
An altar-shaped name stamp from the workshop of Avillius was found in a mid-first-century CE context at the site of Podere Marzuolo (Tuscany, Italy). Among the known repertoire of name stamps on Italian terra sigillata , this stamp stands out both in terms of size and complexity.
Object Agency
Object agency or material agency refers to the capacity of things to act. Since the 2000s, the material turn has fueled new attention for the role played by objects in forging social relations and in shaping historical developments. Consideration of object agency can generate more accurate and more complex historical narratives and get closer to the different worldviews of people in the past.
The Diversity of Roman Rural Settlement
This chapter reviews the history and recent developments regarding the study of rural settlement, with a focus on Roman Italy, the northwestern provinces, and North Africa, stressing the diversity of regional settlement patterns and trajectories. The chapter discusses the analytical and methodological move from questions of site identification and classification (villa, farm, village) to the reconstruction of integrated landscapes of activity and…
History (12 works) · Classical Antiquity Studies (11 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Economics (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Ancient Mediterranean Archaeology and History (7 works) · History (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Archaeology (6 works)