Critique of Romanization in Classical Archaeology

Introduction

During the 1990s, archaeologists and historians of the late Iron Age and Roman period sparked discussion on the concept of Romanization which was an omnipresent and predominant interpretational framework in the Roman studies of the Western academic tradition. Scholars such as Martin Millett, David Mattingly, Jane Webster, Richard Hingley, Greg Woolf, Nico Roymans, Ton Derks, Nicola Terrenato, Benjamin Isaac, Peter Wells, and Colin Haselgrove (to name just a few) started to reconsider traditional approaches drawing inspiration from postcolonial intellectual waves and processual and post-processual archaeological paradigms. Primarily, they have addressed previous academic favoritism of the Roman side within simplistically and ethnocentrically conceptualized binary opposition of “Romans” and “barbarians/natives.” This black-and-white perspective was constituted within the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European imperialisms and colonialisms, accompanying...