Roman Officers and English Gentlemen: The Imperial Origins of Roman Archaeology

by Richard Hingley

This landmark book shows how much Victorian and Edwardian Roman archaeologists were influenced by their own experience of empire in their interpretation of archaeological evidence. This distortion of the facts became accepted truth and its legacy is still felt in archaeology today. While tracing the development of these ideas, the author also gives the reader a throrough grounding in the history of Roman archaeology itself.

Genres: History

244 pages, Hardcover

First published March 8, 2000

About the author

Richard Hingley is Professor in Roman Archaeology at the University of Durham.

Reviews

[Candy Wood]

The "pioneering" parts of this book are the ones where Hingley examines the influence of Francis Haverfield's Romanization theory not only on later archaeologists but on the subject itself. If scholars believed in a linear progress from ancient Briton to classical Roman, they were more likely to look for evidence of that progress and thus pay insufficient attention to villages and other rural sites where the Roman influence was not as strong. Hingley is also interested in how prevailing ideas about Rome were reflected in nonscholarly texts such as histories and fiction intended for children, but his examples of such texts are mostly from Victorian and Edwardian times. Much more could be done (and is being done) with more recent representations of Roman Britain in popular texts, and how they too both reflect and influence archaeological discoveries. It's also disappointing that the book seems to have been proofread only by a computer, so that errors such as "where" instead of "were" are all too frequent. At any rate, Hingley's book makes readers think about imperial discourse instead of taking it for granted.