Archaeologist Tesse Stek studies Roman colonisation with fellowship
As Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS-KNAW) fellow, Tesse Stek will explore the intricate relationship between the history of ideas about Roman imperialism and contemporary archaeological interpretation.
Historical contexts
The history of thinking about Roman colonialism is as old as the Roman empire, but there are clear punctuations in three historical contexts: the Renaissance, the early 20th century, and the immediate post-WWII period. Combining these different intellectual traditions, only fairly recently a coherent model of Roman colonialism has developed. Newly emerging archaeological and historical evidence, however, proves much of this ideal type wrong or incomplete. Rather than discarding previous research traditions altogether, in this fellowship their origin and backgrounds will be unpacked, and compared to a wealth of new archaeological data from early colonies collected during previous EU and NWO funded fieldwork projects.
New rationales
By this dual approach, the project Early Roman colonization and motivations for imperial expansion seeks to explore new rationales for early Roman expansion in the Mediterranean, notably economic ones, that are usually not associated with normative Roman behavior.