Current Research Projects

Apart from my ongoing work at the site of Gabii more generally, these are my current research and writing projects.

Cato and 18th/19th Century Agricultural Writing (forthcoming CW)

At the turn of the 2nd century BCE, Cato the Elder wrote one of Latin's first prose texts and the first farming manual in Latin: the de agricultura. It would go on to inspire a genre of farming manuals and didactic texts in Latin. Although Cato grew up outside of the city of Rome, he was a wealthy slave owner and outspoken politician in the city; his real-life experience with farming and menial tasks is questionable. Centuries later, we can similarly consider the rise in agricultural writing among British gentlemen of the 18th and 19th centuries; here wealthy landowners wrote detailed instructions about ploughing methods and fodder. Reading agricultural treatises from these two periods together enriches our understanding of both eras; these texts functioned as the ultimate work of both Roman and British expansion. The emergence of the genre among elite authors reflects the tensions of a nascent empire; there was an importance to wielding control over the local landscape as the controlled territory widened and newer more exotic lands were incorporated.

Repairs on Terra Sigillata (ongoing!)

The presence of terra sigillata pottery is often used by scholars as a proxy for the cultural integration of people conquered by the Romans. I examine the movement and repair of terra sigillata in the western Roman provinces. Broken vessels were repaired by joining cracked or broken sections together with metal clamps. At the periphery of the Roman Empire, a few studies have noted terra sigillata repaired in this way. This is in contrast to piles of unblemished tablewares found casually discarded in their regions of production. To-date there has not been an effort to tabulate where and when repairs occur in order to capture patterns of behaviour. Thus, I am compiling a macro-level study, tracking repairs spatially and chronologically, to explore how the empirical data reveals insights into perceptions of both economic and cultural value.

Composition of Wattle and Daub (new!)

The goal of this project is to better understand Iron Age mud hut construction at Gabii in terms of the composition of the clay and the re-facing and repair of walls and floors. My colleague, Giuseppe Lucarelli, is working on sampling and characterizing the macroscopic remains and the depositional conditions. I am doing petrographic analysis of samples from huts excavated in Area D (in 2015) and Area C (excavated in 2022 and 2023). We are also interested in what variability there may be between the phases of huts in each area and between the huts in the two different areas. This is the first phase of what will likely be a broader study (with more samples and perhaps chemical analyses) in future.

Deposits and Formation Processes (Neverending!)

Inspired by emerging excellent work on discard, urban rubbish, feasting, ritual deposition and formation processes more generally in the Classical world, I am interested in exploring how residuality, object use life, and discard practices intersect in Roman Italy. I am also interested in how our expectations for ancient behaviour colour how we interpret archaeological assemblages in different periods and different regions. I am exploring this from the theoretical perspective using case studies of whole assemblage study as well as using quantitative approaches at the site of Gabii.

L. Banducci 2023 © CC BY-NC-SA 4.0