Portable Material Culture in the Roman Civitas Capital of Leicester (Ratae Corieltavorum) and its Hinterland

Before my recent retirement, I had worked at the University of Leicester for 38 years, both as a professional archaeologist and as a part-time lecturer, and made an important contribution to the research of Roman portable material culture nationally and, most significantly, within Roman Leicester and its hinterland. At the root of my research endeavours has always been a desire to demystify the study of pottery and registered small finds and make knowledge of them more widely accessible whilst, at the same time, demonstrating their relevance to addressing the bigger questions pertaining to the relationship between indigenous populations and their conquerors. Over my career the theoretical climate of Roman Britain has evolved considerably, from the initial nativist backlash to the colonialist paradigm of Romanisation (Reece 1988), to the post-colonial models of competitive emulation (Millett 1990), creolisation (Webster 2001) and the recognition of discrepant experience, identity and agency in shaping Rome’s provincial societies (Mattingly 2004, 2011 and 2024). Alongside these we have seen the rise of globalisation as an explanatory framework for the spread of Roman culture at the macro-scale (Hingley 2005; Gardner 2013; Pitts 2018) whilst, at the micro-scale, new materialism and fluid ontologies (Mol 2023) remind us that the Roman World was very different to the modern one we inhabit.