Year: 2006
Type: article
Abstract: Introduction: does TRAC have a future?After 15 years, the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference has become something of a venerable institution in Roman archaeology in Britain.A regular publication series, a consistent audience, and a Standing Committee to provide organisational continuity all indicate that the conference is still healthy too.However, with seemingly ever-increasing demands on the time of everyone involved, rising costs of hosting conferences, and a variety of other events on the calendar, no conference can take its existence for granted.This is even more true for TRAC, a gathering which was founded with a specific agenda, and which has always had something of a mission beyond self-perpetuation.The problem we need to address at the outset, then, is whether TRAC has a future at all.There have been arguments in the recent past that the conferences, or at least the publications coming from it, have not been theoretical enough.In a review of a selection of four volumes of proceedings, Ray Laurence suggested that TRAC was failing in its mission to deliver well-argued theoretical papers in the majority of cases, partly because of a self-imposed insulation from theoretical discourse in other subdisciplines (Laurence 1999; cf.Fincham et al. 2000: vii-viii; Woolf 2004: 420).Further consideration will be given to the latter issue below, but Laurence's comments certainly raise questions about the future of the conference in its present form, which has nonetheless remained largely unchanged since they were published.Other questions come from almost the opposite direction.The suggestion that TRAC has succeeded in its mission to reshape Roman archaeology into a more open, multi-vocal and theoretically-aware discipline has been voiced by some (Gardner 2003: 434; Hill 2001: 12; cf.Scott 1993), and again this might incline one to think that it no longer serves a purpose.This development is mainly detectible from the kinds of sessions that now regularly feature at the Roman Archaeology Conference, the larger, biennial event first held in 1995 which was, at least originally, seen as a more 'mainstream' gathering than the 'way-out', radical TRAC (Davies et al. 2001: v).Recent RACs have included sessions on themes like the life course and the parallels between Roman imperialism and globalisation.Some of these have been organised by people who have been active within the TRAC community, while others perhaps testify to the wider influence of TRAC in broadening the terms of debate within the field (Forcey et al. 1998; Gardner 2004: 6-7).It would be presumptuous to suggest that the increasing diversity and dynamism of Roman archaeology can be solely attributed to the existence of TRAC, particularly as some of the key publications which helped to open up discussion of themes such as Romanisation (including Millett 1990 and Reece 1988) predated its establishment, while the first RACs certainly had theoretically-innovative sessions (see e.g.Mattingly 1997).Nonetheless, it is certainly becoming difficult to distinguish TRAC and RAC sessions when the two conferences are held in tandem, and the audience also appears to be increasingly willing to attend strong TRAC sessions without discrimination, in contrast to earlier years when these seemed somewhat neglected.If more and more people are aware that
Author: Andrew Gardner
Institution: University College London
Language: English
Topic: Classical Antiquity Studies
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2175214486