Chapter 8 argues that souvenirs force us to rethink paradigms of center and periphery in our approaches to the Roman Empire, and to reconsider how people confronted and made meaning of empire in antiquity. As prime examples of ancient material popular culture, Roman souvenirs actively constructed and shaped their beholders’ conceptions of those subjects and of their relations to the empire and other people in it.

Chapter 4 argues that souvenirs of cult statues, cities, and monuments helped their owners make meaning of places, transcended distances of time and space, and transformed statues and buildings into landmarks. They emerge as powerful technologies of memory and knowledge in the Roman Empire that shaped shared understandings of places and constructed imagined cultural affinities that enabled people to feel sense of belonging on multiple scales.

Chapter 3 investigates souvenirs representing cities and architectural monuments: Alexandria’s port and lighthouse, Hadrian’s Wall, and the resort towns of Puteoli and Baiae in Campania. The chapter examines the agents behind the manufacture and consumption of these souvenirs and the various uses to which these souvenirs were put by their owners, and argues that the souvenirs constructed conceptions of monumental spaces that were at once descriptive, pedagogical, and panegyric.

Chapter 6 focuses on souvenirs of Roman theater, including traditional drama, pantomime, and mime. These objects constructed an abstracted idea of theater that could accrue a wide range of meanings, from the apotropaic to the festive to the culturally prestigious, and allowed people from widely varying social classes and backgrounds to identify with the cachet of Greek theater and an ideal of Greek culture more generally.

Chapter 5 examines souvenirs related to circus and arena spectacles, which disseminated knowledge about gladiatorial combat and chariot racing, constructed athletic celebrity, and fueled excitement about these sports. Sports souvenirs provided a tangible means for people of all ages to participate in spectacle culture and are thus critical for understanding the social construction of sport in the Roman world.

This chapter analyses architectural terracottas as proxies for buildings and thus as valuable signs of construction in the city of Rome during the fifth and fourth centuries BC. In doing so, it challenges the neglect of these centuries in many histories of Roman architecture and argues that this was far from a period of architectural stagnation. Here terracottas function as temporal connectors, linking buildings across centuries in the eyes of their builders and users, and as evidence that Rome remained in touch with wider trends in building and decoration in a time that has too often been read as a rupture between a highly networked archaic world and one increasingly in thrall to Greece. Promoting the study of this era supports the view of Etrusco-Italic and Roman architecture as closely related fields of study and encourages broader recognition of terracottas as evidence not just for roofs but for buildings now lost from the archaeological record.

This chapter serves as an introduction for what follows by placing the volume’s approach into the wider context of the past and current study of central Italic architecture. It points out some of the issues that underlie and join the subsequent analyses, including why so many major building projects were undertaken in Etruria, Rome, and Latium in this period, who and what was moving to create them, and how the results blur the boundaries of what has traditionally been considered ‘Roman’. Fundamentally, it argues not only for the value of central Italic architecture as a source for regional social and economic histories, but also for its potential contribution to the study of ancient architecture as a whole.

This chapter reconnects the architectural terracottas from different roofs of the cult building on the acropolis at Satricum with related foundations and in the process discovers a hitherto-unknown temple. While it was known that the cult building at the site went through multiple phases of extension, refurbishment, and reconstruction, the application of 3D modelling techniques in which all elements of the buildings are connected has succeeded in reconciling problematic data by identifying a new structure named ‘Sacellum II’. When the results are compared to contemporary temples in Rome, the relative precociousness of different cities’ architecture can be re-evaluated, leading to the suggestion that Caere, along with eastern Greece and Sicily, may have been influential in the development of religious architecture in central Italy. The project shows the value of studying terracottas and foundations together, something that is not done as a matter of course.

This chapter re-examines tie-beam trusses and argues that their invention arose from the woodworking techniques and tools honed in the construction of Bronze and Iron Age palafitte houses (pile dwellings). Showing that the earlier type of architecture developed in response to particular environmental conditions, it establishes that early builders had extensive knowledge of the potential of their raw materials and how they could be engineered. Out of this came the truss as a refinement in wooden roof structures that was able to counter the side loads of heavy tiled roofs when the latter came into use during the seventh century BC. Through its eventual use in the sizeable roofs of basilicas in the fourth century AD, the truss represents a form of woodworking expertise that connects architecture in Italy from the Bronze Age through to Late Antiquity.