Megan Daniels – författare

Exploring the dynamics of human migration and mobility in Roman Hispania (currently known as the Iberian Peninsula) during the Imperial period, this book examines an extensive data set of inscriptions – predominantly funerary epitaphs – from the first and second centuries CE. These inscriptions indicate the movement of over 500 individuals across the three provinces of Baetica, Lusitania, and Tarraconensis. Each inscription is closely analysed in order to discover who moved, where, when, and why.More specifically, the study considers the extent of population movement and the age, gender, and legal status of those who moved. Human mobility was not a marginal practice, and nor was it confined to men, soldiers, administrators, or the enslaved, as often assumed – it was a much broader phenomenon encompassing free civilian men, women, children, and families. In turn, this examination brings to the foreground patterns of mobility and the organisation of movement, which reveals the possibility of chain migration, group movement, and the potential role of associations and labour contractors. One of the primary motivations for movement is economic, and labour mobility can be seen in several case studies connected to specific cities, as well as industries such as mining. Alongside the inscriptions, a range of archaeological, material, and literary evidence is analysed together with carefully selected historical examples and comparative studies. As a result, this book reveals a world in which human mobility was a normal and structural part of society.

The studies in this volume share a focus on religion in the ancient Mediterranean world: how ritual, myth, spectatorship, and travel reflect the continual interaction of human beings with the richly fictive beings who defined the boundaries of groups, access to the past, and mobility across land and seascapes.They share as well the methodological exploration of the intersection between human sciences, the integration of numerous disciplines around the study of all aspects of human life from the biological to the cultural, and the study of the past. In so doing, they continue a long dialogue that engages with critical models derived from specializations within history, philology, archaeology, sociology, and anthropology, and addresses, increasingly, the potentialities and pitfalls of quantitative and digital analyses. Many of the threads in this long conversation inform these chapters: the comparative project, human social evolution, disciplinary reflexivity, religion as an embedded, functional, and structural system, and the role for agency, networks, and materiality.