Charlotte Root ’22 and A&A Team Coauthor Article on Roman British Epigraphy

Oct. 3, 2024

Supervised by Lecturer in Classics Janet Kay, four recent alumni and a graduate student published the article “The Agency of Civilians, Women, and Britons in the Public Votive Epigraphy of Roman Britain” in Internet Archaeology on September 30, 2024. The article was based on 2022 A&A alumna Charlotte Root’s senior thesis, which was also supervised by Kay. Certificate in Archaeology alumni Noah Kreike-Martin ’24 and Cathleen Weng ’24 contributed to the article, along with Heather Madsen ‘24, and A&A graduate student Rhiannon Pare, who offered expertise on Roman religion.

The work grew from Kay’s 2021 “Religious Environments in Roman Britain” summer internship, funded by the High Meadows Environmental Institute, in which Root, Kreike-Martin, Madsen and Weng participated. “Together, we collected data on religious inscriptions throughout the island and stored them in our Airtable database for further research projects such as this article,” explained Kreike-Martin. 

Root refined and analyzed the data for her A&A senior thesis, which earned her the Frederick Barnard White Prize in Archaeology in 2022. “My senior thesis looked at the agency behind the creation of altars and monumental religious dedications in Roman Britain,” said Root. “The agency behind these inscriptions has long been assumed to be attributed to the Roman military, but no one had yet pursued a comprehensive study to analyze the overall demographic data of who created them. Scholars have generally preferred to look at the deities invoked rather than the dedicators of the inscriptions. My thesis focused on what we can glean about these dedicators. Our article acts as a summary of our findings for this project.”

The internship project also impacted Kreike-Martin’s undergraduate research. “The questions explored during the internship continued throughout my undergraduate career and inspired my fall junior paper, ‘Mind the Gap: Implications of the Scarcity of Imperial Cult Epigraphy in the Eastern Midlands of Roman Britain,’ and my senior thesis, ‘Rock, Paper, Coins: Comparing Evidence of the Roman Imperial Cult in Gallia Comata, Hispania, and Britannia,’ which were both advised by Dr. Kay,” said Kreike-Martin. “The topic of religious epigraphy in Roman Britain serves as a case study in the second chapter of my senior thesis, which explores similar questions of the agency of civilians, women, and Britons as the article, but with a focus on the Roman imperial cult.”

After three years of work, the group’s article shares some pivotal conclusions. “Crucially, our findings confirm the assumption of the Roman military's primary agency in the creation of these inscriptions. This means that the dedicatory contents of the inscriptions should not be taken at face value—they do not necessarily reflect the religious beliefs of the general population of Roman Britain,” said Root. “They must only be interpreted in the context of their function as a tool to translate the indigenous British deities into a Roman cultural complex, an act of imperial assimilation. When civilians, women, and Britons participated in the epigraphic tradition, they did so in a way that was different from the Roman military's approach. They frequently recorded the names of deities who appear nowhere else, and they did not maintain a distinction between the identities of Roman gods and local deities when they invoked them alongside each other, preferring to blend them together as hybrid, two-named deities.”

The collaboration established by Kay in 2021 continues to reverberate in the careers of its participants. Having completed an M.A. in Cultural Heritage Management at the University of York, Root is in a teacher training program en route to pursuing a Ph.D. and looks forward to further developing her research.  “There is a clear opportunity to study evidence of private religious practices using several online databases and interactive maps,” she said. “This could elucidate the perspectives of individuals living in Britain under Roman imperial rule rather than just the perspectives of the wealthy few who embraced the Roman tradition of public religious epigraphy.” Kreike-Martin is applying for M.A. programs in Archaeology to pursue cultural heritage law, archaeological research, and museum/library studies. And Kay is utilizing the research stemming from this project to inform her next book.  

Both Root and Kreike-Martin expressed their deep gratitude to Kay for providing the impetus and ongoing guidance that set them on their respective paths. “Dr. Kay has been an invaluable mentor throughout this process,” Root concluded.