The University of Sheffield
Department of Archaeology

Professor Maureen CarrollMaureen Carroll

Professor of Roman Archaeology

On Research Leave, Autumn 2012/2013
Leverhulme Research Fellowship, Spring 2012/2013

BA Honours (first class) in Classical Studies, Brock University; MA Classical Archaeology, Indiana University; PhD Classical Archaeology, Indiana University and Freie Universität, Berlin

Email address
p.m.carroll@sheffield.ac.uk

Telephone
+44 (0)114-2222959

Department address
Department of Archaeology
Northgate House
West Street
Sheffield S1 4ET

Biography

I earned my degrees in Classics and Classical Archaeology in Canada, the U.S.A. and Germany, and upon completion of my PhD in 1983 I worked in Germany for many years, leaving posts at the Römisch-Germanisches Museum in Cologne and Cologne University to take up the position of lecturer in Roman archaeology at Sheffield in 1998.

I have conducted numerous archaeological fieldwork projects in Italy (most recently at Pompeii and at Vagnari in Puglia), Germany, Britain, North Africa and Cyprus.

Research interests

My research interests are varied. They include:

Current research projects

Infancy and Earliest Childhood in the Roman World
This interdisciplinary project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the Society of Antiquaries, draws on archaeological, artefactual, osteological, epigraphic, artistic, legal and literary evidence to understand the role and significance of newborn children and infants in Roman families and societies throughout the empire. It aims to explore distinctions of class and socio-cultural situations over time and the relations between the realities of and rhetoric about earliest childhood.

Clothing, ethnicity and gender in funerary and votive sculpture in Roman Germania Inferior and Pannonia
This EU-funded project takes a fresh approach to exploring the depictions of male and female dress in funerary portraits and votive sculpture on the Rhine and Danube frontiers of the Roman empire to assess how Romans, immigrants and indigenous populations used such images to express and display cultural and ethnic identities.

The Imperial Roman Estate at Vagnari (Puglia)
This project, funded by the British Academy and the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, has as its focus the archaeological exploration of the central agricultural and industrial village of an estate belonging to the Roman emperor since the early 1st century A.D. We are investigating the economy, the living conditions and the role of slave labour in the village.

Research supervision

I have supervised and co-supervised MA and PhD dissertations on a wide range of topics. Past thesis topics include the burial of the urban poor in Italy in the late Roman Republic and early Empire; the introduction and cultivation of new wheat crops in the Roman period in Western Europe; a spatial analysis of Roman houses in Pompeii and Herculaneum; and evidence for swaddling clothes and shrouds in neonatal burials in Roman Gaul.

I am interested in supervising research students who have an interest in aspects of the following themes:

Teaching

Undergraduate

MA level

Selected publications

The Roman child clothed in death, in M. Carroll and J.P. Wild (eds.), Dressing the Dead in Classical Antiquity, Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2012, 134-147

Infant Death and Burial in Roman Italy, Journal of Roman Archaeology 24, 2011, 99-120

Memoria and Damnatio Memoriae. Preserving and erasing identities in Roman funerary commemoration, in M. Carroll and J. Rempel (eds.), Living Through the Dead. Burial and Commemoration in the Classical World. Oxford: Oxbow, 2011, 65-90

‘The mourning was very good’. Liberation and Liberality in Roman Funerary Commemoration, in V. Hope and J. Huskinson (eds.), Memory and Mourning: Studies on Roman Death, Oxford: Oxbow, 2011, 125-148

Exploring the Sanctuary of Venus and its sacred grove. Politics, cult and identity in Roman Pompeii, Papers of the British School at Rome 78, 2010, 63-106

Götter, Sterbliche und ethnische Identität am Niederrhein: Die Aussage der römischen Weihedenkmäler, Mannheimer Geschichtsblätter 19, 2010, 97-106

‘Vox tua nempe mea est’. Dialogues with the dead in Roman funerary commemoration, Accordia Research Papers 11, 2007/2008, 37-80

Spirits of the Dead. Roman Funerary Commemoration in Western Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006

Romans, Celts and Germans. The German Provinces of Rome. Stroud: Tempus, 2001

Full publications list

Conferences

Organising Chair at Roman Archaeology Conference, Session on Child Health and Death in Roman Italy and Beyond, Frankfurt, Germany, March 2012
Organising Chair at International Roman Frontier Studies Conference, Session on Families and Dependents, Rus, Bulgaria, September 2012
Organiser of international workshop on The Fabric of Family Life in Classical Antiquity, University of Sheffield, November 2011
Organiser of international conference Dressing the Dead. Clothing, Textiles and Bodily Adornment from Funerary contexts in the Graeco-Roman World, University of Sheffield, May 2010
Keynote lecture at the international conference Mors omnibus Instat. Aspectos arqueológicos, epigráficos y rituales de la muerte en el Occidente Romano, Tudela, Spain, October 2009
Keynote lecture at the international conference Oikos – Familia: The family in the ancient Greco-Roman society. Framing the discipline in the 21st century, Gothenburg, Sweden, November 2009

Other professional activities