During my tenure as Hugh Last Fellow I made progress on the completion of a book on slaves in Roman visual culture (Images of Roman Slavery). For this project I am collecting and analysing images of slaves and slave life in Roman art, and setting them against the background of the conventional historical scholarship on slavery. Although material culture (art and archaeology broadly defined) generally has been neglected as a potential source for understanding Roman slavery, it in fact provides scholars with another means of approaching a subject for which ancient sources are often insufficient. By setting this imagery in its cultural context, it is possible to explore the dynamics of power and the display of power in Roman society through the representation of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Most scenes with slaves fall into relatively straightforward categories (for example, scenes of domestic work, serving at table), but there are critical differences in function and emphasis, as well as degrees of ambiguity about status and identification. Rather than develop absolute criteria of identification where none are possible, in my study I use selected typical examples of the most common figure types conventionally identified as servile in nature as discussion points for their role in Roman art and for their relevance to servile existence. While in Rome, I undertook a substantial reworking of the structure and focus of the volume, while also making progress on several chapters. I gave a paper on an aspect of this research as part of the lecture series for the BSR's ‘City of Rome’ taught postgraduate course, and I particularly enjoyed the lively discussion and subsequent interaction with the students about their research projects.

During my time at the BSR, I was able to initiate work also on a new project in which Roman funerary culture is combined with bioarchaeology to address the issue of vitamin D deficiency in the Roman empire. I shall be examining Roman grave-goods from selected cemeteries in Italy, France, Spain and the UK, while a team of physical anthropologists from McMaster University identifies levels of vitamin D. Our results will be correlated, with a view to outlining the shape and variation of vitamin D deficiency across gender and status groups within a subset of the Roman population. While in Rome I had access to recent publications on burial assemblages in Italy, which enabled me to obtain some necessary grounding in the current state of the question, and which will be useful comparanda for analysing the provincial material that is part of this project. Best of all, I was able to plunge in and take advantage of the library's riches, as well as visiting the city's major museums in search of more material. The collection in the epigraphic museum at the Baths of Diocletian goes well beyond inscriptions, and is particularly valuable for material on Roman funerary culture; perusing the wealth of small finds over several visits helped me make this shift in the focus of my research. As always, I found it particularly valuable to alternate site visits with focused background research in the library, a combination that led to an especially intense and fruitful scholarly experience.