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The nature, and indeed the reality, of Romanization in the east is controversial. One of the most influential accounts of Romanization in the western provinces notes that ‘by contrast, where Greek was already the language of culture, of government and of inter-regional trade, the Romans carried further the process of Hellenization … in general what was specifically Latin in the common civilization of the empire made little impact in the east’, the exceptions being the influence of Roman law and the popularity of gladiatorial games. That verdict endorsed the view that ‘the emperors made no attempt to romanise the Greek speaking provinces’, which saw the foundation of cities as a continuance of Hellenistic royal practice, and which regarded the establishment of the rare eastern colonies as motivated by practical considerations rather than any attempt at encouraging cultural assimilation. More recently, a fuller survey of exceptions to this general rule nevertheless concluded that ‘On the one hand, the culture and identity of the Greek east remained fundamentally rooted in the Classical past. On the other hand, the visible presence of Rome, outside those zones where the legions were stationed, was extremely slight.’

The appearance of large sites known as oppida, and generally qual$ed as urban or proto-urban, is a central feature of all accounts of late Iron Age Europe. But the category of oppidum groups together sites that are very diverse in morphology, scale and Jicnction, and excludes other sites that share many of the same features, but lack fortijications and/or are located outside the supposed heartland of the oppida civilisation. Few oppida seem to be at the centre of differentiated settlement networks of the kind usually associated with urbanism, and few display a higher level of intra-site zoning than do rural farms or hamlets. A reassessment of late La T h e settlement, focusing on its technological and cultural unity, contributes to an analysis of late prehistoric Europe which stresses the contrasts between the social trajectories of temperate European and Mediterranean societies.

The vast majority of surviving Roman inscriptions originated in a cultural phenomenon that is characteristic of, and in some senses defines, the early Roman Empire. At the end of the last century B.C. — roughly co-incident, then, with the transition to autocracy, the Roman cultural revolution, and the formative period of provincial cultures throughout the Empire — an epigraphic boom occurred, in Italy and in every province of the Empire. That explosion of new inscriptions, and the subsequent rise and fall of an epigraphic culture, was experienced by eastern and western provinces alike, in Greek as well as in Latin epigraphy. Many regional epigraphies remain to be characterized in terms of their chronology, but such local studies as have been done strongly suggest that, although there was certainly some inter-regional variation in the scale, rate, and timing of this phenomenon, in its broad outlines this pattern was very widespread. Across the entire Empire, the number of inscriptions set up each year began to rise from the Augustan period and increased more and more steeply through the second century. In every region that has been examined in detail, the majority of extant inscriptions were produced in the late second and early third centuries. The peak or turning-point seems to have been reached at slightly different times in each area. But everywhere the subsequent decline was much faster than the original rise, reaching a new low between the middle and the end of the third century A.D. Epigraphy does survive into the fourth century — in most areas of the Empire, if not in most cities — but late imperial inscriptions are very much rarer and differ markedly from early imperial examples in genre, form, and style.

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