Archaeology Lessons From Lockdown

Katherine A. Crawford, The Cyprus Institute, CY, kathacrawford@gmail.com Karl Goodwin, Canterbury Christ Church University, UK, kag28@kent.ac.uk Francesca Mazzilli, University of Bergen, NO, mazzillifra@gmail.com Blanka Misic, Champlain College Lennoxville, Canada, Blanka.Misic.2008@live.rhul.ac.uk Sarah U. Scoppie, State Office for Cultural Heritage Baden-Württemberg, DE, scheffler.sarah@gmail.com


Introduction
A common theme within Roman archaeology since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic has been a reflection on the pandemic's effect. In many cases this has revealed the underlying issues and inequality implicit within the discipline that have been simmering under the surface for years, but never fully addressed. The pandemic only exacerbated and forced many of these issues to the forefront of discipline discussions. The challenge remains for the field of archaeology of how we address the issues that have come to light over the past two years as the pandemic (hopefully) soon comes to an end. In this editorial, rather than focusing on the issues present within the field of Roman archaeology, and by extension TRAC, we choose to consider what we have learned from the challenges of the past two years and how this can inform how we positively move forward. Despite all the discussions of returning to normalcy, we should not strive to return to the position we were in as a field two years ago, but rather, aim to create a field that is more sustainable, diverse, and inclusive.

Positive Outcomes of COVID for TRAC
Living in a pandemic for the last two years has been challenging for most people, Roman archaeology scholars included. As lockdown measures were imposed, conferences cancelled, and universities, libraries, museums, archives, and archaeological sites  uk/trac-webinars/). In true TRAC tradition, the series featured an eclectic collection of papers, employing a diversity of interdisciplinary theoretical approaches, presented by postgraduate, early career, as well as established scholars in the field of Roman archaeology. Many of the webinars reflected on issues that bridge the ancient Roman and present times -populist nationalism, plague and health, globalization, and urbanization, among others. In order to make these important discussions accessible to individuals who were unable to attend the webinars live as well as to future audiences, the webinars were recorded and posted, with permission from the speakers, on a newly-created and publicly-available TRAC YouTube channel (https://www.youtube. com/channel/UCuLBCPbZyFwTfTAI4Gzeerw).

Towards a Sustainable Future for TRAC
Through the creation of new digital spaces for the TRAC community, TRAC has moved closer to fulfilling the Agenda 2030 with its 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs; https://sdgs.un.org/goals). Enabling a sustainable future for TRAC goes beyond addressing climate change (SDG 13) and promoting responsible consumption (SDG 12).
At previous conferences, the local organising committees have helped participants to cut waste by providing free water bottles and mugs for hot drinks. The TRAC Standing Committee aims to introduce a sustainability policy for all future TRAC sponsored events, which will also continue to encourage the local organisers to use sustainable and responsible providers and thus help society to move towards achieving food security (SDG 2), clean water (SDG 6) and affordable and clean energy (SDG 7).
As the world slowly emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic and in-person academic events resume, one of the key challenges will be in sustaining the open-access trend in Roman archaeology which emerged as a by-product of lockdown. Will the academic world go back to costly conference fees and travel requirements of in-person conferences? Or will we shift to a more sustainable and inclusive online and in-person hybrid conference format? We hope that it is the latter. In the meantime, TRAC remains committed to promoting inclusive and open-access scholarship in Roman archaeology as well as inclusive and equitable quality education (SDG 4) through the continued publication of its uncommon free open-access journal (TRAJ) and through a new 2021-2022 series of free webinars. As we move beyond the pandemic times, it is our hope that the open-access research resources the TRAC Standing Committee created (TRAJ, TRAC Webinar series and TRAC YouTube channel) will prove useful to scholars across disciplines (and of particular use to scholars with limited access to library collections and research resources), and that more scholars in Roman archaeology will be encouraged to embrace open-access research. Through the venue of TRAJ, we will also be introducing the possibility of including special issues within our yearly volumes as our next target to continue to promote increased accessibility to open access research on behalf of both researchers and authors. We hope that this helps fill the gap left by discontinuing the TRAC theme series, while ultimately enabling special issue collections to achieve a greater breadth of readership and engagement through virtue of its open access nature.
To provide learning opportunities for all and to work towards ending poverty in all its forms (SDG 1), TRAC remains dedicated to not only offering free open-access scholarship but to also keep conference costs at a minimum and increasing the accessibility of TRAC events. In 2022, TRAC will take place in Split, Croatia, thus moving closer to many of our European participants. We will continue to support participation through bursaries, aimed specifically at students who have to travel further to the conference and/or receive less institutional financial support. In light of the hardships posed by COVID-19, we will also be offering a Covid hardship bursary for the 2022 conference. For the future, TRAC aims to continue encouraging attendance by offering bursaries to help offset otherwise prohibitive attendance costs and by providing an inclusive conference space that caters towards the well-being of all participants, including families and those with special needs (SDG 3).

TRAC -Reflecting on Our Core Values
TRAC was initially conceived to 'offer an alternative to [the] depressing orthodoxy' of the study of Roman archaeology in the 1990s and to provide a platform for new ideas and approaches (Scott 1993: 3). Eleanor Scott also stated that TRAC was intended to be primarily a place for the 'introduction and operation of theory in Roman archaeology' We, therefore, invite articles that openly and critically address key issues within Roman archaeology for this is needed to push the discipline forward. As such, we advocate for critical introspection as a means to develop TRAC and TRAJ in a way that benefits Roman archaeology on a global level across theoretical and ethical themes.
Two publications in this current volume express the fundamentality of this process (Garland 2021;Kamash 2021). Both papers provide critical insight into current issues faced by TRAC and include analysis on whose voices are platformed and whose are not. Zena Kamash, for example, uses data from previous TRAC conferences to show that participants at our conferences do not proportionately represent wider society (Kamash 2021: 8-9). While 15% of the UK population identifies as different from the dominant uk/about/standing-committee/). While TRAC has, since its establishment in 1991, made a lasting impact on Roman archaeology through its reflexivity (Gardner 2016: 1), it is also to be understood that we are part of the wider Roman archaeology field that needs to progress. Thankfully, this aim has been the core reason behind TRAC's longevity, emboldened through our commitment to introspective, reflective, and critical discourse in the field -and thus towards gender equality (SDG 5) and reduced inequalities (SDG 10). We hope that articles

TRAC Moving Forward
Despite the new challenges and the forefront projects and policies that TRAC has so far embarked on, TRAC constantly strives for new goals to improve the current state of research, its accessibility, and to offer an even more equal, inclusive, and safe platform for nurturing ideas between international diverse young scholars and more established researchers.
We will continue to host the annual TRAC conference, however, we will work on implementing solutions that enable it to be more accessible and equitable moving forward. This will hopefully include enabling a hybrid format that will allow a greater diversity of scholarly voices to join. The pandemic has shown the positives of online conferences, in particular enabling participants that previously were excluded from in-person conferences due to a myriad of reasons. A greater balance needs to be implemented that merges the positives of both in-person and online events, which we hope the larger TRAC community can help us develop in the coming years. We will also be introducing a new sustainability policy to be voted on at the next TRAC AGM to help address the unavoidable environmental impact that comes with any in-person event.
We will also continue to run the TRAC webinar series, which thus far has provided a platform for a wide diversity of topics and scholars, many of whom have not previously been involved with TRAC. In combination with our open access efforts with TRAJ, we hope these two initiatives provide one avenue for growing the TRAC community beyond the UK focused conference it began as. We also hope it provides a platform to address the current dominance of Britain and Italy within TRAC research by enabling scholars working on other areas of the Roman empire as well as within related fields to more readily engage with our community.
Taking into account the reflection of TRAJ editorials and Kamash and Garland's articles that have reviewed TRAC progress over the last 30 years of annual conferences, TRAC aims to implement new regulations/actions that address the issues raised. While TRAC has been consistently introspective in terms of editorials and papers written by select scholars engaged with the TRAC community, we hope to widen this approach.
We aim to create greater discussion from the community attending in-person and online events about what is working well with TRAC and what can be improved, and in particular, how we can continue to become more accessible and diverse as an organisation.

In This Issue
The present volume consists of eight articles, and as is common with TRAC they cover a wide range of topics. Two of the articles take an introspective approach to questioning the state of TRAC within the field of Roman archaeology. Zena Kamash, in an expansion of her 2019 TRAC keynote lecture, brings specific attention to the marginal voices that are absent or extremely limited at RAC/TRAC conferences and within the discipline more broadly. This extends not only to the scholars involved in academic discourse, but also to the regions which receive the greatest degree of scholarly attention, notably Britain and Italy. Nicky Garland expands upon this theme in his bibliometric analysis of TRAC's publications over the last 30 years, paying particular attention to how TRAC's diversity can be measured. Notably, both authors offer suggestions for how TRAC can begin to address the issues of diversity and larger discipline biases to positively incite change within TRAC in terms of its in-person events and publication practices.
One of the articles addresses economic practices within Roman Egypt. Paul Kelly questions previous assumptions of Roman Egypt inflation during the third century AD by adopting a quantitative approach. His research indicates the presence of two different markets, one for wheat which corroborates existing views while other commodities saw price increases into the third century.
Three of the articles consider rural and villa life applying extremely different theoretical frameworks. Brain Theng applies social science theory to try and better understand the socio-economic condition of the rural non-elite. Kilian Mallon adopts a taskscape framework to question how mosaics with scenes of labour can inform our understanding of Roman visual narratives and, particularly, the elite power structures that are emphasised through their display. James Dodd considers villas more broadly by taking a spatial perspective to reconsider how the transformation of Roman villas can be assessed during Late Antiquity.
The final two articles consider specific types of Roman material culture. Salvatore Fadda considers how Roman portraiture in combination with literary sources can be used to assess and propose specific medical diagnoses. Elizabeth Webster, alternatively, looks at cultural and technological changes occurring within Britain from the Late Iron Age to the second century AD. Various styles of jewellery are used to try and understand the changes that occurred after the start of the Roman occupation.
All these articles apply an interesting display of different theoretical approaches to address a wide range of topics. Topics, which question and raise issues about the current state and future of TRAC and the field of Roman archaeology. We thank our authors and reviewers for continuing to support TRAC and TRAJ through their scholarly engagement with our community, and for introducing research topics that can help our field improve in terms its research focus but also by furthering an introspective approach to always questing how we can continue to improve as an organization.