An Archaeological Theory Agenda at the Intersection of Colonialism and Androcentrism

Archaeological meaning-making is simultaneously embedded in, influenced by, and intervenes on, contemporary political debates and power structures (i.e. Meskell 2002; McGuire 2008; Hanscam 2019; Carman 2024; Gardner 2026). Accordingly, this paper aligns with those scholars that believe that archaeology and bioarchaeology provide the right evidence and critical tools to resist authority and hence can be used to foster political activism based on scientific grounds (Carman 2024; Halcrow et al. 2026). It responds to such calls, and more specifically to the call of this special issue of the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Journal, by outlining a theoretical path that brings feminist, postcolonial, subaltern and posthumanist perspectives into dialogue to address the mechanisms through which most ancient lives have remained analytically invisible.

To do so, this paper examines the evolution of theoretical debates in Roman archaeology that place marginalized experiences at the centre, not only those of ‘minorities’, but also of the overwhelming majorities, the ‘ninety percent’ (Bowes 2025), historically overlooked by linear, elite-driven and androcentric archaeological and heritage narratives that still frame our discipline despite sensible changes (i.e. Mattingly 2024: 289; Hingley et al. 2025: 1–18). This paper asks what theoretical frameworks are needed to reconstruct how women, migrants, enslaved individuals and labouring communities experienced Roman imperialism, and how recovering these histories might impact the narratives archaeology helps sustain.

Since these questions require tackling historical issues that operate simultaneously, such as androcentrism and coloniality, this paper adopts an intersectional approach. Following Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989; Crenshaw et al. 2019), intersectionality is understood not as a framework of identity, but as a method to analyse how multiple structures of power produce differentiated forms of vulnerability and exclusion. The question we should answer is therefore not how many identities intersect, but how many systems of domination operate simultaneously within a given context, shaping bodies, access to resources, historical visibility, and preventing some people from being recognized as fully human.

Within this framework, feminism and postcolonialism constitute the two principal traditions brought into dialogue to advance a decolonial agenda. Feminism is employed here not simply to recover women’s histories, but to examine how gender structures labour, embodiment and memory within patriarchal societies, such as ancient Rome. Following work ranging from Judith Butler’s (1993) and Donna Haraway’s (2013) critique of fixed gender categories to Feminist and Black Feminist archaeology, gender is approached here as complex, historically contingent, open, and inseparable from other relations of power, such as colonialism, racism and capitalism (Spector 1993; Meskell 2002; Battle-Baptiste 2011).

Postcolonialism, in turn, provides tools to interrogate cultural and material legacies of empire, particularly the ways imperial power produces hierarchies of humanity and historical value. Building on Edward Said’s (1978; 1993) theory of how the West shaped the ‘other’ as the Orient, and consistently developed by a number of archaeologists of the Roman world (Van Dommelen 1998; Hingley 2000; Webster 2001; Gardner 2007; Mattingly 2011; Van Oyen 2015) postcolonialism foregrounds the experiences of populations subjected to empire, challenging narratives centred on colonial elite perspectives.

Two additional frameworks are helpful to foster the dialogue between these traditions. Subalternity, following Antonio Gramsci’s layout of the concept in his Prison Notebook 25, directs attention to the fragmented histories of those heterogenous groups, the subalterns, whose initiatives were/are systematically obscured by dominant power (Buttigieg and Green 2021). Posthumanist feminism, particularly through the work of Rosi Braidotti (2013; 2020) and its archaeological formulations by Rachel Crellin (2025: 47), challenges the assumption of a universal and neutral human subject, which is in reality a specific ‘White, Western, heterosexual, educated, able-bodied male’, emphasizing instead difference, relationality and multiplicity.

These approaches are used here to engage with both decolonizing and decolonial agendas. Following Frantz Fanon (1952; 2002), decolonization is understood as the dismantling of colonial structures and the eradication of the psychological power relations through which colonial domination is reproduced. Decoloniality, following Aníbal Quijano (2000), refers to the necessity of challenging coloniality, the persistence of hierarchies of knowledge and authority that survive the formal end of colonial rule and continue to shape contemporary societies.

In the following sections, this paper will progress from framing the entanglement of Roman archaeology with politics in the contemporary world, toward proving how feminism and postcolonialism assisted archaeology in resisting manipulations of the past, finally testing their collaboration with a case study on funerary practices in Roman period Sardinia. This will allow us to address tensions between gender and subaltern theories.

Ancient Rome World Today: Feminist – Postcolonial Dialogues to Walk a Decolonial Path

The Roman world, filtered through the disciplines of classics, history and archaeology, has long shaped how modern societies imagine authority, citizenship, and humanity (Kotrosits 2020; Padilla Peralta 2025: xii; Dozier 2026). Its materiality has inspired artists, philosophers, filmmakers and nationalist movements alike. Yet, while often treated as too familiar (Gardner 2007: 15; Bang 2008: 1; Mol 2023: 716), numerous studies show how the Roman world was deeply heterogeneous. The actors we choose to foreground within this heterogeneity — emperors or enslaved women, military generals or migrants — produce radically different visions not only of Rome but also of the present and future societies imagined through it. To address these layers of historical and contemporary invisibility, this paper engages with the disproportionate influence exerted by the Roman past on today’s political and cultural debates.

Narratives on the Roman past unfold within broader disputes about the nature of the political and social crisis of values. For some, the present moment reflects a crisis of humanity and empathy, echoing Albert Camus’ (2021: 18–34) argument that societies fail to recognize others as equals. For others, it represents a perceived crisis of ‘the West’, in which diversity, migration, feminism and queer rights, aimed at extending fundamental recognitions to marginalized groups, are framed as threats to civilizational continuity of an imagined lineage of ‘strong men’ (i.e. Butler 2024; Gabriel 2024; for the United States of America see Brenton 2025; for the African continent, Matfess 2015; for refugees, Mokre 2022). Within these narratives, Rome is often mobilized as a symbolic model of hierarchy, masculinity, order and whiteness (Dozier 2020).

The motivations of those advocating for focusing on the human crisis will be retrieved later. The advocates of the latter position, central to this section, frame diversity as a menace, whether related to gender or religious and national identities, and often invoke a linear narrative on ancient Rome, centred on monuments and the prowess of emperors and warlords, as a legitimizing model: a world imagined as masculine, hierarchical and anchored in domination. Archaeology, and particularly Roman archaeology, cannot avoid being entangled in these narratives. As argued by Emily Hanscam (2019: 2), it is not enough to just acknowledge the political dimension of archaeology: ‘archaeologists must also intentionally engage with politics’. Hence, decolonizing Roman archaeology means addressing both ancient power structures and the modern frameworks that continue to amplify elite Roman male voices, to this day, ensuring that gender and postcolonial studies are not adjacent to, but embedded within, the major debates of the field. A case in point is the way pro-Leave and pro-Remain discourses during Brexit mobilized any archaeological discovery in Europe (Brophy 2018), and particularly ideas of the Roman Empire, to support their agendas, even though in contradictory and counter-intuitive ways (Gardner 2026: 50).

Simplified narratives of the Roman past continue to feed exclusionary politics that reject complexity in favour or rigid identities (Bonacchi 2018; Hingley et al. 2018; Bonacchi and Krzyzanska 2019; Mac Sweeney et al. 2019; Greenberg and Hamilakis 2022). At the same time, archaeology is helping foster empathy, offering rich historical resources to resist and counteract dehumanizing rhetoric (Cobb and Crellin 2022). In 2023, Swedish influencer Saskia Cort asked her followers, ‘How often do you think of the Roman Empire?’. The viral trend exposed a striking gendered asymmetry: women asking this question of men, whose responses, ranging from ‘a few times a month’ to ‘a few times a day’, emphasized conquest, technological superiority or war. As Mary Beard (2023) noted, such fascination provides a ‘safe space where to indulge macho fantasies’ located at a comfortably historical distance. But its popularity coincided with the rise of online masculinist subcultures that now leak into everyday politics.

Roman archaeologists therefore carry responsibilities both toward scholarly communities and wider publics. Because interpretations of antiquity circulate beyond academia, simplified reconstructions exclusively involving male elites risk reinforcing exclusionary narratives in the present. Roman archaeology is not unique in its elite bias, but its cultural influence is exceptional, pervading institutional buildings and centres of power like Capitol Hill, in addition to ‘Senate’ being adopted as a global parliamentary term. Widespread fascination with gladiatorial violence further reveals how deeply Rome structures western imaginaries of politics, culture and authority. Such fascination goes beyond architectural facades and nostalgia; high-profile figures have often invoked Rome as the foundation of the identities of modern states, for instance Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (2010) praised the discovery of Cicero’s works in the 1820s as the new start of a unified Italian national identity.

Today, such appropriations also appear within national and international institutional settings. For instance, the book Manifesto per l’Occidente (Valditara and Azzoni 2026), co-edited by the current Italian Minister of Education, presents postcolonial scholarship as a pathologized form of Western ‘self-hatred’, framing critiques of colonialism as attacks on a shared civilizational heritage: the lack of engagement with the contents of seminal works by Fanon (1952) and Bernal (1987), only briefly mentioned as symptoms of a problem, is revealing. The book’s tendency to replace, in relation to ancient Rome, the language of conquest and coercion with softer notions of cultural ‘contact’ is also noteworthy, a rhetorical shift that mirrors wider attempts to depoliticize relationships.

Such uses of antiquity extend to influential financial actors. An example is the Expandere Conscientiae Lumen Grant Programme, funded by The Musk Foundation, framed with the intent to ‘support projects that preserve and promote Greco-Roman culture — the foundation of Western civilization’ (Ancient Rome Live 2026). Of course, projects funded through such initiatives may themselves critically interrogate the call’s terminology and assumptions. The issue is therefore less the research that may emerge from them, and more the broader discursive framework within which such initiatives are articulated.

Emphasis on a supposedly superior, white, Graeco-Roman inheritance obscures the heterogeneous experiences that constituted the Roman world itself, including those of women, provincials, rural communities, migrants, labourers and enslaved individuals. The erasure of these people from ancient narratives is not an antiquarian oversight: it is an exercise that tacitly reinforces tolerance of inequality and violence today.

Recovering those silenced experiences requires theoretical approaches capable of addressing power and difference. Over the last three decades, Roman archaeology has generated many such approaches able to deconstruct monolithic narratives (e.g. Millett 1992; Scott 1993; Hingley 2000; Gardner 2007; Revell 2010; Mattingly 2011; Moore 2023; Bowes 2025; Mol 2025; Van Oyen 2026). Nevertheless, their insights, often confined to specialist scholarship, need time to impact wider images of human societies. The following sections explore how dialogue between feminist and postcolonial perspectives can help move this agenda of recovering silenced experiences forward.

Feminism and Roman Archaeology

Since the inception of the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference in 1993, Eleanor Scott placed gender at the centre of the discipline, a commitment later reinforced by Louise Revell 2010) and Amy Russell (2016) among others. Since then, feminist and gender studies have moved dynamically within the understanding of the Roman past, occupying important spaces in the study of history (Rantala 2019), classics (Rabinowitz and Richlin 1993; McClure 2002), art (Koloski-Ostrow and Lyons 1997), frontiers (Carroll 2013; Walas and Birley 2025) and reception (Moore 2023). The rhythm of such dynamism is only increasing (see Tilley 2025; papers in this issue). The issue is therefore not the absence of innovative scholarship producing sophisticated analyses of gender, identity and colonialism (i.e. Meskell 2002; Battle Baptiste 2011; Tilley 2025). Rather, the question is how far such nuanced perspectives have become integrated into everyday interpretive practices of the discipline. Other paradigms, seemingly more aligned with the artefacts-centred origins of the discipline, feel easier to integrate in archaeological practice. One of these is the object-oriented-ontology (Harman 2018), whose agenda sidelines human actors in favour of objects. But its popularity, for Eva Mol (2023: 716), might have been fostered by the ‘still often peripheral positions that post-colonial and feminist theory take in the wider archaeological debate’.

The lack of widespread engagement with feminism and postcolonialism impacts not only reconstructions of the past but also archaeological practice itself. In their Affirmation and Action, Hannah Cobb and Rachel Crellin (2022: 265) ask:

Dear Reader, how do you feel, right now, about the state of inequality in archaeology, and in the world? For us, the authors of this paper, we feel angry and exhausted. In the constant grind of the neoliberal, audit culture of academia, the privilege and dominance of the patriarchy seems ever more acute.

This analysis finds a material match in commercial archaeology, where sites have long been organized around an implicitly exclusive masculine worker: personal protective equipment, site facilities and working arrangements have often been designed with limited consideration for menstruation, pregnancy, breastfeeding or other bodily experiences (Palha 2022; Pedro 2025). Such assumptions shape who is imagined as the default archaeologist even before interpretation begins.

The fact that postcolonialism and feminism still remain unevenly integrated into broader understandings of the Roman and contemporary worlds is part of the trend of Roman archaeology towards theoretical fragmentation into isolated hyper-specialized areas of study (Gardner 2024: 8). The decolonial commitments embraced by many archaeologists in the last decade (i.e. Kamash 2021; Lemos 2023; Hamilakis 2026) aim to transform archaeology from a discipline that reconstructs the past as a chain of neutrally stratified facts into one that critically examines past inequalities and the epistemic structures through which they continue to be reproduced today. This requires challenging hierarchies of knowledge, questioning assumptions of universal neutrality and expanding whose lives become historically visible. Such commitments cannot advance without building collaborations between feminist and gender theories and other cosmologies that require us ‘to unlearn the deep-rooted frameworks of thought grounded on the idea of a universal rationality’ (Lemos et al. 2025). Although refined interpretations of the past abound, much Roman archaeology writing still presents its subjects through categories that appear neutral, ungendered and socially unmarked.

Our cognitive biases overwhelmingly imagine an ancient world dominated by male elites; even when non-elites are studied, farmers, soldiers or craftsmen are routinely imagined as male by default (Coltofean-Arizancu et al. 2021; Matić et al. 2024). More than ancient patriarchies, whose specificities we still ought to investigate in greater detail, these biases reflect the male-centric world we inhabit today (i.e. bell hooks 2000). This should suffice to accept Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s (2014) invitation to recognize the necessity of a feminist lens, not only to ‘recover women’ but to interrogate the intersecting structures that render many lives, ancient and contemporary, invisible.

This urgency has been often underlined. Louise Revell (2010: 1) warned that feminist archaeology risked becoming a ‘ghetto area’, recognized as important by many yet disconnected from major debates about cultural change, economy and imperialism. Amy Russell’s (2016) work on women’s occupation of public space — from which they are excluded in linear historical accounts — as a form of resistance tackles the risk of ghettoization of women both as past agents and as a current category of study. These calls align with other appeals against siloed thinking within the traditions of the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Journal itself (i.e. Thomas and Savani 2024; Kitching 2025).

Recent research demonstrates how feminist approaches render a more complex picture of the Roman world rather than merely adding women into existing narratives as a homogeneous voice. Kassandra Miller’s (2024: 49–50) analysis of intentional menstrual suppression in imperial Rome illuminates hidden gendered practices, showing how little we know about perspectives that are absent in the archival record. Similarly, Penelope Allison’s (2006; 2015) focus on small finds reveal the presence of women and children in spaces long assumed exclusively masculine, like military bases along the German frontier.

Such work also opens space for non-binary identities: Miller Power’s (2020) analysis of the Harper Road burial, an inhumation dating to AD 50–70 in Southwark, London, illustrates the importance of recognizing the cultural specificities of gendered behaviour: a person buried with grave goods including a mirror, often culturally coded as a luxurious attribute of femininity, was defined as potentially non-binary only after aDNA analyses showed XY chromosomes (Redfern et al. 2017). Although more recent ancient DNA analysis of that burial found that the individual had in fact male chromosomes (Redfern et al. 2023), the train of thoughts used to interpret it needs critical assessment: for Power (2020: 12), this discussion exposes the assumption that ‘all people are cisgender, heterosexual, endosex (the opposite of intersex), heteroromantic, and fit the gender binary until something “unusual” is found’ (i.e. XY chromosomes on someone buried with a mirror). Similarly, Jessica Tilley’s (2025) study of mourners’ depiction on Greek sarcophagi exemplifies the rejection of stagnant identities in Roman times, by showing how funerary iconography transgressed normative and binary categories of gender, age and decorum, suggesting that ancient social categories were far more fluid than often assumed.

These refined discussions acknowledge that gendered behaviours are not innate but culturally specific (Ghisleni et al. 2016; Johnson 2019: 163). As Sørensen (2006) cautioned, gender cannot be isolated from broader social dynamics. This has been repeatedly demonstrated by Black Feminist scholarship (Whitney Battle-Baptiste 2011; Bhalerao, this issue), showing the intersections of gender with race, class and structural violence. Black feminist archaeology exposes how mainstream feminist approaches risk reproducing white, middle-class epistemologies if other power relations, such as race, are not made central; a risk previously tackled by Lynn Meskell (2002), reflecting on the intersections of politics and archaeology, and Janet Spector’s (1993) weaving of female voices, ancient and present, in the study of gendered uses of artefacts by American Indigenous communities.

Postcolonialism and Roman Archaeology

Feminist archaeology reveals how gender structures historical exclusion; it also hints at the fact that gender intersects other power relations. This paper argues that a full understanding of how different people experienced imperialism requires bridging feminist and postcolonial approaches. This dialogue does not shift attention from gendered to other types of domination but rather broadens our capacities to highlight different dimensions of the same mechanism: the production of historical invisibility and inequality through social, political and colonial structures of power. Roughly 98% of the people who inhabited the Roman Empire were far removed from political power (Scheidel and Friesen 2009; Bowes 2025). Yet, this overwhelming majority continues to be treated as marginal to Roman high culture (Mattingly 2024: 289). The influx of postcolonial approaches to archaeology in the last thirty years has offered valid and nuanced alternative perspectives; nevertheless, such approaches are far from representing the average scholarship of our discipline. This imbalance is the consequence of the Latin literary tradition, which privileges the voices of those in power. Archaeology is uniquely positioned to counterbalance this bias, as it can detect the material traces of those excluded from elite narratives. Yet, archaeological evidence does not speak for itself: the stories we reconstruct depend on the questions we choose to ask, the interpretive frameworks we mobilize, the material evidence we leave silent in the archives and the one on which we focus our narratives (Puddu and Van Dommelen 2026: 34).

Similarly to feminist studies, postcolonial perspectives, which were highly influential from the 1990s onwards, have been sidelined at times. During the 2010s, other theories such as globalization were presented as more productive for understanding connectivity across the Roman Empire (Pitts and Versluys 2014). Through the lens of globalization, reflections on the state of Roman archaeology (Woolf 2014) have judged the postcolonial paradigm change as incomplete, challenged by discussions on revitalizations of paradigms earlier judged as essentialist, such as Romanization (Versluys 2014; Woolf 2014). More recently, Terrenato (2022: 19) has argued that postcolonial approaches might have changed our moral evaluation of social processes within the Roman Empire more than our understanding of those processes. As a result, postcolonialism is often portrayed as having exhausted its interpretive potential. Yet, it has never left the scene.

Its resistance is good news, as within an imperial setting, the danger is that scholarship unconsciously reproduces Rome’s own elite-centred perspective, echoing imperial propaganda. Symbols of authority tied to urban elites have been extensively examined (Killgrove 2013; 2014; Mattingly 2024: 289), persisting across two millennia to inspire modern political organizations (Vlassopoulos 2021). To counter this still existing trend toward a ‘VIP version of history’ (McCarthy 2013: 9), a stronger theoretical lens is required: recent decades have also witnessed a shift of attention towards the study of provincial, rural and frontier communities (e.g. Millett 1992; Bowes 2021; 2025; Walas and Birley 2025), accompanied by nuanced concepts such as subalternity (González-Ruibal 2021), failure and precarity (Van Oyen 2023; 2026), enslavement (Zuchtriegel 2017; Vlassopoulos 2021), the bioarchaeology of colonization (Killgrove 2014), and structural injustice (Kuzawa Gravlee 2016; Meloni et al. 2022).

The problem of subalternity emerges neatly from these approaches. Often theoretically blurred, and at times depoliticized (Marín-Aguilera 2021a; 2021b), subalternity has a precise genealogy. For Antonio Gramsci, subaltern groups are defined by conditions of fragmentation: their historical activities survive discontinuously, ‘continually interrupted by the initiative of the ruling groups’ (Buttigieg and Green 2021: 6–7). Postcolonial concepts such as Edward Said’s orientalism (1978; 1993), Homi Bhabha’s third space (1994), and Gayatri Spivak’s strategic essentialism (1988) all build on this foundation: histories escaping elite control are fractured, but they remain politically powerful. To apply these concepts rigorously requires a methodological stance founded on plurality, solidarity, non-linearity and epistemic humility. These qualities stand in contrast to the androcentric and homogeneous histories that describe the past as a coherent continuum culminating in nationalist presents (Gramsci 1975: Notebook 15).

The focus on postcolonialism and subalternity reconnects with the human crisis, mentioned above, framed by Albert Camus (2021) in his lecture at Columbia University in 1946 as the difficulty of recognizing others as equally human. Only people whose stories are told tend to be empathized with, and are thereby considered fully human. Subalternity, as a framework, complicates the imagined universal belonging to the human category. The Roman ideology of humanitas, celebrated as a universal category, was in fact profoundly hierarchical (Čulik-Baird and Hanses 2024: 78), reserved primarily to male citizens. This dynamic anticipates later European colonial logics: defining ‘the human’ through the production of its non-human opposite. Posthumanist feminism exposes similar exclusions. The supposed ‘universal human’ of humanistic tradition ignores the differences and inequalities that characterize people’s daily lives (Crellin 2025: 47, after Braidotti 2020 and Ferrando 2019). Drawing on Deleuze’s (2004) definition of difference as a generative force, Crellin uses posthumanist feminism to emphasize difference as a feature of humanity. By putting the spotlight on multiplicity rather than universality (Kay and Eriksen 2024: 16), and by not stopping at ‘a dissatisfaction with gender roles, but [extending] to a wider anger at intersectional inequalities’ (Crellin 2025: 48), posthumanist approaches can usefully illuminate imperial asymmetries framing the lives of the 98% in the Roman world.

Similarly, anti-racist archaeologies further demonstrate how systems of domination must be analysed simultaneously as historical structures and living epistemologies that still shape academic practice. Ayana Flewellen (et al. 2021), Theresa Singleton (1985; 1999), Maria Franklin (et al. 2020), and Deirdre Cooper Owens (2021) have argued that archaeology cannot meaningfully engage with coloniality without confronting the racial hierarchies produced through slavery, extractive labour regimes and capitalist expansion, but also through persistent segregation in academic sectors. A transition to equity, we are reminded by Flewellen et al. (2021: 232–233) cannot be achieved by Black, Indigenous and People of Colour scholars on their own: intersectionality, both in terms of theoretical effort and practical behaviour, is a collective precondition to interpreting different pasts and imagining radically different futures. Though racism as it exists today was not a feature of the Roman Empire, racialization within Roman culture certainly did exist and is a feature today under analysis (Čulik-Baird and Hanses 2024). Anti-racist archaeology offers methodological tools that resonate strongly with Roman contexts, particularly when examining how imperial systems categorized, ranked and exploited subject populations.

Recognizing these dynamics initiates a process of consciousness-raising: a praxis aimed at restoring political presence to those excluded from history formation, in line with Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s (2006) idea that decolonization must be grounded in practice, not merely discourse. Indeed, humanism, colonialism and dehumanization are historically entangled. Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (2002: 21–22) captures the asymmetry of this worldview, describing how through colonialism ‘Europe accorded the human status de jure to its inhabitants (…) [while] on the other side of the ocean there was a race of less-than-humans’. The analogy resonates with Roman imperialist logic, which — mediated through Renaissance humanism — served as a model for later colonial regimes (Padilla Peralta 2025: 33).

For these reasons, particularly if the Roman past continues to be mobilized in ways that both distort antiquity and exclude diversity in the present (see the above section), postcolonialism and feminism should be treated as mutually reinforcing pillars of an intersectional paradigm. One example of such integration is provided by Alena Wigodner’s (2025) work on Roman Britain and Gaul. She shows, through the study of votive offerings, that their materiality is a proxy of the gendered framing of the Roman world: a worldview that, applied to the colonized regions, ‘kept women in their place with respect to men and kept locals in their place with respect to Rome’ (Wigodner 2025: 11). Wigodner’s intersection of postcolonial and indigenous feminist theories demonstrates the ancient imagination of a binary Roman world where Rome was masculine, civilized and rational, while conquered people were constructed as feminine, dependent and uncivilized. This resonates strongly with later colonial language, revealing the permeability of the present to gendered power frameworks of the past. This example shows that collaborations between postcolonial and feminist theories produce powerful results not only to foreground different experiences of the past, but also to expose the lingering of gendered, colonial framings of present realities. The next section extends such dialogue to a case study from Roman period Sardinia, both addressing theoretical tensions within the frameworks we use and moving the analysis beyond collective categories and toward individual experiences.

Addressing Feminist Tensions within Subaltern Theory: A Case Study from Roman Period Sardinia

The cover of this special issue features a photograph taken in the 1920s by photographer Mario Pes showing women walking along the pier of Porto Botte, southwest Sardinia. They are skilled workers on heavy duty carrying, balanced on their heads large wicker baskets filled with coal (Figure 1) extracted from the mines of Carbonia to be shipped into Italy. They are skilled workers on heavy duty. This photo destabilizes a persistent historiographical tendency to imagine the mining environment as exclusively masculine and mechanized (Romano and Papastefanaki 2020). Despite abundant written, oral and photographic evidence, women were long erased from androcentric narratives, or their work, together with that of children, naturalized as informal paid or unpaid activities, such as taking in lodgers, washing and ironing clothing, and agriculture (Vanja 1993; Azara and Betti 2018: 14; Romano and Papastefanaki 2020: 218).

The rendering invisible of women’s labour in contexts with abundant evidence raises an archaeological question: what happens when archaeologists interpret ancient extractive communities through far more fragmentary evidence? To what extent are elite masculine narratives in archeology not evidential but interpretive?

Figure 1: Mario Pes, pre-1928. Women transporting coal in Porto Botte, South-west Sardinia. (Ilisso Edizioni. Reproduced with permission).

Subalternity and funerary practice in Roman Sardinia

Roman authors routinely described Sardinia simultaneously as an environmentally and morally difficult place. For instance, Tacitus (Annales 2.85) tells the story of over four thousand worshippers of Egyptian and Jewish cults being expelled from Rome to Sardinia, recalling that authorities considered that the exiled could have died due to the island’s pestilential climate — ob gravitatem caeli interissent. Such representations persisted into Late Antiquity, when Gregory I (Registrum Epistularum IV.27.4) complained that Sardinians still worshipped sticks and stones, rejecting Christianity. Roman representations of Sardinia also reveal the gendered dimensions of colonial othering. In his defence of Sardinia’s governor M. Aemilius Scaurus, accused of extortion, violence and sexual abuse during his mandate, Cicero ignores the charges and instead attacks the credibility of Sardinian witnesses, racializing them (Culik-Baird and Hanses 2024: 84). Significantly, this depiction of a backward island needing domestication (Puddu 2023: 64–67), where moral and physical geography coincide, resembling later settler colonial rhetoric (Deere 2025) reaches its clearest expression in Cicero’s (Scaur. 38) discussion of a Sardinian woman. Allegedly taking her own life rather than submit to Scaurus’ advances, she is referred to dismissively as ista Sarda (‘that Sardinian woman’) by Cicero, who invites his audience to focus on her age, appearance and ethnicity. The episode recalls the dynamics identified by Wigodner (2025), in which conquered populations are feminized and rendered inferior through intersecting discourses of ethnicity and gender. Here, a rural Sardinian woman emerges at the intersection of imperial domination and patriarchal exclusion.

Archaeological evidence helps broaden this perspective. Previous work has applied the semiotically informed concept of subalternity to rural communities in west-central Sardinia, seeking to move beyond elite-centred narratives of the Roman Empire and foreground the collective experiences of populations largely absent from literary sources (Puddu 2019a; Puddu and Van Dommelen 2026). Cemeteries at Masullas, Sanluri and Sardara in rural west-central Sardinia demonstrate remarkable continuity of practices across centuries: body positions, grave organization and relations between bodies and grave goods were replicated according to highly codified ritual patterns (Paderi 1982; Arru 2003; Puddu 2019a). Yet, such uniformity may have itself functioned ideologically, flattening distinctions of age, gender or provenance (Puddu and Van Dommelen 2026: 40). Understanding how these communities negotiated inequality therefore requires moving from collective identities to individual bodies.

An edict preserved in the Codex Theodosianus, previously analysed in full in the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Journal (Puddu 2019b: 8), provides an historical context for these dynamics: addressing the reorganization of Sardinian agricultural estates, Constantine ordered the reunification of families that had been separated through new systems of land management and labour allocation aimed at augmenting productivity (Theodosius II: Vera 1986: 267; Meloni 1990: 211; Colavitti 1996: 643; Mastino 2005: 178–179). Constantine’s will, reported in the Codex, illustrates how imperial extraction could disrupt kinship and social networks.

Against this backdrop, two fourth-century AD burials from the necropolis of Sa Mitza Salida become significant. While earlier graves were overwhelmingly individual (Puddu 2019c), burials 9bis and 43B incorporated manipulated human remains from earlier burials into new ones (Puddu 2019b: 13). My previous interpretation approached these practices through subaltern theory, suggesting that bodily recomposition and ritualized memory may have responded to experiences of social fragmentation produced by imperial economic restructuring, land redistribution and displacement (Puddu 2019b, 15; Puddu and Van Dommelen 2026: 40), in line with nuanced readings of burials of enslaved individuals (De Haas 2012; Redfern 2024).

Recent genetic and isotopic analyses run on graves 43B and 9bis reopen that interpretation. Integrated with archaeological and historical evidence filtered through a feminist framework, knowledge of biological sex helps raise new questions about how imperial disruption might have been experienced through gender. In grave 9bis, both the principal inhumed individual and the secondary cranium deposited near the feet were biologically male adults. In grave 43B (Figure 2), the principal burial ‘(Inhumed_C)’ was also biologically male, while the three crania ‘(R1, R2, R3)’ deposited over the body belonged to biologically female individuals (Table 1). Although analyses of biological relatedness remain ongoing, the identification of genetic sex, filtered through an appropriate framework, introduces a new dimension to the interpretation of these practices.

Figure 2: Grave 43b, Roman cemetery of Sa Mitza Salida, Masullas, fourth century AD. (Photo: Michele Sannia. Reproduced with permission of the photographer.)

Table 1: Biological sex determination results for six individuals from graves 43B and 9bis, necropolis of Sa Mitza Salida (synthesis of report by Orhan Efe Yavuz, Cosimo Posth, Archaeo and Paleogenetics Group, University of Tübingen).

Individual	Sample Name	X rate	Y rate	Assigned sex
T9Bis Cranium A	SAMS001.A.1.1	0.3281284413	0.4395771331	XY
T9Bis Inhumed_1	SAMS002.A.1.1	0.3186626912	0.4417792476	XY
T43 Inhumed_C	SAMS008.A.1.1	0.284665	0.328864	XY
T43 Cranium R1	SAMS009.A.1.1	0.636570734	0.02958418287	XX
T43 Cranium R2	SAMS010.B	0.195558	0.00529538	XX
T43 Cranium R3	SAMS011.B	1.3947	0.044873	XX

Conclusion: A Path Towards a Decolonial Archaeology of Roman Imperialism

This paper has argued that feminist and postcolonial approaches are most productive when treated as collaborative strands. Although both traditions have generated important scholarship, they often have developed along parallel trajectories despite confronting related questions of power, exclusion and historical visibility.

The case study from Roman-period rural Sardinia demonstrates how bringing these perspectives into dialogue opens new interpretive possibilities, allowing archaeology to move from collective accounts of imperial extraction toward differentiated embodied experiences of labour, kinship, care, memory and social reproduction. It has also helped address a tension around gender within subaltern theory. In this sense, the significance of feminist and postcolonial archaeology lies not simply in adding previously marginalized groups to Roman history, but in expanding the interpretive questions archaeology can ask, revealing multidirectional layers of subalternity.

More broadly, the paper has suggested, in line with foundational works (Spector 1993; Meskell 2002; Battle-Baptiste 2011), that categories such as gender, legal status, class, locality and indigeneity, revealed by archaeology, bioarchaeology and written sources, cannot be treated as separate dimensions of historical experience. Such an approach does not collapse distinct forms of subordination into a single category; rather, it helps explain how imperial systems were experienced differently. At the same time, these interpretive categories require constant scrutiny if archaeology is to account for differentiated imperial experiences.

This perspective fosters decolonization, which is understood here as neither the replacement of one dominant narrative with another, nor the incorporation of a few previously marginal voices into an otherwise unchanged account of Roman history; but rather as the dismantling of the colonial and androcentric structures of knowledge that continue to determine whose histories become visible and whose remain fragmented, ‘othered’, or silent. A feminist, postcolonial archaeology of the Roman world recognizes intersectionality as a methodological commitment to keeping interpretive frameworks of the past open, dynamic, self-critical and porous to the present. The value of theoretical collaborations lies precisely in generating new questions, exposing blind spots, and refining the analytical tools necessary to answer those questions. Postcolonial and feminist critiques jointly expose how dominant systems define and replicate themselves through marginalization of others, whether through the ideology of humanitas, colonial distinctions between civilized and uncivilized, masculine and feminine, or overarching modern assumptions about whose lives are historically meaningful, or even grievable (Butler 2009; Eriksen and Kay 2022).

By pursuing a decolonial agenda, Roman archaeology must treat the fragmentary traces of historically marginalized groups as central to the shaping and functioning of the Roman Empire. The critical understanding of these people’s embodied experiences is not an antiquarian formality: it is a rigorous political action that broadens the range of human experiences recognized as historically significant, fostering greater attentiveness to mechanisms of marginalization in the present.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the editors of TRAJ and to the anonymous reviewers for their encouraging and generous engagement with this paper. Their comments and suggestions substantially strengthened both its theoretical framework and its engagement with archaeological evidence. Any errors or shortcomings remain, of course, my own.

Funding Statement

The research done for this paper is part of the project “PAAST: A Posthuman Archaeology of Ancient Sardinia: Mobility, Diversity, and De-Racialization of Bodies at Work” funded by the European Union and the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR) through the NextGenerationEU Programme. Project number: E63C24002760001.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.