The Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference (TRAC) is an academic organisation and conference which was designed to be an arena for open discussion of archaeological theory in Roman archaeology.

History

TRAC, organised initially by

Eleanor Scott Eleanor Roberta Scott (''née'' Ettles, born 23 July 1951) is a Scottish politician and physician. She was Scottish Greens Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) for the Highlands and Islands from 2003–2007, then female co-convener of the pa ...

, was held for the first time in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Newcastle on 23–24 March 1991. Historically, one of TRAC's main focuses has been on the debates surrounding Romanisation, and this dominated many of the volumes during the 1990s. However, since the early 2000s, there have been a rising number of discussions relating to post-imperial and post-colonial approaches to the Roman world. TRAC was originally established as a one-off event, but, the interest that this conference garnered led to it becoming an annual fixture. After the initial meeting in Newcastle, TRAC has been run at many of the major archaeology departments in the UK and has even been organised at institutions in Europe and America. TRAC was joined with RAC (the Roman Archaeology Conference), organised by the

Roman Society The culture of ancient Rome existed throughout the almost 1200-year history of the civilization of Ancient Rome. The term refers to the culture of the Roman Republic, later the Roman Empire, which at its peak covered an area from present-day Lo ...

, at

Reading University The University of Reading is a public university in Reading, Berkshire, England. It was founded in 1892 as University College, Reading, a University of Oxford extension college. The institution received the power to grant its own degrees in 192 ...

in 1995.

Participants

Many of the participants in TRAC are early career scholars or postgraduates who use the conference to outline their own original research and attempt to re-define existing models about the Roman past. Andrew Gardner, in an article in TRAC 2005, raised the issue of a gender imbalance in the history of TRAC conferences. However, in more recent article,

concluded that TRAC had given an equal platform to female archaeologists working within Roman archaeology. In the 2010s, TRAC has becoming increasingly international.

Annual Meeting Locations

Publications

TRAC was previously published as a set of conference proceedings. From TRAC 2017 it moved to an online open access journal, the ''Theoretical Roman Archaeology Journal'', published by the

Open Library of Humanities The Open Library of Humanities is a nonprofit, diamond open access publisher in the humanities and social sciences founded by Martin Paul Eve and Caroline Edwards. Founded in 2015, OLH publishes 27 scholarly journals as of 2022, including a meg ...

Subjects

*Romanisation *Post-colonial archaeology *Gender and material cultural *Material cultural theory

References

External links

{{Scholia, event-series *
Theoretical Roman Archaeology Journal
'
Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference
Archaeological organizations 1991 establishments in the United Kingdom