Socio-literacy: an interdisciplinary approach to understanding literacy in the Roman North-West

Abstract

This chapter presents the scope and limitations for work on provincial writing equipment and how we might use it to understand literacy in the Roman world.The approach advocated here is to side-step the debate over percentages of literacy for each province and rather to focus on literacy in its social context.Using the datasets from the Roman Inscriptions of Britain Online, the Portable Antiquities Scheme and the Rural Settlement in Roman Britain project, we set the scene for Britannia in a brief casestudy.literacy correlates neatly with military and urban settlement, and, in rural contexts, roads, production centres, higher population, administrative/small-scale market functions and status were key drivers.Military presence, however, does not seem to be closely related to the spreading of literacy to local rural communities in Britannia.The military clearly played a role in spreading literacy, but this may have been for the soldiers themselves, their immediate local interlocutors, their families and homelands, rather than necessarily for the hinterlands in which they were stationed.Cross-provincial work combining epigraphic and archaeological evidence and using a socio-literacy approach will allow us to explore the dynamics of military settlement and other drivers of literacy and their impact across the Roman north-West.