Prof. A. Van Oyen (Astrid)

I am an archaeologist studying Roman Italy and the Western provinces, exploring the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of inequality, empire, craft production, and rural economies. I am particularly interested in the socio-economic history of non-elites.

My most recent book, Living Precariously in the Roman World: A Social Archaeology of Inequality (Cambridge University Press, 2026), explores the experiences of people living in constant uncertainty triggered by structural inequality. Building on a contextual analysis of diverse archaeological data, the lens of precarity transcends rigid categories in the study of the non-elite, such as women, the poor, or the enslaved.

I have longstanding expertise in the study of rural economies. My book The Socio-Economics of Roman Storage: Agriculture, Trade, and Family (Cambridge University Press, 2020) cuts across the scales of farmer and state to trace the practical and moral reverberations of storage. With Gijs Tol (University of Melbourne), I edited Roman Rural Archaeology: Society, Economy, and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2026), which brings together new archaeological data to advance our understanding of the complexity of the Roman countryside, beyond elite villas.

I continue to be interested in issues of craft production and material agency. How Things Make History: The Roman Empire and its Terra Sigillata Pottery, my first monograph, was published in 2016 by Amsterdam University Press. With Martin Pitts (University of Exeter), I co-edited Materialising Roman Histories (Oxbow, 2017). I co-direct the Marzuolo Archaeological Project – with Gijs Tol (University of Melbourne) and Rhodora Vennarucci (Denison University) – excavating the rural craft site of Marzuolo (Tuscany, Italy) to explore innovation, investment and connectivity in a rural community.

I have held fellowships at Homerton College, Cambridge and at the Stanford Humanities Center and was previously Associate Professor at Cornell University.

• Roman archaeology