Outputs

Peopling Roman Palaces will organise a session at the 32nd EAA Annual Meeting in Athens. 

The session #5 Housing the Court – Infrastructures, Communities, and Power in Palatial Environments investigates the residential and infrastructural dimensions of imperial residences, redirecting attention from ceremonial spaces to the largely overlooked architecture of housing and service infrastructure. Beyond rulers, their families and the immediate courtly elite, such complexes were intricate environments hosting diverse populations that included high-ranking officials, administrators and servile staff, whether permanently settled or temporarily engaged in residence and labour. Yet the archaeological, spatial and social dynamics of these quarters remain insufficiently explored.

Central to this enquiry is the question of how imperial residences were planned to accommodate, organise and regulate their diverse human and infrastructural needs, and how these arrangements materialised power, hierarchy and social permeability. Addressing this question requires the integration of structural, documentary and environmental evidence, framed within comparative perspectives across the Roman Empire and beyond.

By foregrounding residential and infrastructural components, the session encourages dialogue on imperial residences from Rome to the provinces and within the broader traditions of Byzantine, Islamic and early modern courts in Europe and beyond. These complexes were not merely ceremonial backdrops but inhabited environments where service populations, court officials and military units coexisted under carefully regulated conditions. Comparative perspectives highlight both the specificity of Roman approaches and the wider challenges faced by monarchical powers across time: sustaining working communities, managing water and sanitation, controlling access to rulers, and integrating palaces with their productive landscapes.

In doing so, the session reframes palatial environments as laboratories of urban and social planning and raises broader questions about how past societies conceived, inhabited and controlled spaces of power.

We welcome papers addressing topics including but not limited to:
- Housing, accommodation and spatial organisation of working communities
- Sanitation, water management and care or disposal infrastructures
- Labour structures and the logistical organisation of working populations
- Military presence and security arrangements
- Access, mobility and spatial regulation
- Integration of palaces with productive landscapes
- Palatial environments as laboratories of urban planning

Contribution submissions open on 19 December 2025.

Session organisers:
T. Ravasi, Newcastle University, UK
S. Vagnuzzi, University of Caen, FR
L. Bottiglieri, Sovrintendenza Capitolina, Roma, IT

Corresponding organiser: thea.ravasi@ncl.ac.uk