Mark Letteney will deliver the Judd D. Kimball Lecture in Classics, titled “The Ancient Prison: Documents, Spaces, and Implications” 

Rome was a carceral state. Prisons dotted the landscape, and their captives were fully integrated into the legal, economic and social apparatus of the empire. Nevertheless, an overly credulous reading of legal sources has left ancient incarceration woefully understudied. This lecture explores archaeological and papyrological evidence for incarceration across the ancient Mediterranean, and suggests implications for scholarly understandings of the Roman empire, histories of the prison, and for our current crisis of mass incarceration.

Mark Letteney is  Assistant Professor of History at the  University of Washington, He is an ancient historian and archaeologist working in the history of incarceration, book history, and the archaeology of military occupation and serves as assistant director on the excavation of the Roman 6th Legion at Legio, Israel. Prof. Letteney’s publications include “The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity” and his current book project, “Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration”, brings together documentary, archaeological, literary, and visual evidence to present a synthetic account of the ideology and experience of incarceration in the ancient Mediterranean basin, from 300 BCE–600 CE.

The event is free and open to the public.