Martin Pitts is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter. Specialising in the quantitative analysis of consumption patterns, his research addresses the origins of mass consumption and the role of artefacts in large-scale historical processes and how such processes impacted on local cultural practices. Although his focus is on the northwestern Roman Empire, he has also published on consumption in the seventeenth, eighteenth and twentieth centuries. He is co-author, with Dominic Perring, of Alien Cities: Consumption and the Origins of Urbanism...