Postdoctoral Fellow in Archaeology (2013-2014)

Prior to her arrival at Brown, Alicia was visiting assistant professor at the Department of Classics at Stanford University. She earned her PhD at the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid and has conducted research in Archaeology and Anthropology at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC, Madrid), University College London and Glasgow University. Alicia has carried out archaeological fieldwork at various Iron Age, Hellenistic and Roman sites in the Iberian Peninsula and Italy, as well as finds research in Museums, most recently at the site of Baelo Claudia (Cádiz, Spain) and the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum Mainz (Coins from Numantia).

Her research engages with archaeological theory and Roman visual and material culture, specifically in the western and central Mediterranean in the period 218 BCE-200 CE. In particular, she focuses on the study of Roman expansion in the western Mediterranean, Roman colonialism, cultural change and monetization in Hispania, with a special emphasis in funerary, urban and military contexts.

Her book, Imagines hibridae. A postcolonial approach to the study of the Baetican necropolis (2008), analyses the impact of Roman colonization in the funerary rituals of southern Spain and how different discourses about collective ancestry where simultaneously mediated in the forum and the tomb. She has also edited a volume on the re-creation of Punic identities in southern Iberia and the north of Africa during Roman times (Colonising a Colonised territory, 2010) and co-edited a couple of monographs focused on two important anthropological problems: the introduction of coins in pre-monetary societies (with M. P. García-Bellido, L. Callegarin, Barter, money and coinage in the ancient Mediterranean, 2011) and the role of coinage in the establishment of the Empire during the late Roman Republic (with M. P. García-Bellido and A. Mostalac, Del imperium de Pompeyo a la auctoritas de Augusto. Homenaje a Michael Grant, 2008)

Alicia has also recently investigated the relationship between mimesis, colonialism and material culture in a series of papers and conferences (University College London, 2011; University of Chicago, TAG, 2013). In the latter, she engaged with a group of anthropologists and archaeologists in a discussion on how shapes, images and objects are transmitted and replicated in (post)colonial contexts. She is currently preparing a new book on mimesis and the Roman provinces in which she hopes to integrate many of these ideas. Her second current book project focuses on the Roman republican army and coinage, using the Roman camps at Numantia (Soria, Spain) as case study.

Selected Courses

  • Hispania: The Making of a Roman Province
  • The Archaeology of Roman Imperialism
  • Lost and Found: Roman Coinage
  • To the Gods of the Underworld: Roman Funerary Archaeology