Shelley Hales is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Bristol. She is the author of Roman Houses and Social Identity and is co-editor, with Joanna Paul, of Pompeii in the Public Imagination from its Rediscovery to Today. Tamar Hodos is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Bristol. Author of Local Responses to Colonization in the Iron Age Mediterranean, she co-directs the Caltilar (Lycia) project and serves on the editorial board of Anatolian Studies.

• Part I. Theoretical Frameworks: 1. Local and global perspectives in the study of social and cultural identities Tamar Hodos; 2. (Re)defining ethnicity: culture, material culture, and identity Carla M. Antonaccio; 3. Cultural diversity and unity: empire and Rome Richard Hingley; Part II. Case Studies: 4. Ingenious inventions: welding ethnicities east and west Corinna Riva; 5. Shaping Mediterranean economy and trade: Phoenician cultural identities in the Iron Age Michael Sommer; 6. Samothrace: Samo- or Thrace? Petya Ilieva; 7. The big and beautiful women of Asia: ethnic conceptions of ideal beauty in Achaemenid-period seals and gemstones Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones; 8. Unintentionally being Lucanian: dynamics beyond hybridity Elena Isayev; 9. Tricks with mirrors: remembering the dead of Noricum Shelley Hales; 10. Neutral bodies? Female portrait statue types from the Late Republic into the 2nd century CE Annetta Alexandridis; Part III. Afterword: 11. Cultural crossovers: global and local identities in the classical world David Mattingly.

'Most essays feature useful, capable presentations of the history and context of the subjects at hand, and all of them - especially given the omnipresence of identity these days - should be required reading for a modern understanding of how these particular examples of material culture can (or cannot) be theorized.' The Classical Review