Playing with the past: Roman board games through history and archaeology

Talk by Dr Tim Penn, Lecturer in Roman Culture in the Department of Classics at the University of Reading, 11am-12pm Saturday 17th February.

Board games are not a new phenomenon: they originate at least as early as ancient Egypt, but they’ve only started to be studied seriously by historians and archaeologists relatively recently. This means we’re now starting to learn lots of interesting new things about the ways that Roman people played games and had fun. This talk considers some of the most exciting lessons that emerge from looking at the historical and archaeological evidence for board games in Roman society.