The Archaeology of Roman Retail Outlets

This chapter begins with a brief overview of the ways in which shops and, especially, food and drink outlets have been identified on Roman archaeological sites. It then provides a detailed account of the archaeological remains of food and drink outlets, with a particular focus on the shop counters and the architectural and spatial configurations of the properties themselves. A typology of food and drink outlets is proposed, one that is necessarily flexible but which also allows for a series of questions and observations to be made about the types of buildings in which we find bars, and of the availability of various spatial and structural resources to their retail networks.