If you have a satellite phone and a hand-held GPS unit, just try getting really lost anywhere on the planet today. Even if youâre a teenager on the island of Yap in the southern Pacific, you can still download from the Internet the latest that Grammy-Award-winning rapster Eminem has to offer on your Flower Power iMac. In the eyes of many, the relentless march of digital technology and Western ideology threaten to swallow all existing cultures in their path. They envision a globalized economy with transnational corporations replacing governments and national boundaries as we know them. Already, thereâs plenty of cause for concern. Half the worldâs languages are in immediate danger of extinction, and, if current trends persist, 60 percent of all existing indigenous cultures will disappear within this century.

Of course, this isnât the first time that one powerful, dominant culture has overwhelmed smaller ones. The Incas, the Romans, the British, the Huns, the Greeks, and many others all had their empires, holding cultural sway over much of the world. And if the current empire is being accomplished with computer chips instead of broadswords, it is no less an empire in its effects. So, if we would know what to expect of our current impending homogenization, and perhaps avoid the worst problems, it would make sense to look back at those ancient empires, to see how cultures interacted, and whether smaller cultures survived.

But first, it helps to examine the nature of cultures themselves. Since humans are an ultrasocial, communicative species, one of our deepest drives is to belong÷to a family, a community, a nation. Culture provides the context for belonging, and belonging imparts identity. We define ourselves in part by how ãweä and ãourä culture are different from ãthemä and ãtheirä culture. We also all grew up and are rooted in specific places. That concept is essential to understanding cultures. A culture develops a unique set of adaptations to a certain ecosystem, whether it be the Gobi Desert or the Amazon rainforest, and hands down those adaptations from one generation to the next to ensure that both it and its environment survive. The longing for community, identity, and homeland, then, is the germ of culture. The most successful empires are those that satisfy those fundamental human drives.

There are some obvious differences between ancient empires and todayâs economic globalization. For example, when you think of the Roman Empire, you think of territory÷lots of it. You may remember from a gradeschool geography textbook, a map charting the vast reach of Rome at its height in a.d. 118: from the River Tyne in modern northern England east to the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Iran and south to the Nile in Egypt. That land and its riches were the source of their power and the basis of their empire. But todayâs empire, based on global economics and the Internet, is utterly landless. As Dr. Mihail Zahariade (The Roman Institute of Thracology and leader of the Earthwatch project Roman Fort on the Danube) points out, we must view our current globalization in terms of ãeconomic power rather than territorial domination.ä James Chiarelli (leader of the Sugar and Slavery project) puts a name to that distinction. He sees the new empire as ãepiphenomenalä (above geography), not based in any single government or in any individual country, but existing above such terrestrial concerns. In this empire, he says, the haves and have-nots are defined less geographically than socioeconomically.

At first glance, it would seem that the epiphenomenal empire is as new as our technology, that it has no counterpart in history. But Dr. Paul Bidwell (Tyne and Wear Museums, leader of the Roman Fort on Tyne project) suggests that the Catholic Church, ãwhich preserved a supranational structure and dictated the way people lived,ä might be a better model than Rome for todayâs assimilation processes. In like vein, says Chiarelli, the Aztec and Incan empires promised their conquered subjects security through a belief system with a highly ritualized ceremony. Priests managed the sacred calendar, which ran everyoneâs life. For the Aztec Empire, that promise of security remained a strong incentive even though, as Chiarelli points out, ãa main reason for expansion was to get more prisoners to sacrifice to the gods. Mankind had cut a deal with the gods: As long as we fed them human blood, theyâd feed us maize, so the objective of warfare was not conquest per se but war captives.ä

The other aspect of our current empire-building that seems unique is that it is largely inadvertent, more an inevitable consequence of technology than a deliberate plan by a government. But here again, history suggests that we are walking a well-trodden path. In fact, building empires is not something most political powers set out to do (although some megalomaniacs, like Hitler and Genghis Khan had that in mind). The British Empire, for example, grew for mercantile reasons; it wasnât a political plot. Likewise, the threat of Hannibal drew Rome into Spain and Africa to protect its trading rights, says Dr. Frances Bernstein (independent researcher and former leader of the Temple of Isis at Cumae project); the Romans hadnât planned on annexing these regions. Most past empires were more incidental than intentional, more a byproduct than a goal. Often as not, a power only realized and rationalized its empire after the fact. Bidwell comments that it wasnât until Rome had already got an empire that the poet Virgil started celebrating the fact.

So, then, our current empire is accidental, like the Roman Empire, and epiphenominal like the Catholic Church. If we concentrate on those two ãmodelä empires in particular, we see encouraging signs for the survival of cultural diversity. We find, for instance, that co-opted religions not only survived the absorption into the empire, but often ended up shaping the larger empire.

The Romans, in spite of their official, hawkish, state religion, were surprisingly tolerant of other beliefs, even monotheistic religions like Judaism and Christianity, as long as the practitioners didnât appear as potential rebels. Then they clamped down, to counter perceived political threats. In the third century b.c., says Bernstein, an expert in Roman-period cults, when Hannibal was invading from Africa, and Romans in power were xenophobic, the Senate turned against the cult of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine. Fearing the cult would undermine Roman youth, conservative Roman senators÷rather like the Religious Right in the United States or the former Taliban in Afghanistan÷banned the cult (though it eventually was approved). During the first century b.c., the worship of Isis, the Egyptian goddess of fertility and resurrection, was officially prohibited as part of the anti-Egyptian propaganda Augustus fostered when he was at war with Antony and Cleopatra. Once Rome defeated the Egyptian rivals, Isis was totally accepted.

Dionysus was just one of the Greek deities that the Romans assimilated into their own pantheon. Bernstein points out, however, that Greek Athena and Roman Minerva were not one and the same, though they were both virgin goddesses of wisdom and guardians of weaving crafts. Athena was a war goddess (e.g., protector of Achilles); Minerva was not. Once the Romans assimilated Athena, they associated Minerva, too, with war. In a similar fashion, Romans and their subjects often incorporated each otherâs deities into their own worship. So, Bidwell says, you find altars in Britain dedicated to both Mars and the Celtic warrior deity, Cocidius. Bernstein says that this tendency to retain and even adopt othersâ traditional gods and mystery cults such as Christianity and the worship of Isis stems from the human desire for something more personal, and more tangibly tied to natural cycles, than the cold, distant, official religion.

The Catholic Church has based much of its expansion on the blending of old cults with Christianity. It was par for the course for Catholic missionaries to build churches on top of ancient sacred sites and then appoint them with an amalgam of motifs from Catholicism and the religion they were replacing. For example, Karl Laumbach, leader of the Earthwatch project Prehistoric Pueblos, says that an Arizona mission sports the Pueblo plumed serpent Awanyu winding around its interior walls. On Easter Island, the birdman, symbol of the islandersâ bizarre cult, sits alive and well÷on top of the Virginâs head. And, near Paestum in southern Italy, Bernstein says she has seen the identical portrayal of Hera and the Virgin Mary, each with a baby in one hand and a pomegranate (symbolizing fertility) in the other. All these examples show clearly that culture is not easily subdued.

With good reason, there is controversy over how to label what happens when an empire encounters another culture. Assimilation is not a one-size-fits-all process. It occurs along a continuum, from total absorption and loss of original cultural identity to complete rejection of anything new from the outside. Both extremes÷from the empire that insists to the culture that resists÷have their problems, especially if one views maintaining cultural diversity as preserving the capacity to adapt to new situations. Brute force, many empires have learned, breeds resentment, which ãtends to create resistance and thus preserve pockets of culture,ä says Laumbach. The Pueblosâ kiva worship survived in part because the Spaniardsâ attempts to wipe it out drove its practice underground, from which it re-emerged during a more tolerant period.

Sometimes itâs a question of who is really assimilating whom. The Roman Empire, in fact, was bilingual and heavily Greek in culture, the result both of long association with the Greeks and of building on Alexander The Greatâs empire. By 550 b.c., before Rome was even a speck on the map, the Greeks already had colonized southern Italy. By the time the Romans assumed control over the Eastern Empire, the region had been so thoroughly Hellenized that Greek remained the language of commerce÷and, for the most part, of the educated classes÷throughout the Roman Empire, says Bidwell. Because many of the professionals in the Roman Empire (doctors, teachers, and so on) were Greek immigrants or Greek-speaking slaves, and because Romans revered Greek culture, Bidwell says, the Greeks held a sort of monopoly on Roman education. ãThe lingua franca of the army, however, remained Latin,ä he says, so most inscriptions found along Hadrianâs Wall are Latin, except for a few Greek ones left by merchants or by Roman officers, ãwho were trying to display their culture.ä

When two cultures such as the Roman and the Greek are similar in sociopolitical structure and technological development, ãthe effects [of their blending ] are quite muted and unpredictable,ä says Bidwell. In this case, the ãconqueredä culture, in fact, transformed its conquerors. Not so with the recalcitrant, if semiliterate Celts. When the Romans ventured into the less technologically sophisticated northwestern provinces, like Britannia, the cultural diffusion went in the other direction. Such pathways of cultural adoption are typical. Where the sociopolitical gap between local populations and Romans was large, the conquerorâs culture predominated. Almost as if filling a vacuum, Zahariade says that one-way acculturation proceeds ãwhere thereâs no political power, no organized state,ä whether or not the overwhelming power plans to impose its culture and language.

Of course, Bidwell reminds us, it was never that simple. Despite Hollywood representations of the Romans as an oppressive occupying force, the ãEmpireâs hold on many areas was quite light,ä he says, and that may have been the secret to the Empireâs success. The Romans were more interested in accommodation than oppression, so they adopted quite different approaches to the more heavily stratified societies in southern Britannia than they did toward the independent Celtic clans of the north. In the south, the Romans co-opted the ruling classes by Romanizing them, literally, by inviting them to dinner. ãIt wasnât coercion, but it was a deliberate attempt to persuade them through education and bribery,ä says Bidwell, and it worked. The rugged terrain of the north made for more fragmented societies with more volatile allegiances. The Celtic chiefs saw nothing in Romanization for themselves, so dinner parties were hardly the answer to controlling these clans. As a result, says Bidwell, Scotland and Wales were never satisfactorily Romanized, and Rome had to maintain a large army in Britannia.

Rome had been successful at assuming control of the bread basket that was Egypt, but that meant merely co-opting an existing agricultural system. Throughout its history, however, the Fort of Arbeia, which served as a main supply base for the legions on Hadrianâs Wall, relied on imported as well as locally grown grain to feed the troops. Although the hinterlands were fertile enough to supply the garrisonâs needs, Bidwell says, the Romans never tried to convert the scattered Celtic holdings to more efficient, large estates practicing the kind of intensive agriculture they were familiar with back home. That would have required wholesale restructuring of the society, and the Romans, says Bidwell, ãdidnât understand principles of social engineering.ä They had learned how to get what they needed in terms of requisitions and taxes, and went no further.

A good thing, too, for when an empire meddles with the social fabric of another culture, it usually buys itself big trouble or destroys the targeted population in the process. The punitive, century-long Highland Clearances in Scotland that started in the mid-1700s, for instance, forced farmers from their ancestral, commonly held lands, which ultimately led to the disintegration of the clan system and mass emigration to the New World. Limited tinkering with social systems, however, can reap benefits for empires. Both the Aztecs and the Romans purposely disrupted cultures they conquered as a deterrent to insurrection. It was standard operating procedure for the Romans and Aztecs to station conscripts from one culture in another, frequently at the opposite end of the empire, says Chiarelli. Removing soldiers from possible local support in their homeland, they figured, would make troops less likely to mutiny. The former Soviet Union employed the same tactics along its borders.

Inevitably, when cultures meet, some aspects of culture are lost and others hang on. Language is almost always the first thing to go, but food is among the last. A favorite dish, as long as it tastes good enough, will remain on the menu even though itâs a pain to make. Karl Laumbach cites a Spanish family he knew from his childhood, who gathered en masse to make their authentic Spanish, paprika-flavored chorizo, even though the Mexican, red-chile-flavored variety was readily available in stores. The survival of this laborious, all-day process emphasizes how strongly our tastebuds crave certain foods from our childhood: a close substitute just wonât do.

Religious beliefs, especially those tied to the land and to fertility, are another die-hard aspect of culture. All over Europe and the New World, there are examples of Christian rituals that in reality are thinly disguised fertility rites. In southern Italy, for instance, says Bernstein, villagers still parade the Virgin Maryâs statue around fields in the spring, much as their Roman ancestors did centuries ago with Venus or Isis. In New Mexico, Laumbach says, pueblo feastdays are often Christian feastdays as well. Here, the actual deities or religions may be less crucial than the cycles and events they represent÷like birth, death, fecundity, and resurrection.

In this persistence, we can see that even the economic and technological juggernaut we are now riding is not likely to really eliminate cultural diversity, though it may change it. For the very monolithic nature of this revolution will render it culturally impotent. One of the main lessons from the Roman Empire, Bidwell says, is ãthat it was an incredibly complex system.ä But complexity has its dangers: ãThe more complex things become,ä says Chiarelli, ãthe smarter people get, and the more stresses arise as people develop needs that arenât provided for by the basic social or political structure.ä Stress, he says, breeds subcultures that make demands on the whole society, which create strife or which the ruling authorities either cannot meet or do not understand. Similarly, the Computer Age, which revels in complexity, both spawns new subcultures and identifies and coalesces those that are ill-defined. Just think of all the specialty Web sites that have sprung up with their faithful followers. It seems that, no matter how much economic globalization homogenizes the worldâs cultures, new ones will stubbornly break off from the bland, global mold. Thatâs because humans want to belong to a community with which they can identify. If that community grows too large, we lose that identity and tend to form subcultures. Laumbach points out that ãWorld citizenship is a great idea, but we all also need something thatâs a bit closer to home.ä Because culture is ultimately rooted in the land, and ecosystems will remain different, we always will need something a bit closer to home. Thatâs writ in our DNA. We canât escape cultural diversity.