People and Spaces in Roman Military Bases

Description

This study uses artefact distribution analyses to investigate the activities that took place inside early Roman imperial military bases. Focusing especially on non-combat activities, it explores the lives of families and other support personnel who are widely assumed to have inhabited civilian settlements outside the fortification walls. Spatial analyses, in GIS-type environments, are used to develop fresh perspectives on the range of people who lived within the walls of these military establishments, the various industrial, commercial, domestic and leisure activities in which they and combat personnel were involved, and the socio-spatial organisation of these activities and these establishments. The book includes examples of both legionary fortresses and auxiliary forts from the German provinces to demonstrate that more material-cultural approaches to the artefact assemblages from these sites give greater insights into how these military communities operated and demonstrate the problems of ascribing functions to buildings without investigating the full material record.

Penelope Allison is Reader in Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Leicester. She has been teaching ancient history and archaeology for nearly thirty years and has also held a number of research posts, including an Australian Research Council Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship at the Australian National University, Australian Bicentennial Fellowship in the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge, and Visiting Fellowship at St John's College, University of Durham. A Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, she has written and edited several groundbreaking books on Roman archaeology and household archaeology, including The Archaeology of Household Activities (1999), Pompeian Households: An Analysis of the Material Culture, and The Insula of the Menander in Pompeii III: The Finds, A Contextual Study (2006).

'... this is a very important study which provides considerable evidence for the ways in which all members of military communities inhabited spaces of forts and fortresses.' Andrew Gardner, Antiquity