Constructing the archaeology of the Roman conquest of Hispania: new evidence, perspectives and challenges

Extract

The first meeting of specialists from different fields relating to research on the Roman army in Hispania took place in Segovia in 1998 under the title “Roman Military Archaeology in Hispania”. Its aim was to gather within one forum different experts working in this field.¹ The term “military archaeology” was provocative in the Spanish academic world of the late 1990s, as military studies were viewed with slight suspicion in some quarters, both by those researching indigenous contexts and by those who remained anchored in a classical concept of Romanisation which rather neglected the contribution of the army to the process of assimilating Hispania into the Roman world. In Anglo-Saxon scholarship other terms with more historiographic tradition (e.g., “Roman army studies” or “Roman frontier studies”) were preferred. The goal in choosing the title of the 1998 congress was to create debate around a topic on which research efforts were becoming increasingly focused. Despite its limitations,² the term “military archaeology” since then has become for many Spanish scholars the methodological basis for material-based and topographic studies of the military world and of war in its widest sense. As archaeology in the Iberian peninsula becomes increasingly open to new methodologies and practices being adopted elsewhere (especially in the Anglo-Saxon world), similar terms such as “conflict archaeology” or “battlefield archaeology” are appearing, which all form part of the conceptual frame of reference of military archaeology. In the last 15-20 years, research in this field has increased exponentially in the Iberian peninsula, particularly in the north and northwest where the Roman army had a much longer-lasting presence. This has allowed scholars, for example, to begin interpreting episodes such as the Cantabrian Wars, practically unknown from an archaeological perspective until very recently. In the last few years, progress has extended to earlier periods, affecting other regions such as the peninsula‘s northeast, southeast and E coast, where military topics are starting to be differentiated into Republican and indigenous contexts. A new generation of congresses and their resulting proceedings have generated some of the most significant contributions. The Segovia congress of 1998, its follow-up at León in 2004,³ the Roman Frontier Congress held at León in 2006,⁴ thematic French-Spanish congresses such as the meetings of the project “La guerre et ses traces dans la péninsule Ibérique” (2007, 2009 and 2010),⁵ and recent colloquia on the Republican period⁶ and on the Cantabrian Wars,⁷ have all become reference works. Coinciding with the first occasion upon which the Roman Frontier Congress was held in Spain, the first monograph — still an essential reference work — on the archaeological evidence for the Roman army in the peninsula was published.⁸