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Roman archaeology with agencements: Assemblage thinking and the military community in Dalmatia and beyond
This thesis explores how an assemblage thinking archaeological framework can enhance our understanding of Roman military communities. First, it tracks the inception of the concept of the ‘Roman military as a community,’ revealing that previous engagements with the idea focused on looking beyond the supposed military machine to the people inside (and around) it. However, whilst these studies are of significant value, illuminating the diversity of experiences within the Roman military, they typically sideline or under-theorise the place of more-than-human things and beings, such as animals, objects, and the environment.To remedy this, I look to posthumanist theory, specifically the assemblage thinking philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari and its central concept of agencement (‘assemblage,’ a more-than-human process of (de/re)arrangement). Using assemblage thinking, I fashion a framework for Roman archaeology that embraces process, openness, and the more-than-human. This is first applied to the idea of community, which I reconstruct as a more-than-human, open, and multiscalar arrangement of people, monuments, objects, signs, practices, and more, centred around associated life, or ‘communal becoming.’ Working from this understanding, the Roman military community concept is revisited. It is argued that the Roman military of the first three centuries CE comprised myriad overlapping communities embedded within broader society, which stretched well beyond the bounds of servicemen, and that more-thanhuman things and beings were vital components of the agencements that shaped life in these communities. This is explored further with case studies of dona militaria (‘military awards’) and signa militaria (‘military signs’).From this stance, I turn to inscribed funerary monuments from the Roman province of Dalmatia (parts of Albania, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Serbia) to study how the more-than-human could be affective within communal military life. Evidence from sites such as Salona (Solin), Tilurium (Gardun), Burnum (Ivoševci), and pagus Scunasticus (Ljubuški) is considered, revealing that members of the military community set up and interacted with hundreds of inscribed funerary ix monuments of various styles and forms (stelae, tituli, and arae), and that these objects, and their associated practices, were a vital component of the Roman military community in first- to early-second-century CE Dalmatia. To examine how exactly, two particular dimensions of this relationship are explored: the creation of communal funerary spaces and the circulation of social significance signs via funerary decoration.This thesis concludes that Roman military communities were (re)constituted, (re)shaped, and (re)defined by humans and the more-than-human together. It also exhibits the wealth of evidence available from Dalmatia for similarly critical investigations of the Roman world. It also shows that assemblage thinking can offer a valuable range of tools with which to study how people lived with other things in the ancient world.
