Intellectual shifts in the late 20th century led to profound change in the questions that could be asked about the ancient world; the chapters in this volume are inspired by the way these shifts have ...

Cursing and curse tablets in the Roman West

In this free course, Exploring Ovid’s big ideas, you will find out why Ovid’s work is still so relevant today. You will meet characters from ancient myth like Actaeon the hunter who was turned into...

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.

In ancient Rome, as throughout the ancient world, people's lives were structured around religious rituals and festivals, they prayed to the gods for guidance, and it was believed the gods even interce...

We've begun work on one of the project's most intriguing burials - a surviving gypsum casing inside a Roman sarcophagus. Find out what we discovered during our initial investigations!

Cambridge Core - Ancient History - Senses, Cognition, and Ritual Experience in the Roman World

Roman Archaeology Conference

The religious life of Roman Africa (like many provinces) is often cast as the simple persistence of Iron Age Punic or Libyan practices, perhaps glossed with a 'Romanised' veneer: 'tradition' is treate...

Abstract. The book is a comprehensive study of infancy and earliest childhood in a cultural overview encompassing the entirety of the Roman Empire. It brin

Cambridge Core - Church History - Senses, Cognition, and Ritual Experience in the Roman World

A rare penguin-shaped pot reveals the Nazca's interest in depicting the wildlife around them.