We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Recent research is demonstrating that other women and children, besides those in senior officers’ families, lived inside Roman military bases during the Principate; however, such women are rarely discussed in written sources. Also, the archaeological remains of military bases essentially lack the types of evidence for sexed bodies and gendered practices that can be found in burial contexts and figurative representations. This chapter discusses how more material-cultural approaches to artifactual remains from such sites can be used to investigate gendered identities and lived socio-spatial practices, and to develop better understanding of the place of such women in these hypermasculine spaces. This chapter is concerned with developing approaches to the artifactual remains from these sites, and the potential range of people and activities they represent, to investigate the presence of women within the fortification walls of these bases, and the roles that they may have played here. It demonstrates how an integrated approach to “gendering” artifacts can be used to explore the probabilities, rather than the certainties, of artifacts as gender attributes and how analyses of artifact distribution patterns can be used to identify women who often are not identified through other media, and so seeks solutions to identifying gendered behaviors.
Penelope Allison’s 2001 article on using material and written sources to study Roman domestic space has framed the debate on the topic more broadly for ancient world housing. In this chapter, she revisits that contribution and responses to it, and surveys the theoretical and methodological frameworks of the chapters in the volume. By examining the nature of the data, analytical and interpretative approaches to them, and the research questions, Allison assesses the extent to which the two decades since her critique have produced more critically engaged scholarship, particularly in approaches to relationships between textual and material evidence.
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.