The Roman Army: A Social and Institutional History - Karatunov.net

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The Roman A rmy
began with an examination of the physical remains, revealing considerable uniformity
throughout the Empire, while the differences in design and execution
could illuminate not only changing fashions, but the needs of the terrain, the
nature of the enemy, and how the Romans perceived the threats posed by the
peoples that they faced in different regions. Not all forts were attached to frontiers,
so their functions perhaps differed in the hinterland and on the frontier itself,
but groundplans and artifacts cannot tell the full story of how they worked.
Nor is it possible to relate how the smaller installations functioned, or whether
the milecastles of Hadrian’s Wall and the Kleinkastelle of the German frontier
housed soldiers whose prime duty was to patrol, either along the frontier line or
beyond it. The so-called watch towers or signal towers are even more problematic
because no contemporary source explains what they were designed to do.
The fact that descriptive names such as signal towers and watch towers are assigned
to these installations signifies the lack of certainty about their purpose.
Consequently, modern scholars can argue that they were used to send messages
along the frontiers, or that the soldiers in the towers simply watched for activity
and reported on it. But in both cases it cannot be known what was communicated
to whom, nor exactly how it was communicated, and what happened after
the message had been received.
The examination of forts and fortresses extended to the areas outside the ins
t a ll a ti on s , to the civil set t l em ents and su rrounding fiel d s , but on ly small
amounts of evidence allow us to reconstruct the lives of the inhabitants of these
settlements and the way in which they interacted with the military authorities.
Archaeological examination of the surroundings of a fort are hampered by lack
of upstanding remains and in most cases by the fact that the fort sites are now
covered by modern cities and towns. Thus, only a small section of a fort or its
vicus, cemetery, and agricultural lands can be examined. It is known that meadows
and cultivated fields were laid out around a fort, but how they were used
has not been fully established. One of the most intriguing factors is that we do
not know where the Romans kept their cavalry horses and pack animals, since
p i cket lines, corra l s , and com pounds do not show up well in arch aeo l ogi c a l
terms (Dixon and Southern, 1992; Wells, 1977).
Fu r t h er Di recti ons of Re s e a rch
on the Roman Army
S tu dents of the Roman Empire owe a great debt to the sch o l a rs of the nineteenth
cen tu ry who em b a rked on the prod i gious tasks of a s s em bling and
recording the corpus of inscriptions and sculpture from all around the Empire,
tasks that ran on into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and are still ongoi
n g. In the late nineteenth cen tu ry, Hermann Dessau publ i s h ed an assem-