Living on the Edge: The Archaeology of Frontier Communities in the Roman Empire

The Roman Empire was surrounded by over 3,100 miles of frontier that marked the end of Roman territory. These regions are often discussed solely from a military standpoint, but soldiers were only a small part of a much larger frontier community that included women and children, locals and foreigners, and Romans and non-Romans. This course explores how these communities, often marked by asymmetrical power relationships between the Roman State and local communities, developed, investigating social structures, religion, art and architecture, and economies in order to understand what it was like to live on the edge of the Roman world.