Romanisation in eastern and central Europe.

Carroll, Maureen

ROGER BATTY. Rome and the Nomads: the Pontic-Danubian realm in Antiquity. xxiv+652 pages, 64 figures, 32 colour & b&w plates, 10 tables. 2007. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 978-0-19-814936 hardback 95 [pounds sterling].

IOANA A. OLTEAN. Dacia: landscape, colonisation, Romanisation. xii+248 pages, 79 illustrations. 2007. Abingdon & New York: Routledge; 978-0-415-41252-0 hardback 60 [pounds sterling]; 978-0-203-94583-4 e-book.

WERNER ECK. La romanisation de la Germanie. 102 pages, 53 illustrations. 2007. Paris: Errance; 978-2-87772-366-4 paperback 22 [euro].

A perusal of the scholarly literature published in the last few years demonstrates that a keen interest in the individual provinces and regions of the Roman empire has developed, with archaeologists and ancient historians focusing on the interaction between indigenous populations and the bringers of Roman culture who settled in their territories. The three books under review fit in with this trend, although they are not all successful in achieving their goals.

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The Pontic-Danubian realm

Batty's meticulously researched and expanded Oxford doctoral dissertation is dedicated to Rome's interaction with a whole range of nomads in the Pontic-Danubian realm. He pays careful attention to the evidence for various groups and traces their migration into the region from places as diverse as central Europe and the Caucasus, with nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples driving out or subjugating the local inhabitants. These were regular events, and not isolated series of invasions. Wanderers without culture or laws, as they were depicted by Graeco-Roman writers, these peoples, in antiquity and in modern scholarship, have often been arranged into larger tribal units without taking the fluidity of population dispersals into account. Yet all of these population groups and sub-groups could have more than one identity, depending on the circumstances. Using ethnic identifiers such as Bastarnae, Getae or Sarmatians suggests a cohesion which, in reality, was missing. Batty's discussion of the accounts of Strabo and Ovid as valid reflections on the identities and dynamics of the region is interesting and thought-provoking.

Batty explores how Rome reached the limits of its power in this area, dealing not only with military issues, but also Roman responses to the movement of peoples, their economies and the lack of urban settlement. Towns created by the Romans were dislocated from their wider territory, serving the needs of the Roman administration rather than the surrounding countryside. The region was heavily dependent on pastoral modes of production with livestock as a mobile resource. As a result, indigenous settlements were likely to be temporary rather than permanent. The previous patterns of constant migration and accompanying instability in the region made control of immigration a central preoccupation of the Roman authorities. Rome's policy was to stop mobile peoples from crossing the Danube into Roman or Roman-protected territory, and in this regard the river was adopted as a line of demarcation at which peoples who probably relied on transhumant pastoralism were dispersed and driven out from their traditional grazing lands, or at least kept distant from the river. But diplomatic solutions were necessary as well because no gains could be made effectively or permanently though military activities alone. Batty concludes that Rome failed to deal adequately with the peoples outside the Empire in this region and suggests that the seeds of the Empire's collapse were first sown here.

The often dense prose and very detailed information can make reading the book slow going. It is however alleviated by the inclusion of excellent summaries at the end of the three parts of the book as well as very useful tables of events involving Rome. An excellent overview of forced or sanctioned Roman resettlement of external peoples within the Empire from the late first century BC to the sixth century AD is given on pages 411-12. The maps are clear and precise; they are a major positive feature of the book and useful to readers unfamiliar with the region. My only quibble is that parts of this book clearly were written quite a while ago, making some of the author's statements appear a little out-dated in respect to debates on acculturation and social transformation currently central to archaeological theory.

Dacia

A study with a different focus, although partly dealing with some of the area covered by Batty, is Oltean's book on Dacia. In this revised version of her Glasgow doctoral research, Oltean makes clear how different attitudes, ideologies and political situations have influenced our understanding of, and research on, Roman Dacia. Her study is centred on the effects of the Roman occupation on indigenous settlement patterns and land use in the area surrounded by Carpathian mountains, the geographic core of both pre-Roman and Roman Dacia. A programme of aerial photography and reconnaissance from 1998 to 2004, on which her results are based, plays a significant role in the study. She also makes good use of the results of excavation, field-walking and geophysical surveys and written sources.

After a chapter on physical geography, climate, environment, flora and fauna, the historical setting of Roman activities in Dacia is sketched out. Here Oltean discusses what we know from written sources about diplomatic relations between the Dacians and Rome and about named historical figures involved in these relations. It would have been useful here to see some discussion of how archaeological research might shed light on the traditional text-based claims of severe depopulation and ethnic cleansing after Trajan's Dacian wars. Archaeology has been used to assess the strength of the Roman military presence in Dacia, the evidence for the highly militarised character of the province being a relatively large number of forts and named military units in the region. Oltean rightly points out, however, that the chronology of these installations is anything but secure and that calculations of the numerical strength of the army may be based on the possibly erroneous assumption that all units were present at the same time.

Oltean criticises the established typologies of Iron Age sites in the region, suggesting that the size and type of both nucleated settlements and individual settlements need to be considered by addressing the social, economic, religious and administrative status and function of sites within the landscape as well as in their relationship to each other. Traditionally high status sites such as hillforts and towers have been the focus of most research in Romania, leaving settlements at the lower end of the social hierarchy neglected. Oltean takes a broader approach in considering villages, homesteads, tower-houses, fortified sites as well as hillforts and their associated settlements, and encourages more large-scale programmes in the future.

The settlement pattern of Roman Dacia is normally thought of as one involving urban settlements (coloniae, municipia) or rural settlements (villae, vici); however, there are numerous settlements without any known legal status and these are often neglected or ignored. Interesting is Oltean's discussion of Roman villages and small towns in the context of the Roman social landscape, not only those with structures typical of indigenous architecture, but also those built in the Roman manner. Aerial photography now has added to our knowledge of military vici through giving an appreciation of the extent of these settlements, their internal layout, and the structure and range of activities in them. Although the chronology of these sites is still often uncertain, the size and internal provision of a range of amenities show them to be important central places for a large surrounding area. Oltean concludes that these are possibly the most common form of substantially Romanised settlements in the province.

The book demonstrates that much more in Roman Dacia is being revealed through aerial reconnaissance and field-walking. The aerial photography project has added many new sites to the list of known places which will allow us to better grasp the use of the landscape. It is therefore slightly unfortunate that sometimes the features Oltean describes in the aerial photographs are not obvious to the uninitiated. Such minor criticism aside, Oltean's book reflects original research which significantly adds to a more sophisticated picture of settlement in the province.

Germania

The same cannot be said for Eck's booklet, though admittedly it is a different type of publication, aimed at a general readership. All the same, there are problems right from the start. For one thing, the title is totally misleading. The book is not about Romanisation, however we define it, nor is it about Germany. The preface's claim that this book fills the gap between archaeology and ancient historical sources in illuminating the province the Romans called Germany is puzzling. Perhaps what is meant is the planned province that never was, the region between the Rhine and the Elbe. But the archaeological evidence and the historical sources cited here all relate almost entirely to Cologne and the lands west of the Rhine. Until the creation of two Roman provinces called Germania Inferior and Germania Superior in the 80s AD, these areas were part of Gallia, not Germania. The inhabitants of these regions were a mixed population of Celtic-speaking people both from the interior of Gaul and the Rhineland as well as Germanic-speaking people from both banks of the Rhine. Added to that mix were people with Roman citizenship from various parts of the empire. No attempt was made on the part of the Romans to understand the subtleties in the population, the official Roman names for the two new provinces being fairly erroneous and highlighting an ethnic group that probably was in the minority. Neither is any effort made by Eck to explore these issues.

Roman Cologne is the subject of Chapter 1, which discusses Augustus and the town (oppidum) that was created on the west bank of the Rhine for the Germanic Ubii. Eck is not an archaeologist and his descriptions of excavated contexts and finds are largely derivative; furthermore, while careful about citing his own publications, he is careless about citing the sources of his information. Several key studies that have contributed significantly to a new understanding of Cologne as a Roman-created central place from the beginning, rather than a military outpost, have been omitted from the bibliography.

The population of Roman Cologne is marginal to Eck's portrayal of the city, as he relies entirely on known funerary inscriptions naming immigrant Romans, sometimes of high rank. The Ubii themselves are given just one paragraph. There is no sense of how they fit in with other population groups or asserted their identity, a particularly important issue, given that they were allowed to migrate from the east bank of the Rhine to settle within the empire on the west bank where other peoples with a much older claim on the land lived. When Eck does talk about the Ubii, he illustrates a funerary monument from Nickenich depicting a woman named Contuinda with her son Silvanus, son of Ategnissa, and two other adult men. The monument, which dates to the first century AD, is very interesting in the combination of non-Roman dress for Contuinda and the Roman toga for at least one of the men, and for the half-Romanised nomenclature of those commemorated. But Contuinda was not an Ubian woman. Her ethnic costume and her name indicate that she was Celtic, and she is depicted like many other Celtic women in the funerary art of the middle Rhine and the Moselle valley. Nickenich may be only 40km south of Cologne, but it is a different world and certainly not one inhabited by the Ubii.

Chapter 2 is a solid historical discussion of power politics on the Rhine at the time Trajan became emperor, although the connection with Romanisation is not obvious. Chapter 3 deals with Roman Cologne again, this time from an economic perspective, giving the basics of supply and consumption. Cereal cultivation in the fertile loess zone west of Cologne is mentioned, but the farms on which they grew are not treated. Eck's final chapter deals with Constantine's conversion to Christianity, and only when he introduces Maternus as a bishop from Cologne is there any connection to Roman Germany. Again, the relevance between these historical events and Romanisation is not apparent.

Eck makes use of archaeological artefacts to liven up his text, but they function as little more than eye candy. He does not credit any of the photographs or plans, but refers the reader to credits for the same images in his earlier book on Roman Cologne, published in 2004. The 2007 book under review here is the printed version of four lectures held by Eck at the College de France in 2006. Given the prestige of this institution, this kind of selective and theoretically uninformed scholarship is a disappointment. There is of course room for haute vulgarisation, but one that is more connected to the kind of meticulous research shown in the first two books under review.

Maureen Carroll, Department of Archaeology, University of Sheffield, West Street, Sheffield S1 4ET, UK (Email: p.m.carroll@sheffield.ac.uk)