Review of 'Rome in the Pyrenees. Lugdunum and the Convenae from the First Century B.C. to the Seventh Century A.D.', Simon Esmonde-Cleary, (Routledge, Abingdon & New York 2008) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Luni and the Ager Lunensis: The Rise and Fall of a Roman Town and its Territory
Papers of the British School at Rome, 1986
Between 1978 and 1981four seasons of research were carried out in the hinterland of the abandoned Roman city of Luna (Luni), with the aim of shedding light on why this city flourished in Roman times but was then abandoned. Field survey (discussed in Part 2) found very few traces of pre-Roman or medieval settlement, but discovered scattered Roman-period farmhouses, above all in the hills above the plain. These farmhouses, one of which was excavated (Part 3), appear to have been abandoned around the end of the first century AD, and it seems possible that their existence depended on the specialized production and export of wine and/or oil. Part 4 examines in detail problems connected with identifying early medieval settlement in the area; while Part 5 presents the results of detailed geomorphological research, focused particularly on the gradual silting-up of Luna's port.
The ruling elite of the local communities in the Roman provinces are mainly known through epigraphic texts. These texts have often been studied as a source in themselves. In this paper, I adopt a contextual approach to study the inscriptions of councillors and magistrates of several civitates in Belgic Gaul and Lower Germany in relation to their archaeological context, with particular reference to villa sites and civitas capitals. Based on historical as well archaeological evidence, it is first argued that there cannot have been a standard size for the local ordines. Findspots of inscriptions of councillors and magistrates in the countryside are then used as indicators for rural properties and burial places on rural estates. The final section of this paper deals with the bronze inscriptions from the villa of Valkenburg-‘Ravensbos’ which provide some nice examples of personal and political patronage. The results of a re-examination and restitution of these texts, which after their first publication in the excavation report of 1925 have never been re-studied again, have been added as an appendix to this paper.
Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2017
For the history of the urban development of Rome’s Hispanic provinces, the lists of civic communities in Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia are a crucial starting-point for understanding the political geography of Baetica (NH 3.1.6-2.17), Lusitania (4.21.113-20), and Hispania Citerior / Tarraconensis) (3.3.18-30; 4.20.110-12). These lists owed much to Agrippa’s map (cf. 3.1.8 and 16; 3.2.17; 4.21.118), prepared during Augustus’ re-organization of the Iberian peninsula.1 But Pliny served as financial procurator of Hispania Citerior early in Vespasian’s reign and, as R. Syme argued,2 probably assisted with the census of the province in A.D. 73-74. This allowed him to add some material from his own personal experience to his account of Hispania Citerior: for example, the population figures for three conventus in Asturia and Gallaecia in the northwest of the province (3.3.28), regions in which Pliny took an especial interest because of their precious gold mines (see his detailed description at 33.21.66-78). His lists, however, do not provide a complete inventory of all the civic communities of Hispania. In his discussion of Baetica, for instance, he eschews any mention of the small civitas stipendiaria of Irni, promoted to municipal status under the Flavians, as we now know thanks to the discovery of the immensely important lex Irnitana, the community’s civic statute received after its civic promotion.3 As for Hispania Citerior, the discovery in the mid-16th c. of a statue-base dedicated by the ‘citizens and residents of Labitolosa’ (cives Labitolosani et incolae) to honour M. Clodius Flaccus, IIvir twice and local flamen (CIL II 3008 = 5837), on the Cerro del Calvario, 1.5 km south of La Puebla de Castro (prov. Huesca), revealed the existence of another community omitted by Pliny in the far north of Hispania Citerior, in the Esera valley in the foothills of the Pyrenees: the community of Labitolosa. East of Osca and west of Aeso (both mentioned by Pliny at NH 3.3.23-24), its territory extended to the provincial frontier, where its neighbour to the north was the community of Lugdunum Convenarum in the far south of the province of Aquitania.4