Feeding the Roman Army, Making the Empire

ongoing

FRAME capitalises on advances in archaeological science and a critical mass of archaeological material to examine how the Roman Empire’s frontiers in Europe functioned as economic as well as militarised zones. The Empire’s expansion and longevity relied on the capability to maintain large armies and provincial garrisons for long periods. The army comprised c. 300,000 soldiers, mainly concentrated on frontiers and supply was a vast challenge, yet how it was achieved remains poorly understood. International in scale, this multi-disciplinary project will explain how the army was supplied with food and the impact this had on the landscapes and economies of frontier provinces and beyond. The Roman Empire’s frontiers are iconic, and their extensive remains have been a focus of research for centuries. Traditionally viewed as physical and cultural boundaries between civilised Romans and their ‘barbarian’ neighbours, Rome’s frontiers in Europe are ready for this ground-breaking project that will reappraise their functions and roles and make a major contribution to the study of Roman imperialism’s remarkable resilience and longevity. FRAME focuses on the somewhat neglected (in Roman studies) resource of food remains (animals, plants and organic residues in ceramics) in five frontier regions. By combining cutting-edge multi-isotope and organic residue analysis with archaeological and historical evidence, the project will reconstruct the military diet across frontiers, address how food was produced, the networks that supplied it and the impact this had on frontier landscapes and economies. The ambitious analytical programme will reveal the regional strategies core to the functioning of the Roman Empire and how they were affected by cultural choices and environmental constraints. This multi-scalar methodology, using a suite of methods never before integrated in archaeological research, will provide a blueprint for studying past food supply in wide-ranging contexts globally.