Editorial note
While not a formal comment on Kristiansen's discussion paper, this brief note was written and submitted to Archaeological dialogues by a participant in the discussions between the Zadar Round Table speakers and the audience.
Roman Frontiers at first sight seem to divide, but in fact they are the point at which goods left the Roman Empire and percolated into the lands beyond. They are the point at which Roman and ‘barbarian’ met. Nearly every country in Europe has Roman artefacts in its museums and in that way the Roman era can be seen as a unifying element in today's world. This is acknowledged both by scholars living beyond the frontier – the first contact when the EAA Working Party on Frontiers of the Roman Empire was established was from an archaeologist in Latvia who saw that the finds in his museum connected him to the project – and by archaeologists within the empire as demonstrated by the Römisch-Germanische Kommission's project to record all Roman finds found beyond the frontier in western Europe.
The Roman Empire, however, was not just a European phenomenon. It encompassed North Africa and the Middle East. Moreover, it is through the inheritors of Rome in these areas, the Arabs, that so much of our knowledge of the Roman world comes, which adds a further dimension to the study of European archaeology. For a Roman archaeologist, therefore, the area of study embraces an area which stretches from the Atlantic to Iran and from the Baltic to the Sahara, though Wheeler, in his seminal study Rome beyond the imperial frontiers (1954), cast his net even more widely.
The Roman Empire is also an idea which has inspired the people of Europe through the generations, as witnessed by the creation of the Holy Roman Empire and the European project, and an ideal world to which we seek to return. The treaty which established what came to be the European Union was signed in Rome; we acknowledge the contribution of the Roman Empire to the spread of Christianity; many countries continue to live under the exercise of Roman law. But if the Roman idea (a united Europe) and the Roman ideal (not only unity but acknowledging a single law, for example) continue to inspire some in Europe, many others are inspired in a different way. Books and films based more or less upon an appreciation of life in Roman times continue to appear, many to popular acclaim, such as Ben Hur, Spartacus and Gladiator. The Roman idea is indeed an inspiration and, who knows, one day, we might persuade the filmmakers to get the armour right.
