Constructing the archaeology of the Roman conquest of Hispania: new evidence, perspectives and challenges

Abstract

The first meeting of specialists from different fields relating to research on the Roman army in Hispania took place in Segovia in 1998 under the title “Roman Military Archaeol-ogy in Hispania”. Its aim was to gather within one forum different experts working in this field.1 The term “military archaeology” was provocative in the Spanish academic world of the late 1990s, as military studies were viewed with slight suspicion in some quarters, both by those researching indigenous contexts and by those who remained anchored in a clas-sical concept of Romanisation which rather neglected the contribution of the army to the process of assimilating Hispania into the Roman world. In Anglo-Saxon scholarship other terms with more historiographic tradition (e.g., “Roman army studies” or “Roman frontier studies”) were preferred. The goal in choosing the title of the 1998 congress was to cre-ate debate around a topic on which research efforts were becoming increasingly focused