المجتمعات العسكريّة من الشرق إلى الغرب: فهم السياقات المحلّيّة والتجاوبات في دورا-أوروبوس وفيندولاندا
Elizabeth M. Greene and Craig Harvey
Through decades of exploration, both Dura-Europos and Vindolanda have offered unique and extraordinary opportunities to understand better the Roman army and the lives of soldiers serving Rome. From the Vindolanda tablets to the Dura papyri, together with dozens of exceptional artifacts practically unknown elsewhere, the sites have pushed scholars to reconsider how the Roman military operated in both war and peace. At the same time, the sites are extraordinarily different, which allows a robust comparison and the possibility to see a range of responses to community organization in the military environment. While Vindolanda was a purpose-built fort and extramural settlement on the northwest frontier in Britannia, Dura was a multicultural city on Rome’s eastern frontier with an urban military base, which integrated the army into the fabric of the city in a way that was mostly unseen in the western empire. Nevertheless, the two sites speak to the same questions concerning the composition of the extended military community and how that population supported the Roman army and its soldiers. This paper looks at the comparable archaeological evidence from both sites to understand how their unique situations directed the organization and composition of the communities that surrounded the Roman army. The differences between the two sites highlight the necessity to incorporate local contexts and responses into our understanding of life in the empire, while the similarities may reveal uniformity in military organization and social reality.