Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? Indigenous Responses to Roman Colonial Surveillance in Alentejo, Portugal

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

If visibility is undertheorized in archaeology, then invisibility is doubly so. This paper investigates the avoidance of surveillance in a colonial context. The central Alentejo, Portugal, was, in the first century BCE, home to watchtowers established under the new Roman administration of the region. In this remote corner of Europe we can see the remains of a surveillance system and attempts at avoiding and countering it by indigenous Alentejans. In the decades following the Roman conquest of the peninsula, sites visible to Roman watchtowers were abandoned and new settlements established in areas invisible to them. The towers’ surveillance system is reconstructed using viewshed analysis, and the use of that system in claiming territory is examined. Indigenous sites, such as Monte do Outeiro, Cabeça de Vaiamonte, and Rocha da Mina are considered for their ability to avoid observation by Roman authorities. Invisibility to the panoptic imperialism of the new Roman regime was just one element of nearly two centuries of resistance to imperialism in the western Iberia. Yet the success of these towers resulted in the reorganization of the region into the province of Lusitania and the use of surveillance in other colonial frontiers and carceral spaces of the Roman Empire.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39564.0