Are Rebellions Visible in the Archaeological Record? The Case of Fregellae in Latium, 125 BCE

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Rising Up Against Authority: Archaeological Approaches to Rebellion" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Violence and warfare can be counted amongst Michael Schiffer’s ‘cultural’ factors or transforms which influence the formation of the archaeological record. Although the application of violence itself is commonly a short-term process, it causes substantial impact on landscapes on both a human and an environmental scale. In many cases, this leaves behind structural evidence. The impact of violence on individuals, and social groups can manifest itself in changing modes of production and consumption, land-use, belief systems, and styles of representation, such as inscriptions, artworks, and monumental architecture. Moreover, it can cause fundamental changes or additions to exisiting settlement patterns, such as the eradication of old settlements and the appearance of new central places. In extreme cases, violence leads to a veritable extinction of socio-cultural practices or to their replacement with other ways of living and thinking, a process which Dan-el Padilla Peralta has recently described as ‘epistemicide’. Through the specific case study of Fregellae in Latium, destroyed 125 BCE after a short-lived ‘rebellion’ against Rome, this paper will explore how the integration of archaeology with other literary and documentary sources makes it possible to arrive at a differentiated picture of the scale and processual nature of such events.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Rising Up Against Authority: Archaeological Approaches to Rebellion   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50997