Towards a model of borderland processes for the Danubian world

Our brief survey of borderland and frontier scholarship has provided the building blocks with which to construct a model of the processes and systems we should expect to find active within Rome’s Danubian Borderland. From Parker we take the framework. His idea of a borderland matrix made up of different, interconnected processes offers us a powerful tool for thinking about the complex realities of life in a borderland. While we will not attempt to describe a ‘hard,’ mechanistic model in the following analyses, it will be helpful to think about the historical events and material patterns - both natural and cultural - discussed in this dissertation as borderland

processes lying somewhere on a sliding scale between the closed-ness of a strictly-controlled border, and the openness of a broad frontier zone of interaction. This approach lies silently behind much of the following research, and has not only lent me clarity, but also helped facilitate analysis of change over time and at different scales.

Rather than uncritically excepting Parker’s suggested process categories, we have, in this introduction, considered a select body of scholarship and highlighted the useful observations and potential drawbacks from a number of sources in order to locate borderland processes relevant for our own analysis. From the original borderland studies community, aimed, primarily, at the modern world, we see that economic and political forces must be viewed as working in tandem. Significant changes to the political sphere should produce corresponding economic ripples, while economic

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practice can, in turn, serve to limit and shape political forces within a borderland.27 _{From Whittaker,} we observe that even in the absence of a well-developed, modern, capitalist ideology, economic forces play an important role in shaping the nature of Roman borderlands. In particular, the limes system seems best designed to give structure to intense economic exchange across and along its line of political control. Whittaker also offers suggestions for how to study economic activities on the edge of the Roman world by gathering material evidence of imports, exports, and consumption habits at both the sub-elite and elite levels. We will employ these ideas in our own Chapter Three, with an additional focus on the faunal evidence for animal husbandry and foodways.

Drinkwater, in turn, presents a strong test-case for the ways in which space and ideology can function together to affect identity creation and cultural change within a borderland. His study of the Alamanni shows that we must seriously consider Rome’s power to shape identities as well as political entities on the margins of the empire, even as we work from a perspective centered on the borderland, rather than on some Roman or barbarian cultural core. Rome’s powerful ethnographic voice, identified by Drinkwater as one of the most important factors influencing the development of Alamannic group identity and political organization, will be a near-constant companion in our own sojourn through the Danubian Borderland. If anything, Greco-Roman prejudices and stereotypes about transdanubian people were even more powerful than those that developed in the west to make sense of the Alamanni.

Finally, Batty’s regional analysis offers insights and warnings. From Rome and the Nomads, we observe the importance of ecological and topographical forces in shaping subsistence patterns,

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and channeling the movement of peoples and ideas. At the same time, we see in Batty’s study a warning: we must always keep the underlying geographic and ecological unity of the Danube Basin in mind as we examine events and cultures within specific sub-regions. To lose sight of the

underlying, natural whole would be to risk ignoring important regional dynamics as does Rome and

the Nomads in its general disregard for the region of the Hungarian Plain.

Stepping back, we can divide the borderland processes highlighted by these scholars into three broad categories:

1). Economic forces (the agency of markets).

2). Political and ideological forces (the agency of people and ideas). 3). Spatial and ecological forces (the agency of the natural world).

These three categories represent the most universally-applicable borderland processes and will fill in our Parkerian framework at a basic level. We must, however, go further and consider how these three broad categories should be analyzed within the Danubian Borderland context. Based on the three categories just described, I propose the following four major divisions of analysis:

A). Material evidence of changes in consumption/personal expression, and evidence for

imports and exports as indicators of economic exchange.

B). Material evidence of subsistence and habitation as indicators both of basic lifeways, and of

culture change over time and/or demographic shifts.

C). Textual evidence of political action and its consequences, and its manifestation in the

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D). Textual evidence for powerful ideologies, in particular their roles in identity

creation/imposition among transdanubian peoples, and in shaping actions and policies by Roman decision-makers.

These four analytical divisions must, in turn, be viewed in dialog with the fundamental disjunction lying at the heart of Rome’s Danubian Borderland. The imposition of an artificial boundary within a connected world will remain the most basic, important, and probably universal borderland process throughout this dissertation, influencing all the other dynamics examined in our study.