Current Approaches to Roman Frontiers

This publication – Current Approaches to Roman Frontiers – is the first volume of the LIMES XXV’s congress proceedings arranged around the original sessions, in order to form coherent thematical collections that make the vast output more accessible to generalists and specialists alike. This volume starts with a recap of the congress. Regarding the themes it deals with a contemporary feminist approach; new digital methodologies and computational modelling; three themes on archaeological heritage management dealing inter alia with preservation, protection, citizen science and World Heritage aspects, and a comparison between the Roman Limes and the Great Wall of China. It ends with an overview of the sessions and lectures of the congress in Nijmegen.

Frontiers are zones, or lines, of contact and coercion, of exchange and exclusion. As such they often express some of the most typical elements of the socio-political spaces that are defined by them. Spanning some 6,000 km along rivers, mountain ranges, artificial barriers and fringes of semi-desert, the frontiers of the Roman empire offer a wide variety of avenues and topics for a very diverse community of scholars. They are the central subject of the International Congress of Roman Frontier Studies (or just Limes Congress after the Latin word for ‘border’), organised every three years since 1949. This four-volume publication contains most of the papers presented at the 25th edition which was hosted by the municipality of Nijmegen in August 2022.