Recherche par auteur > Rummel Christoph

Stefan Pop-Lazic, Archaeological Institute, Belgrade, stefanpo@gmail.com

Christoph Rummel, Römisch-Germanische Kommission, Frankfurt am Main, christoph.rummel@dainst.de

The positioning of most Roman Imperial palaces in urban settings directly affects the study of their wider surroundings and occupants. As has been shown repeatedly, the Tetrarchy was a key period of reform for the imperial structures of the Roman world, including the way Emperors themselves worked, behaved and lived. This included the end of the Palatine as sole “palace” of the Roman Emperors and establishment of new palaces and residences across the Empire.

Two such sites are located in the territory of modern Serbia – the Imperial Palace in the Tetrarchic capital city of Sirmium/Stremska Mitrovica and the ”retirement palace” of the Emperor Galerius near the modern village of Gamzigrad, generally identified as Romuliana. This offers the unique opportunity to study and compare two contemporary Roman palatial sites that have been studied within a common research tradition but lie in very different settings: one urban, the other rural.

This paper will present newest research on both sites, carried out through rescue excavations and large-scale international research projects. On this basis, it will discuss the key themes of the session, with a particular focus on embedding the palaces within their landscape settings (both urban and rural) and access to and use of key resources (e.g. water, etc.). The paper will furthermore present ways in which the two sites acted as focal points of wider structured and designed spaces. In discussing the extent to which these latest results make it possible to gain a better understanding of the daily lives of the people who populated these spaces and enabled them to act as palaces, it will highlight the different approaches to this field that an urban and a rural palatial site offer and necessitate.