February 2024 Research Update

Amici!  It is now March!

February - even a February longer by one day - rolled past pretty quickly.  I'm going to keep this update on the short side (fitting for its short month) because I am rather pressed for time this week.

For research updates, this month has been spent largely finishing out the chapter on pre-Roman equipment in Spain, which I had paused while I waited for a half-dozen museum measurements from the Museo Arqueológico Nacional in Madrid (which I got back in January, while busy working on the Routledge Companion chapter).  That said, I think we've reached the point where those need to be the last additional measurements and bibliography I'm adding before we finalize this manuscript.

Military equipment in pre-Roman Spain is a tricky topic in any case.  Pre-Roman Spain isn't a single state, of course, but a collection of non-state peoples organized into what we might term 'tribes' or broader ethnic groupings, but the upshot is there are no formal state institutions and thus no standardization of equipment.  But unlike the La Tène material culture sphere, you also don't have one dominant material culture set with fairly standard weapon forms.

Instead, what you have in Spain are a host of different peoples.  What the ancients called 'Iberians' are the folks that live on the Mediterranean coast of Spain (the Levante), though the military equipment here differs meaningfully in some cases between the northern Levante (that is, Catalonia) and the rest of it.  Inland, the peoples in central Spain (the upland Meseta) are called Celtiberians in our sources and were Celtic-language speakers but not La Tène material culture-havers.  They have their own distinctive military material culture, but they're sharing and overlapping with the coastal zone.

Then you have the folks of what today would be Portugal - the group that gets the most interest in our sources are the Lusitani (in N. E. Portugal), who seem culturally a lot closer to the Celtiberians than the Iberians, but who - for whatever reason - leave us a lot less archaeological evidence.  Our sources imply they were equipped a lot like the Celtiberians, but even lighter.

So for instance, you'll hear that the Falcata - a forward-curving sword a lot like the Greek kopis (it is, in fact, a local copy of the kopis) was the distinctive sword of pre-Roman Spain, but really the falcata is only that common on the Iberians of the Levante; it's present, but rare among the Celtiberians of the Meseta.  Meanwhile, the Celtiberians are still using 'antenna' straight-swords and - more importantly - have a local variant of the early La Tène sword they use which is the ancestor of the Roman gladius.

In other cases, material does hop zones.  For instance, the soliferreum, an all-iron javelin distinctive to Spain, shows up everywhere, as does the distinctive Spanish round shield, which the Romans call a caetra (but they later use that word to mean any round shield smaller than the aspis, which they call a clupeus), though by the third/second century, the caetra of the Meseta is a bit different from the caetra of the Levante.  Meanwhile, you have La Tène-style oval shields, but almost exclusively in the northern half of the Levante.

It's complicated!  And trying to nail down one or two standard panoplies for comparison was tricky.  In the end, I think I have something solid (and I also do a basic reconstruction of a fifth/fourth century Celtiberian aristocrat, because those fellows seem to have had much more expensive kit than anyone in the third/second century), but it took some doing.  In any case, I'm still wrapping up bits here and there on that chapter (introduction, conclusion) so I'm a week or two behind where I want to be.  Hopefully I can catch up over the summer.

In addition to that, I have another job talk coming up. This was a late-appearing position at what we'd call an R2 university (so a 'second tier' research university).  That means it's not quite so plum a position as the R1 we just barely missed back in January.  The teaching load would be heavier (3 courses a semester, rather than 2) and the research support substantially less and it would require a truly cross-country move.  On the other hand, it seems like a good department (albeit a small one), R2 is hardly 'bad' by any means (SLACs and so on often have 4/4 or 5/5 teaching loads and this department has a graduate program and thus TAs, which they would not).

In any case, we're going to do our best to try and nail the campus visit.  As always, the odds in a job search are never in your favor - there are generally 3-4 candidates making campus visits and only one of them can get hired.  I'll have to give a job talk (I have one of those) and a teaching demonstration, along with the standard 48-hour-interview process I detailed back in January.

Meanwhile, there are a few things that I have in a public-facing capacity coming out or that have come out.  On the podcast front, the last month or so saw a bunch of podcasts I've recorded come out:

- On the Early Roman Army with the Partial Historians: https://partialhistorians.com/2024/02/29/special-episode-the-early-roman-military-with-dr-bret-devereaux/

- On the Roman Army generally, with History Hack: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2qak00X9nJ0DIgiw97Knvd?si=QCocZo2jQ9G_xrHm34volQ&nd=1&dlsi=1171360e193c4374

- On the Humanities crisis in Higher Education with Jeff Crane on his amazingly titled, Yeah, I got a F#%*ing Job with a Liberal Arts Degree: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/yeahigotanfingjob/episodes/Episode-15-Dr--Bret-Devereaux-and-the-Importance-of-Public-Facing-Work-in-Academia-e2fbv6d

- And back with Drachinifeltalking about the interaction of academic historians and public-facing history educators: https://youtu.be/LRTr0lqoXNo?si=hErb-HgkfsdbqfWz

That may be 'it' for podcasts for a while though, as I really need to focus more tightly on the book project.  Also in the pipe is an article in Foreign Policy on the national security implications of the collapse of history as a discipline, probably appearing this coming weekend (or so I am assured).

And that was the month!  We're a bit behind on the writing schedule (but making progress) - the job market and teaching will do that to you - but some exciting possible job opportunities.  Of course on ACOUP we'll be finishing up our Legion-and-Phalanx series this month.  After that, the next big series will probably be a Teaching Paradox look at Imperator: Rome.