Armement et auxiliaires gaulois.

This book offers a comprehensive and renewed vision on the subject of gallic auxiliairies during the Late Roman Republic. To fully understand this phenomenon, this study relies primarily on archaeological sources as well as on historical sources and ancient art. The area of study concerns Gaul in general, including Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul, as well as the Alpine region. The archaelogical groups of objects used for the study come mainly from warriors graves selected in modern day Northern Italy, Slovenia, Switzerland, Western Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium and France. Chronologically, they range from the beginning of the 2nd to the end of the 1st century BC. The main part of the project is the establishment of a catalogue of 450 warrior graves which is organised geographically. One of the study’s strong points is that all the weapons studied have been re-examined and some re-drawn from different museum collections. This allows a better understanding of the evolution of cetlic weaponry at the end of the Iron Age and how it eventually merged with Roman weaponry. A large part of the analysis focuses on the typology of theses weapons, e.g. the Coolus-Mannheim helmets and the republicain gladii. The combination of archaeological sources with historical texts enables the study to conclude with a short history of the Gallic auxiliairies at the end of the Republic which in turn sheds light upon their role in the transition of Republic to Empire.