Sulpicia Lepidina and Elizabeth Custer: A Cross-Cultural Analogy for the Social Role of Women on a Military Frontier 

complete record of women's lives in a military context.The American western frontier in the second half of the nineteenth century provides an interesting and useful analogy for a pioneering military group forging into unknown and sometimes hostile territory with the purpose of conquest and pacification.Specifically, the letters of Elizabeth Custer, wife of the commander of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry Regiment provide an interesting parallel to the life of military wives only glimpsed in the Vindolanda tablets. Using historical analogyA few necessary caveats about using historical analogies to illuminate the more distant past are necessary.This approach has had a rough ride, particularly through the formulation of the 'New Archaeology' of the 1960s.Early analogic approaches were criticized primarily for their simple overlay of current narrative onto the past, presuming an uncomplicated continuum of human similarity.Certainly one cannot project a modern scenario backwards and declare it unquestionable truth, but almost no-one today proposes such a method.Outright rejection of analogy disregards the potential to identify material markers produced by similar historical and social conditions.It becomes possible to at least hypothesize about a social group that is less well documented and to shed more light onto current questions (cf.Kopytoff 1993: 146).With its limitations clear, this investigation uses analogy in a constructive way to offer a broadened perspective about past lives that are otherwise frustratingly incomplete, such as those of Roman military wives.The American West provides an interesting historical comparison with which to explore the lived reality of pioneering military women.This is not the first proposition to draw a parallel between the Roman frontiers and those of the United States in the nineteenth century.Whittaker suggested that this was a far more useful analogy for understanding the mentality of Roman expansion and frontier regions, than the overused contrast with the British colonial model (Whittaker 1994: 4-5).He argued that a similar political viewpoint was shared by both, in terms of the meaning and physicality of a frontier.There was a similarity between the American and Roman view of a frontier as being in a constant process of change, and an area to be entered, rather than a boundary (Whittaker 1994: 4-5).The Roman frontiers were malleable zones that demarcated the 'current official line' (Osborn 2006: 22-3).In this way the opening of the American West provides a comparable situation, with its frontier a constantly moving target and by no means solidified.Using comparison and analogy to understand frontier situations has been argued positively by other scholars, usually referring to the similar 'actors' and situations to be found in a frontier environment (with caveats, Kopytoff 1993: 143-7; cf.Hingley 2008: 27).The focus in this paper is the frontier expansion and push into Dakota Territory in the 1860s and 70s, at which point there were already thousands of settlers living in states further to the west, leaving this northern pocket of native territory still to be brought under control.As we now tend to see Roman frontiers and provincial areas, the American West was also a region of movement, exchange and fluidity that held elements of the conqueror and the native at one and the same time.In these environments the outcome of daily life may also have been similar, especially for those associated with a formulaic player in the process of change, such as the conquering military force (cf. the 'actors' and 'actor's culture' of Kopytoff 1993: 144).

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