Walls

Two Weeks at Isthmia

As my time working at Isthmia hits the two week mark, our routine of ceramic analysis is giving me the bandwidth to start to think more broadly about the situation at Isthmia.

For those who don’t read the blog regularly, I’ve been working with my colleagues Richard Rothaus and Scott Moore to analyze the after life of the Roman bath. To do this we’ve studied the way in which people used the bath not only for the construction of the Hexamilion Wall, but also for other activities including eventually settlement at the site.

The elephant in the room, of course, is the wall itself. Not only would it have loomed figuratively over the ruined bath, but also literally.

I continue to struggle to think about how the wall (and the bath) shaped the experience and behaviors of the individuals living in its ruins and shadow. As a way to think about this differently, I followed a tip by University of Virginia graduate student James Razumoff who suggested that I read some of Lori Khatchadourian’s work and provided me with a copy of “Life Extempore: Trials of Ruination in the Twilight Zone of Soviet Industry” from Current Anthropology 37.2 (2022), 317–348.

This article features how two Armenian informants leveraged the ruins of Soviet industrialization to make a living in the 21st century. Khatchadourian introduced the concept of “trails of ruination” which described the efforts to make a living from ruins when “time and temporality, matter and materiality rebuff with opposing force.” She deploys this concept to understand the tension between Soviet and capitalist forms of engagement with the materiality and time. 

At a site like Isthmia, of course, there are fewer traces of ideological change much less the kind of abrupt ideological change that occurred with the collapse of the Soviet empire. One wonders, however, how the memory of a particularly vibrant phase of Roman building in the Corinthia (and the institutional apparatus that made such a phase possible) lingered in the wall (and the earlier bath). 

This summer, I’ve spent far less time thinking about the wall and the bath and more time thinking about the material from individuals “lots” or stratigraphic (loosely defined) units. The finds from each unit will help us be able to tell the larger story of the post-Roman bath. Thus far, we have studied almost 2000 sherds from context pottery and over 100 inventoried finds from the bath. Our plan is to produce the definitive publication of the bath’s afterlife with a thorough, if not complete, artifact catalogue.

Stay tuned for more!

Three Things Thursday: Lead Pipes, Mouses, and Flood Walls

It’s something like week 12 of the semester and I’m all over the map. This feels like as good a time for a Three Things Thursday as any. 

Thing the First

My colleague Ty Reese pointed out to me that the city of Grand Forks recently published online a map showing the lead service pipes present in town. It’s exactly the kind of contemporary infrastructure document that tells stories about the city. It also fits in with our growing interest in the infrastructure of water in the city (here and here).

If you check out the map it’s fascinating to consider the distribution of lead pipes. It is easy to associate these pipes with the older sections of the city. What’s more interesting, though, is trying to understand where the lead pipes have been replaced (and based on the the kind of replacement pipe, when were they replaced). It would be fascinating, for example, to compare the distribution of lead pipes with home size, lot size, tax value, and age. Is there a pattern for where, when, and how certain homes had lead pipes replaced? 

Of course, the map has a lot of “unknowns” on it, but a clever GIS person with access to the right data maybe could speculate on the whether these unknown pipes are likely to be lead, copper, galvanized, or even plastic!  

Thing the Second

I was completely charmed by the article from Robyn Faith Walsh in The Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 22 (2024) titled “The Mouse of the Mysteries.” As title suggests, this is a cleverly updated version of the David Macaulay book Motel of the Mysteries which would be familiar to anyone seeking to introduce students to the practice of archaeological interpretation.

Walsh’s article is set in 4025 and attempts to understand the rise of the mouse cult in a post-catastrophe world. The discovery of a center of the mouse cult in a submerged area in the what was formerly the southern region of the United States linked domestic cult practices with a larger center that evidently had parallels in both the western part of North America and in the area around Paris, France. 

The articles is clever enough and sincere enough to challenge students to unpack the series of intellectual, methodological, and even epistemological leaps made by the author to come to her conclusions. In other words, the article is rigorous as far as fictional archaeology goes, but still vulnerable enough that student should be able to critique the assumptions on which it rests in pedagogically and intellectually productive ways. 

Thing the Third

When I get very stressed, my attention begins to scatter and I start to make questionable decisions. For example, this week I decided it was as good a time as any to start reading Steve Conn’s The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is—and Isn’t (Chicago 2023). 

I got to know the author a little bit many years ago at Ohio State when he would occasionally join our regular basketball games at Jesse Owens North. I knew his earlier work on museums, but less familiar with his work on rural America. So when there was a bit of buzz about The Lies of the Land, I decided to give it a quick read. 

I’ve only managed the first part of the book, but it already has helped me make a connection that I missed. Conn makes the obvious connection between the Cold War and the work of the Army Corps of Engineers around rivers. He explains how the USACE’s approach to managing water — and rationalizing water flows — in the US had many parallels with wartime infrastructure projects. This included a sense of urgency in construction and a coarser attitude toward the rights of proper owners and traditional land rights. In the case of the Grand Forks flood wall of the 1990s, I suspect the aesthetics of the wall reflects some of the military logic at play in the USACE. Conn’s explicit connection between the militarization of rural areas through various strategic defense initiatives and the Army Corp efforts to control the flow of water was very well done and bodes well for the rest of the book! I’m very pleased to be reading this and its making me think more about writing something on Grand Forks as a Cold War town.

On Walls: The Hexamilion Wall in Context

Tomorrow I’m scheduled to give a talk at Michigan State. It’ll be my first talk on a new project, but I’m sure it’ll be familiar to folks who read this blog. 

The talk is title “On Walls: The Hexamilion in Context” and it is mostly just an overview of my work with Richard Rothaus, Scott Moore, David Pettegrew, and Jon Frey over the least few years at Isthmia.

Isthmia MSU 2024 FINAL.

The paper is pretty tentative in a lot of ways, but my hope is that the reader gets a sense of how I’m feeling my way forward with this project. It also represents an effort to blend my interest in the archaeology of the contemporary world with my interest in antiquity.

You can read the paper here if you want!

More Writing about Walls: Arguments and Meaning

One of the chapters in Sarah Maza’s little book, Thinking About History (2017) is titled “Causes or Meanings?” In it, Maza proposes a distinction between the search for causality in history — evoking E.H. Carr’s famous story of the car accident — and the search for meaning. In the post war period, some historians shifted their attention from causality to exploring how the past produced meaning both for groups and individuals in the past and in the present.

I am not sure that I found the juxtaposition between causality and meaning a particularly compelling one, but it certainly works in the classroom and often produces good discussions.

Recently, though, I’ve been thinking about my own scholarship and come to realize that as I’ve gotten older and more “senior,” I’ve become more interested in argument (and even occasionally epistemology, which I do recognize is out of vogue these days). Part of this is that I enjoy the simpler pleasure of putting together intricate archaeological arguments. Part of this is that I think “Big Arguments” are best left for up-and-coming scholars who are more invested and involved in contemporary conversations in our field. Part of this is because someone needs to spend the time do this and as someone with the security of tenure and some institutional resources, I’m willing to do it.

The downside is that when I have to give a paper, I often find it hard to move from argument to meaning. I’m struggling to do that in the paper I’m preparing to give in a couple weeks at Michigan State.

I have two things that I want to argue. First, the Hexamilion Wall is a useful wall to consider when thinking about modern walls. This is particularly important as I’ll be giving my talk a few days after the election. Second, I want to argue that the afterlife of the Hexamilion Wall in “Long Late Antiquity” (5th-8th centuries) tells us something about how past promises of future security embodied in the wall literally falls apart as the wall itself deteriorates. It reminded me a good bit of the final line of Cavafy’s famous poem, “Barbarians”:

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution. 

The first part of the paper outlines the history of the wall and the fortress at Isthmia in the 5th and 6th centuries. The second part talks about how evidence in the Roman Bath tells the story of the afterlife of the wall. Here’s the final two parts of this paper.

In other words, ancient walls have a plurality of lives and the Hexamilion and fortress are no different. This offers a productive tension between arguments that ancient walls were doomed to obsolescence as soon as their “reason to be” had passed and their self-evident monumentality which encourages us to try to understand these features as permanent structuring structures in the landscape. This tension is a productive one because rather than pushing us toward understanding ancient walls as persistent features that justify contemporary calls to build walls, it urges us to think about walls as structures with long and complex lives. It goes without saying that ancient and modern walls — from the Hexamilion to the Maginot Line to the Berlin Wall — often outlive their initial purposes. In many cases, these fortifications failed to address these purposes at all. Midcentury border fortifications around Europe were inadequate in the face of aerial warfare which rendered networks of coastal and terrestrial batteries largely obsolete. Many critics have argued that the kind of border wall proposed by President Trump would likewise fall short of its stated goal to reduce the number of migrants entering the US across our southern border. As we have seen, the Hexamilion would have been challenging to defend, difficult to maintain, and expensive and time consuming to build. Moreover, it would not have necessarily prevented an army from invading Roman territory north of the wall. 

If we take the wall as part of an emergent “securityscape” in the Late Roman east (to adopt a phrase used in contemporary borderland studies), then perhaps we can understand that the wall represented less of an immediate solution to a proximate problem and more of a monumental gesture of imperial concern for the region that could be renewed at various junctures. The notion of the securityscape in anthropology describes spaces defined by infrastructures of security. The most obvious examples securityscapes in the contemporary world are airports, national borders, and gated residential communities or corporate sites (although securityscapes often extend invasively into our private life through surveillance technologies and the appearance of survivalist (or earlier bomb shelters) in homes.) The interplay between technologies, bodily experiences (and private spaces), and authority serves to internalize both the sense of risk and danger present in the world and the role of the state (or at very least the emperor) in providing security.  

Securityscapes often do not necessarily protect individuals from a proximate threat, but instead promise security from future threats. Thus the continuous performance of various security rituals, say at an airport, reinforces the promise of security offered by authority. It is appealing to imagine that some of the reason why the Isthmus represents such a storied securityscape is its position as a crossroads. Crossroads are famously fraught and the Corinthian crossroads appear no different. In fact, the Philostratus tells the story of a young philosopher Menippus who met a ghost on his walk across the Isthmus, not far from the eventful course of the Hexamilion Wall (Vita Apollonii 4.25). Early efforts to wall the Isthmus in the Classical and Hellenistic periods offered a historical precedent for the vulnerability of this landscape. In short, they established the Isthmus as a place of both risk and security.

There is evidence on the Late Antique Isthmus for such thinking. The pair of Justinianic inscriptions associate the walls explicitly with imperial power — present in the naming of the emperor himself. They also offer an example of the professionalization of security through the naming of the official Viktorinos on both inscription. In fact, D. Feissel argued that Viktorinos may have been an architect, but it seems more likely that he was the Praetorian Prefect or other high ranking imperial official. The presence of religious language in these inscriptions connects the security offered by these walls to divine protection and it is tempting to argue (as I have done) that Justinian reinforced these messages through the construction of the massive Lechaion basilica at Corinth’s western port. This church, which I won’t discuss in detail here, was among the largest churches in the Mediterranean when it was built in the mid-6th century. Its lavish use of Proconesian marble sourced from imperially controlled quarries near the capital and unique arrangement of liturgical furnishings suggests imperial patronage. If this is the case, then, perhaps we can extend the concept of the securityscape beyond the realm of the walls as physical artifacts of imperial power and included aspects of religious life. 

One wonders how much of the interplay between the wall and its promise of security clung to its physical remains through time. As Eric Driscoll will argue in his forthcoming book, Late Byzantine efforts to restore the Hexamilion took on both a practical urgency as Ottoman forces threatened, but also one that evoked the longer history of imperial posturing on the Isthmus. The groups who made use of the bath and the fortress may well have been aware of the significance of the wall. Their willingness to adapt the securityscape to their much more local needs speaks to the way in which these features play an active role in shaping their landscapes. Whether these groups saw their actions as part of a strategy of resistance or critique, as Prof. Frey has gently suggested, or they live huddled against its ramparts as a way of acknowledging the security that the wall provides, the irresistible materiality of the wall mitigated against its own obsolescence. The rediscovery of one of Justinian’s inscriptions during early 15th century wall repairs reinforces this. Despite 800 years of neglect and repairs, Justinians promise to protect the Peloponnesus remained. 

Conclusions

The Hexamilion Wall offers a complex and thought provoking model for walls in the contemporary era. As we noted, modern commentators often evoke Hadrian’s wall as an archetypal border fortification which they imagine served to protect the edge of Roman territorial control. Its location further allows commentators to indulge in ahistorical fantasies about the the line between Roman and barbarian where the power of the state stands firm against the chaos of the disorganized territories. Recent commentators on Hadrian’s Wall have gone to some lengths to disprove this simplistic interpretation. The Hexamilion Wall built several centuries later speaks to another kind of logic and one that speaks more eloquently to our contemporary situation.

If the hardened border makes manifest the antasy of territorial sovereignty, the Hexamilion Wall evokes the fluid borders acknowledged by the modern securityscape. As a manifestation of the securityscape, the Hexamilion hints at the effort of the state to promote a ubiquitous sense of security which by the reign of Justinian has taken on a profoundly Christian cast. Travelers across the Isthmus would have encountered the imposing walls and marveled at the strength of the empire. 

At the same time, the persistence of these walls would have materialized the obsolescence of imperial policies and transformed the once imperial securityscape into a very local one. The shelter provided by the still standing vault of the bath, the utility of fallen walls for ad hoc construction material, and the proximity to a walled enclosure all likely contributed enduring value of the 5th and 6th century fortification efforts. In some ways, these modest forms of security represent an appropriate response to the future calamities that the wall promised to avert. 

Even More on Walls

I’m sure you’ll all be sick of walls by the time I’m done with writing about them. To add just a bit of variation to the ole blog, though, I’m going to pivot to the section on the 2nd century Roman bath at the site of Isthmia. 

Readers of this blog know that I’m written a bit about the bath here and there and have made available our report for this past summer. My piece in the paper on the Hexamilion, however, is my first effort to distill this down into more than just a technical report. Here’s how I’m articulating my research from this summer for a more casual audience:

(If you’re a bit lost here, you can catch up, if you really want, by reading my post yesterday and then following the links there to earlier posts).

The Bath and the Wall

The strategic and symbolic situation of the fortification only tells a tiny part of the wall’s story. Prof. Frey, for example, has painstakingly worked to reconstruct the prehistory of the wall. He explored how the builders used spoliated blocks and took advantage of buildings and their foundations from the sanctuary of Poseidon at Isthmia. The most visible example of how the wall used earlier structures is present at the second-century Roman Bath. This elaborately appointed building donated its northern wall as the south face of Hexamilion. Tim Gregory argued that this happened soon after the bath fell out of use in later fourth century although the archaeological evidence for this is anything but clear. What is clear, however is that large parts of the bath continued to stand even after the wall builders removed parts of the structure to build the wall. As a result, the afterlife of this building paralleled for a few centuries the life of the transisthmian walls and nearby Justinianic Fortress. The bath building continues to showed ongoing modification for at least two centuries and provides evidence for an alternative history of the wall. 

The first wave of modifications to the bath buildings at Isthmia appear to directly relate to the construction of the wall. For example, the builders of the Hexamilion seem to have robbed out most of the eastern walls of the bath and perhaps some of the southern rooms of the building. They also reinforced the north wall of the building which stood against the south side of the Hexamilion. These modifications appear to have taken place fairly soon after the bath fell out of use judging by the thin layer of winter wash on the floor of the the northeastern room of the bath (Room I) that the excavator argued entered from an open door in the bath’s north wall which the Hexamilion eventually sealed. Inserting the buttresses along the north wall of the bath presumably involved the removal of the roofs from this rooms.

This is not the end of the bath’s story, however, any more than it is the end of the story for Hexamilion Wall. Soon after the construction of the wall, the bath saw new activity. A long drainage ditch was cut across the mosaic floor in Room II of the bath. This ditch fed into a modified drainage system in the bath which included new cuts in the Room II and III, which run along the northern side of the bath. These drains fed into a cavity below the the bath which presumably flowed out of a natural opening into ravine below the Hexamilion wall. The purpose of these drains are a bit difficult to discern, but considering the significant effort invested in their construction, they almost certainly represent a commitment to the continued use of the still standing bath building for some purpose. It seems probable that these drains were cut to manage the flow of water off the wall itself into the roofless rooms along the north side of the bath. In other words, some of the rooms in the bath continued to serve some function that made it worth diverting water from them. 

Whatever their function, we know that the north room of the bath saw the dumping of debris including a remarkable number of Late Roman lamps sometime after the cutting of the drain. This dumping was sufficiently substantial and vigorous that the debris spilled across the floor of Room I and down into the Room II. It seems likely that this was dumped from the top of the wall into roofless room of the bath. It is tempting to associate this dumped material with the Justinianic restoration of the Hexamilion wall or perhaps the activities of the garrison stationed in the fortress to the bath’s east. This material spilled over the earlier drain cut perhaps hinting that it had gone out of use. If that is the case, this dumping might be more or less contemporary with the closing the drain in Room I and the blocking of the drains in Room II for the insertion of a burial marked by an intact 6th or 7th [check this] century lamp. This burial may well be contemporary with a burials elsewhere in the vicinity of the fortress. Activities such as dumping and burial are consistent with the edges of a settlement and perhaps reflect activities at the fortress or elsewhere nearby. 

But even this is not the end of the activity in this area. There is evidence for a series of rather crude apsidal shelters — perhaps no more than windbreaks — as well as surfaces and features around the bath buildings associated with both wheel made and handmade pottery generally datable to the 7th and 8th century. The amount of broken and discarded pottery in various contexts around the bath suggest more than an ephemeral settlement, but rather recurrent (perhaps seasonal?) activity in the bath structure. This appears to coincide with contemporary activity in and around the fortress itself. Prof. Frey has noted, for example, that the northeast and south gates into the fortress were sealed. He has also noted that the common appearance of bee hive sherds datable broadly to the Late Roman period suggests that the fortress may have reverted to agricultural use soon after its construction.  

Evidence from the bath and the fortress, then, indicates that the wall and the fortress served a number of different functions over its first three centuries of existence. Many of these functions do not seem clearly related to the possible strategic or symbolic reasons for the initial construction of the wall. Instead, these functions rely on the persistence of the wall and the fortress in the landscape which creates its own inertia, opportunities, and — as the ad hoc drainage system in the bath suggests — challenges.  

Writing Wednesday: Some Fragments

This was supposed to be an easy post today that I drew from some of the stuff that I’ve been writing this week, but I became fascinated by the idea of “securityscapes” (particularly as discussed in Setha Low and Mark Maguire in the introduction to their edited volume Spaces of Security: Ethnographies of Securityscapes, Surveillance, and Control [2019]). In particular, I want to apply it to Hexamilion Wall across the Isthmus of Corinth which has become a recent research interest. As readers of the blog know, I’m giving a paper at Michigan State on our work at Isthmia which has so far focused on a 2nd century AD Roman bath that was built into the Late Roman Hexamilion wall. (For more on this go here and here).

I’m struggling a bit to produce a concise definition of a securityscape and Low and Maguire help me understand that this partly because of the range of definitions present across the disciplines that have found this term useful. The definitions range from the manifestations of interstate security found around the post-Cold War world to the infrastructures deployed at sites such as national borders, airports, and ports or even the pervasive reach of surveillance culture developed by the emergent security-state. As the subtitle of their edited collection suggests, securityscapes almost always exist along side spaces of control and surveillance. While the contributors to Low and Maguire’s volume focus main on modern examples, the concepts that they explore may well shed light on the relationship between ancient walls and modern ones—a relationship that modern commentators have explored albeit in rather hamfisted ways.

These are fragments and not full formed ideas, but they represent my prodding and probing of these topics:

1.  The key notion of securityscapes is that they do not necessarily protect individuals from a proximate threat, but instead suggest security from future threats. Thus the continuous performance of various security rituals conveys not only the immediacy of possible danger, but also the promise of security offered by authority. The Hexamilion would not have protected the citizens of the Peloponnesus from an imminent invasion by Visigoths, but the possibility of future invasions.

2. As much as the Hexamilion represented a promise of future security, it also drew upon a rich vein of past history of Roman intervention in the region and an even longer history of the region as part of a landscape of security in Greece.

3. In its promise of future security that the inscriptions of ships on the wall — so cleverly noted by Prof. Frey — makes (pardon the pun) its most incisive critique. The inscriptions of ships mark the potential futility of the wall and offer a salient critique of state’s promised security.

4. It is striking how the Justinianic inscriptions associate the securityscape not only with imperial power — present in the naming of the emperor himself — but also in an early example of the professionalization of security through the naming of Viktorinos who D. Feissel argued may have been an architect, but was likely the Praetorian Prefect or other high ranking imperial official. Thus, much like the modern securityscape the Hexamilion and its nearby fortress seems to articulate more than a simple model of authority but rather a professionalization of security (at least in an ancient version of this).

5. If we argue that Justinian’s reconstruction of the Hexamilion, his building or repair of the walls of Corinth, and the construction of the fortress at Isthmia was contemporary with the building of the great basilica at Lechaion, we can perhaps argue that the emperor sought to project security from the walls themselves to religious architecture. The securityscape extended well beyond the realm of the walls as physical artifacts of imperial power and included aspects of religious life. This was alluded to in the famous inscriptions found associated with the walls themselves which I’ve argued made liturgical allusions. 

More on Walls

I’ve been thinking and talking about walls a good bit lately — including an hour long conversation with David Pettegrew about the fortification of the eastern Corinthia. Last week I posted some scrappy notes on the Hexamilion Wall vaguely related to a paper that I’ll give in November at Michigan State. 

David and I discussed three key things relevant to understanding the Hexamilion Wall.

First, we acknowledged that considering how (and whether) the wall functioned as a fortification is important to trying to unpack the motivation for the wall. Gregory argued in the Isthmia dedicated to the wall that is served to protect the Peloponnesus for the kind of large overland invasion witnessed in the later 4th century. The destructive impact of Alaric’s Visigoths might have been at the forefront of the Imperial administration’s mind. The wall would have prevented a large land based army from moving easily into the Peloponnesus. 

Of course, a large land based army invading the Peloponnesus would have been quite an unusual thing historically with only a handful of examples. More than that, there’s little reason to imagine that the Peloponnesus in the 5th century was particularly valuable territory for the Roman state. This isn’t to say that it was not valuable, but an army invading the Peloponnesus would have effectively entered a cul-de-sac and not a particularly profitable place to invade. Moreover, the absence of a wall would have not made the passage south into the Peloponnesus particularly easy. The Venetians, for example, appear to have managed passage south in the Morea through a series of smaller fortifications along the northern side of Mt. Oneion which runs immediately to the south of the Hexamilion Wall. Hellenistic fortifications along the top of Mt. Oneion may represent another method of preventing an army from moving south through various passes into the Peloponnesus. The city of Corinth often served as a sufficient deterrent (or a “fetter”) for armies moving through the region as well. A Hellenistic barrier wall served to block passages into the Peloponnesus, but it was erected by an alliance of largely Peloponnesian cities rather than an entity outside the Peloponnesus (similar to the Venetian walls which we’ve connected to the Second Venetokratia).

In short, the Hexamilion Wall is a bit strange when considered in light of earlier efforts to fortify the Isthmus and when considered in the larger context of Late Roman strategy. It may be then that residents of the Peloponnesus lobbied for the construction of the Hexamilion. Or that it served a strategy dictated by defense in depth which created “speed bumps” designed to slow the movement of any invading army and manifested itself in city walls, rural fortifications, garrisons, and even barrier walls like the Hexamilion. Later sources, such as Procopius, point in this direction. 

This brings us to the second point: perhaps the wall’s value both in the 5th century and later was largely symbolic. There is no doubt that Late Antiquity was an era of monumentalized architecture. The construction of city walls, massive basilica style churches, monumental villas, and dramatic urban features characterized a theatrical-turn in Late Antique architecture. The vivid use of walls to symbolize cities (and regions) in mosaic pavements, for example, stresses their prominence in the representation of the city in Late Antiquity and corresponds to ambitious urban fortification campaigns around the Empire. 

If the Hexamilion is as much symbolic as strategic, its location at both a point of north-south transit and east-west movement across the Isthmus makes sense. It would represent both an expression of imperial power, but also — as David noted to me — an expression of local power and wealth. Travelers through the region would have either passed through the wall to points south or walked in its shadows as they moved east-west to either Kenchreai or Lechaion. In later centuries, the construction of monumental Christian basilicas similarly marked the presence of Christian, ecclesiastical, regional, and even imperial authority. Later inscriptions — such as those crediting Justinian and Viktorinus from Isthmia and Corinth — reflect the deep entanglement of sacred power, imperial power, and fortification which by the 6th century appears to be standard in many places around the empire. In this case, the wall might represent the power of the empire (and its increasingly entanglement with sacred power) to protect its communities. In this context, the strategic needs of the wall would have been secondary to its symbolic power. This is also in keeping with a history of symbolic gestures by emperors at the Isthmus.

We might complain that such a gesture seems dramatic and inefficient, and that would certainly be true, but it is hard to imagine that Nero’s doomed effort to dig a canal across the Isthmus was any less of an inefficient and dramatic gesture. After all, Roman engineers were no fools and they must have understood that the topography and geology doomed the project from the start.

Finally, the research of myself and my colleagues at Isthmia has largely focused on the afterlife of the wall and the buildings adjacent to it on the Isthmus. These communities might have been ignorant of the wall’s strategic or symbolic function when they used its abandoned fortress as a place of burial or occupied the collapsing ruins of a Roman bath building into its ramparts.

On the other hand, these people likely contributed to place making in much the same way as the builders, architects, funders, and defenders of the wall did. As I noted last week, but Jon Frey and myself have noted that despite the monumentalized character of imperial investment in the Isthmus, there are signs of resistance throughout Late Antiquity. While we should not expect these signs to operate on the same monumental level as churches, fortresses, and walls, the presence of fish and boats inscribed in the still-wet mortar of the fortress and wall, the presence of liturgical variation in nearly contemporary church buildings, and the reuse of the wall and fortress at Isthmia as the backdrop for domestic activities and agriculture suggest that Corinthian lives continued the shadow of imperial investment. The walling of the gate to the fortress may suggest, on the one hand, that there was no longer a monumentalized way through the wall after the later 6th century. On the other hand, it hints that there were likely any number of less monumental ways over, under, or through the wall by that time.  

The existence of handmade pottery in contexts adjacent to and inside the fortification may even indicate that the wall did not disrupt the movement of technologies, cultures, and groups through and along the wall in the Late Antique and Early Byzantine period. In fact, the presence of these so-called “Slavic Pots” in contexts along the wall speak to the wall’s irrelevance or even fundamental inadequacy as a barrier. History seems to indicate that the wall never served its strategic function either and was probably always too long to serve as anything more than a proteichisma before the mass of Mt. Oneion or the strategic location of the city of Corinth astride major east-west and north-south routes. Perhaps, in the end, that was all that it was meant to be. 

Walls

I’m starting to read and think about walls more partly for a paper that I’m giving at Michigan State in the fall and partly because at some point Richard Rothaus and Scott Moore and I will have to publish some of our work at the Roman Bath at Isthmia and we need to find ways to think and talk about it that make it relevant to people who do more than just study Late Roman and Early Byzantine Northeastern Peloponnesus (as fine as many of those people are).

As a bit of a challenge, I want to try to blend together my book, the Archaeology of Contemporary America, with our work at Isthmia. This isn’t a very clear plan, but work like Jon Frey’s piece “Boats, Burials, and Beehives: Seeking the Subaltern in the Fortifications at Isthmia, Greece” and the recent debate article in Antiquity which compared Hadrian’s Wall with US-Mexico border wall offer points of departure.

The key for my work is going to be, first, to offer an understanding of the Hexamilion Wall in the landscape of the Corinthia. As any number of scholars have argued — Pettegrew, Frey, Kardulias, Gregory and so on — the Hexamilion would have been a visible and imposing feature in the Corinthian landscape for a millennium. It would have shaped settlement, movement patterns, and at times economic activity during its long life. That said, it is NOT a border wall in a conventional sense. The Roman Empire constructed the wall and for most of the Empire’s existence effectively governed the land to the north and to the south of the wall. It seems likely that for most of the wall’s history, the same ethnicity lived on both sides of the wall, speaking the same language, and sharing a material, religious, and political culture. In other words, this wall didn’t wall someone out and despite it’s massive size and length did not (in the unfortunate language of Randal Maguire) appear to be the case that “[a]rchitects designed the old walls to drive off and annihilate the invaders.”

In fact, the Hexamilion Wall appears to have functioned very similarly to contemporary American border security. Since the US borders are so massive that only the most deranged could imagine a wall running their entire length, the US Border Patrol follows a strategy that recognizes that travel corridors are the most effective places to intercept migrants. These corridors extend for many miles from the borders and this is the justification for the rather generous jurisdiction of the Border Patrol which extends 100 miles from the nearest border (which may be a stretch of coastal line). This means that nearly 200 million American live in areas where the Border Patrol operates. In a post-Homeland Security, 9/11 world this equal parts reassuring and terrifying. If I were honest, it is mostly the latter. At the same time, we can accept that — following Paul Virilio here — that speed has made borders qua territorial borders effectively obsolete if we imagine them as wall, but less obsolete if we imagine them as zones where the authority of the state especially as manifest in fortified and militarized architecture, tactics, and symbolism remains visible and common. In other words, the Berlin Wall was simply one expression of the East German police state which penetrated all aspects of East German (and broader Soviet Block life). In the same way, the presence of militarized law enforcement, expanded jurisdictions of Border Patrol, nuclear missile silos, Strategic Air Command bases, the growing reach of dronoscopy, and national security rhetoric suffuses the American experience. We all live at the borders now.   

The Hexamilion Wall — as wall as a series of smaller fortifications throughout the Balkans — operated along a similar strategy. They represented defense in depth (at best) and (at worst) made manifest the reach of the Imperial authority. What makes the Hexamilion (and other walls in the Roman world) interesting, though, is that despite its status as an imperial monument, they clearly served multiple functions over their history.

[As an aside, it is interesting to note that the Isthmus of Corinth was not just a north-south border as the east-west running Hexamilion Wall would suggest, but also an east-west border between the western and eastern basins of the Mediterranean Sea. As early as late-4th century, Greece came to represent a jurisdictional, linguistic, and even religious border land. Investments by Justinian, for example, including the fortress at Isthmia and the massive Lechaion basilica were part of systematic efforts to fortify spiritually, religious, and militarily, the empire’s borders through a strategy of defense in depth.]

Our research at Isthmia, for example, has primarily functioned to highlight the the later uses of the wall and in this way our work is consistent with some of Frey’s arguments surrounding the later modifications to the fortress which saw burials, walled up gates, and the possible return of the area to agricultural uses. He suggested that some of these elements might hint at resistance to the function of the wall or the exceeding short term character of its use.

In other words, both ancient and modern border policies appear to investments in persistent infrastructure. At the same time, the permanence of the Hexamilion Wall as a border (or the material manifestation of a border policy) evidently provided illusory at least as far as representing persistent investment by the state. In fact, it appears to have continued to function as an anchor for groups moving through the region whether the garrison at the fortress at Isthmia or residents of what appears to be a short term Early Byzantine settlement in the Roman bath.