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 linksthere 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.