Fragments: Walls and Isthmia

Yesterday, I mentioned that this summer, I spent a bit more time thinking about how my interest in little fussy archaeological problems inform bigger picture conversations in the field. What prompted this, in part, was a couple of conversations with folks during my time at Isthmia in Greece. First, I chatted with Lita Tzortopoulou-Gregory about some of Tim Gregory’s ideas about the wall at Isthmia and its relevance for debates over the role of walls in the contemporary world (and this has taken some inspiration from Eric Driscoll’s forthcoming work on the Hexamilion; more on this later).

The other inspiration came from Jon Frey who invited me to Michigan State this fall to give a talk. While I had planned to talk about our work at Isthmia, he suggested that maybe I’d prefer to talk about my new book, The Archaeology of Contemporary America.  As I thought about this and Lita’s comments, I started to conjure up a talk that would focus on the Hexamilion wall and fortress at Isthmia as a place in the landscape and incorporate some lessons that I’ve learned from my work in that area.

Below is a fragment that I wrote on a tired afternoon in Cyprus reflecting on some of these things:  

My paper will use our recent work at the Roman Bath at Isthmia to talk about ruins and walls.

To do this, however, I’m going to use as a starting point something far closer to the present day: ruins in the contemporary landscape (and the role of ruins in punctuating narratives of decline [and rebirth]) and the the role that walls play in how we think about place. Like ruins, descriptions of efforts to wall in and wall out have often shaped conversations centered in decline as well as reactionary position that seek stability in a time where movement, indeterminacy, fluidity (and even liquidity) have emerged as the prevailing metaphors of the day.

The distance between antiquity and the present is vast and the disciplinary framework separating Mediterranean (or classical) archaeology from historical archaeology reflects this divide. As a result, the capacity for Mediterranean archaeology to address issues of capitalism, colonialism, and nationalism so central to historical archaeology is often limited to understanding the historical framework in which this archaeology takes place. Race, another of Orser’s famous “haunts of historical archaeology,” for example, informed arguments for the character of the so-called “Slavic invasion” of Greece (and the ethnic character of contemporary Greeks) and this, in turn, amplified the significance of the Early Byzantine remains at Isthmia.

This paper, then, will start generally with ruins and walls and then dig more deeply into the ruins and wall at Isthmia.