Isthmia and Rubble

On my flight from Greece to Cyprus, I read the first part of  Gastón Gordillo’s book Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction (2014). To be clear, I’ve not read enough of the book to offer a thoughtful take on it (or the subject), but it was enough to get me thinking about how to apply some of his ideas to the situation at the Roman bath at Isthmia.

Here are a few shaky ideas:

Idea the First

It is clear that as part of an effort to remove rubble from the second century bath, the excavators removed most of the evidence for its later use. The only exception is the “e-shaped structure” that rests against the west wall of Room VIII. In all other places, as the excavators removed the unruly and “formless” rubble to reveal the original form of the bath (as they saw it), they also cleansed the bath of its later history. This archaeologically mundane act of removing rubble from the building also served to purify and even abstract the remains of the building to an idealized and digestible form.

Idea the Second

Rubble serves to mark chronological breaks in continuity. This is particularly important for those of us interested in Late Antiquity. The transformation of the Roman bath with its clearly defined spaces and functions into rubble marked the end of antiquity (so the narrative goes). 

At the same time, there is evidence that the use of the rubble to form spaces and surfaces has continuity with the walls and floors of the Roman bath. In other words, the very definition of the collapse of the bath as rubble created an expectation of discontinuity which then impaired our ability to recognize the rubble as a necessary element for continuity (of function? of space?) in the bath. Because there is rubble, there must be change?

In other words, it was the appearance (and recognition) of rubble that separated the activity in the bath immediately after its abandonment from the activities a century or two or three afterward. Rubble caused the breach as much as it represented it. It was both necessary and evidence for the end of antiquity.

Idea the Third

Finally, I started to think a bit about how rubble works to create a sense of place. The Roman bath and the Hexamilion wall in some ways anticipate the 6th century burial in Room II and the 7th century settlement. The relationship between these buildings and their rubble can help us understand how they remained places in the Greek landscape. The visibility of the rubble would have made the bath and this particular stretch of the wall visible. The rubble offered a kind of functional value both as building material and, perhaps, as a place of marginal value to others. Maybe the rubble was only inviting to those willing to make use of its affordances? The rubble might have also provided the area with a sense of history. It might have marked the remains of earlier activities in the space — settlement, agricultural work, and the rituals associated with burial — and this would have made the space important for particular groups (and perhaps worth avoiding by others). 

Of course none of these ideas is polished or well-considered enough yet to go beyond a kind of creaky blog post, but I do like that a month spent looking at notebooks and pottery from the bath (but oddly only rarely at the bath itself) would slowly help me think about Late Antique Greece in ways relevant to conversations about rubble and ruins across the humanities. This is something that I hadn’t expected, but I’m pretty pleased that it’s happened!