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.