Hadrian’s Wall as Artscape

This paper draws upon the concept of “artscape”, a term adopted in studies of contemporary urban and borderland contexts. Nine artworks sited along Hadrian's Wall form the case studies. These interventions aim to challenge the traditional concept of Hadrian's Wall as a fixed and well-defined ancient monument set within an unchanging landscape. Many of the projects reflect, directly or indirectly, upon the ethics of contemporary bordering practices. The artworks may have succeeded, at least to a degree, in challenging people's understandings of the current significance of the Wall by encouraging local people and visitors to contemplate the constraining characteristics of modern borders and frontiers. However, the communication of Hadrian's Wall as “open to all” elides ethical issues and the paper explores the extent to which these artworks may have encouraged or provoked public responses

‘The most ancient Boundary between England and Scotland’: Genealogies of the Roman Wall(s)

Drawing upon the writings of English, Scottish and Irish authors, this article explores the conceptual spaces created through the medium of the two Roman Walls of Britain. Late seventeenth- to early twentieth-century texts are addressed to explore how the location of Hadrian’s Wall has sometimes led to its use as a motif for what might be and what is not English. Significantly, the meanings attributed to this Wall are far more complex than any simple idea of inclusion in or exclusion from English national space. Interpretations are often bound up with a broader geographical focus drawing upon the remains of a second and less substantial Roman frontier, the Antonine Wall. The location of this more northerly monument, cutting across Lowland Scotland, complicated any simple territorial identification of England with the former geographical extent of Roman civilization. It is argued that the authors’ ideas of identity were influenced by where they were born in relation to the Walls, but these concepts were also challenged by physical or conceptual movement. Mobility turned Hadrian’s Wall into a spatial referent for a transformative and ill-defined concept of Englishness which, in the writings of some authors, drew upon a nuanced conception of identities within, between, and/or beyond

Globalization and the Roman empire: the genealogy of ‘Empire’

The use of concepts and ideas taken from the contemporary World in the studies on ancient Rome simply cannot be avoided. The studies that since 1990s onwards have criticized the term “Romanization” are not an exception. For this reason, the concept of “globalization” in reference to Ancient Rome can be helpful since it makes the anachronism in contemporary accounts all more evident

‘Are You Local?’ Indigenous Iron Age and Mobile Roman and Post-Roman Populations: Then, Now and In-Between

The Iron Age and Roman periods are often defined against each other through the establishment of dualities, such as barbarity–civilisation, or spiritual–rational. Despite criticisms, dualities remain prevalent in the National Curriculum for schools, television, museum displays and academic research. Recent scientific studies on human origins, for example, have communicated the idea of an ‘indigenous’ Iron Age, setting this against a mobile and diverse Roman-period population. There is also evidence for citizens leveraging dualities to uphold different positions on contemporary issues of mobility, in the UK and internationally. This paper discusses values and limitations of such binary thinking, and considers how ideas of ambiguity and temporal distancing can serve to challenge attempts to use such dualities to map the past too directly onto the present, reflecting on recent social media debates about Britain and the European Union