Tales of the Frontier

Project summary

Hadrian's Wall is the one of the most evocative and powerful ancient monuments in Britain and the most famous frontier system (materially and culturally) of the Roman Empire. Through an evaluation of ideas about the linearity and permeability of the monument, this project addresses the historical context within which the Wall has been interpreted, publicised, visited and displayed.

For more details please go to the project summary document

Progress and Highlights

The team has been working together through meetings and writings, to integrate the interests of different project members in order to create an approach that explores and develops the inter-disciplinary interests of the core researchers. In researching histories of the Wall, the team has been pursuing the project themes of conflicting claims to authority, spiritual valuations and the historical context of interpretations. There have been a number of interesting findings from this preliminary research In particular -

a) The religious associations that it held for generations of English people. The writings of Gildas and Bede focus on the physical creation of the Wall as a boundary between Christian Britons and pagan Picts/Scots. This association is projected through the placement of early medieval crosses and churches along the line of the monument. Ideas of ruination and restorations (rebuilding) are also being explored to provide ways of interpreting the reception of the Wall since the C16 century.

b) The variety of ways in which the monument has drawn from the C16 to the present day in reflections upon national identity, imperialism and ideas of otherness. Particularly relevant new examples of the use of the Wall as a metaphor have been found, including writings by Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe and Robert Louis Stevenson.

c) The insights that the Hadrian's Wall Pilgrimages have provided into the experience of travellers on the Wall. Thinking through these journeys led to the development of a paper on embodied experience of the Wall and ways of travelling and experiencing the landscape of the Wall. This was presented by Claire Nesbitt at the Theoretical Archaeology Conference (York, December 2007) and has since been written up as an article which will be published the Journal of Social Archaeology .

The project has a significant element of engagement with non-academic stakeholders through the website, the e-newsletter and popular papers in Frontiers and British Archaeology and the team are actively involved in the formulation of the Hadrian’s Wall Research Framework.