Barbarians at the Gate: A History of Walls (original) (raw)

Walls As Symbols of Political, Economic, and Military Might

Leadership and Polity in Mississippian Society, 2006

During the eleventh century A.D., the frequency with which stout walls were constructed around settlements began to increase across the East ern Woodlands. While some of the large Mississippian mound sites in the Southeast and southern Midwest were protected with substantial enclosures studded with bastions, other mound sites lacked these features. Typically associated with warfare, such walls reflect vertical integration involving regional nal elites as they vied for adherents, struggled to establish and maintain alliances, cultivated and enhanced the sanctity of chiefly office, and attempt ed to augment their prestige and expand their spheres of influence through the use of coercive force and the construction of monuments; the walls also manifest horizontal forms of integration involving followers and allies who weighed the benefits and costs associateawith a loss of autonomy in such CJ contentious social landscape. The implications of village fortification for the ascent, attrition, transformation, and eventual dissolution of chiefly power are explored using a case example from the lower Tennessee River valley in western Kentucky. I One of the most enduring topics of anthropological inquiry has been the emergence and evol.ution of chiefdoms (e.g., Drennan and Uribe 1987; Earle 1991; Redmond 1998; Service 1962). Archaeologists recently have been exploring. the many pathways along which such societies developed and the diverse, mul tiple, and shifting ideological, economic, political, and military strategies used by chiefs as they continuously negotiated with their potential followers, allies,

Walls as a space of pacification

3rd International Conference Of Contemporary Affairs In Architecture And Urbanism - Full Book Proceedings of ICCAUA2020 - 6-8 May 2020, 2020

Today we live in a world that daily erects walls on the most delicate borders between countries. Over the centuries, the walls have acquired a dual significance for the city. They make the city an island, creating a feeling of unity as well as security. The city and its citizens were one with the walls. But the walls are also the only contact that the city has with the outside world, thus representing the point of passage between inside and outside, between the foreigner and the citizen. This paper attempts to analyze the key role that the the walls must play in these border areas. The choice to erect a wall, if in the beginning it was born to propose an element of separation, can instead become a privileged element of connection with the outside.

1Contested Identities: The Dissonant Heritage of European Town Walls

2016

As well as exerting an enduring influence on townscapes, town walls have always played a critical role in shaping the identities and images of the communities they embrace. Today, the surviving fabric of urban defences (and the townscapes they define) are features of heritage holding great potential as cultural resources but whose management poses substantial challenges, practical and philosophical. In particular, town walls can be conceptualised as a ‘dissonant ’ form of heritage whose value is frequently contested between different interest groups and whose meanings are not static but can be re-written. Evidence is gathered from walled towns across Europe, including member towns of the WTFC (Walled Towns Friendship Circle) and inscribed UNESCO World Heritage Sites, to explore the cyclical biographies of town walls in their transformation from civic monuments, through phases of neglect, decay and destruction to their current status as cherished cultural resources. In order to explo...

Contested Identities: The Dissonant Heritage of European Town Walls and Walled Towns

International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2006

Town walls have always played a critical role in shaping the identities and images of the communities they embrace. Today, the surviving fabric of urban defences and the townscapes they define are features of heritage holding great potential as cultural resources but, in management terms, pose substantial challenges, practical and philosophical. Town walls can be conceptualised as a ‘dissonant’ form of heritage whose value is frequently contested between different interest groups and whose meanings are not static but can be re-written. Evidence is gathered from walled towns across Europe, including member towns of the WTFC (Walled Towns Friendship Circle) and inscribed UNESCO World Heritage Sites, to explore the cyclical biographies of town walls in their transformation from civic monuments, through phases of neglect, decay and destruction to their current status as cherished cultural resources. To explore this area of interface between archaeology and tourism studies, the varying attitudes of populations and heritage agencies to walled heritage are reviewed through examination of policies of conservation, preservation, presentation and restoration. Areas of commonality are thus identified.

Border walls, imagined and real

Antiquity, 2023

Hanscam and Buchanan (2023) give us an insightful comparative analysis of Hadrian's Wall and the US/Mexico border wall. Their analysis shows how critically to study and use these long walls in an explicitly political archaeology. I have engaged in archaeology as political action (McGuire 2008), and have researched the materiality of the US/Mexico border while doing humanitarian work along that border (McGuire 2013). Hanscam and Buchanan deftly employ archaeology as a political tool to challenge capitalist ideologies about borders. They plead for a politically relevant archaeology that engages the past to address modern issues. Without such relevance, they fear that archaeology will be made redundant. I emphatically agree with them that an activist archaeology makes our discipline more relevant. I fear, however, that these politics may be our demise rather than our salvation.