Meggie Macdonald

Over this past weekend, the once mighty northern border of the Roman Empire – a stone wall stretching from Newcastle-Upon-Tyne to the Solway Firth built by the Emperor Hadrian in AD 122 – was lit up with burning beacons to honour the men who once guarded the ramparts.  It is also a bid by Tourism UK to jumpstart the 2010 spring tourist season and, by all accounts, this is one powerful publicity stunt.

The wall once ran right across northern England for 117km and cut off the Caledonian ‘barbarians’ from the romanized civilians to the south.  Hadrian built it as part of his campaign of peace and stabilitythroughout the empire (he also had another border built along the farthest reaches of Roman Africa.   Following the massive expansion efforts under Trajan (including the conquest of Dacia in AD 106 and the campaigns against the Parthians beginning in AD 107), Hadrian was faced with a formidable task when he came to power following Trajan’s death in AD 117:  how to consolidate power and stabilize the Roman empire when it had been overstretched for far too long.  Among his various solutions – some successful, some not – were the construction of the wall in Britain and the huge pallisade across North Africa.

Among the benefits of such an undertaking, the construction of Hadrian’s Wall in Britain kept some potentially rebellious soldiers occupied with other tasks.  The wall took years to build as legionaries dug the foundation from the cold, wet clay-mud of northern England and built the forts and milecastles to maintain security at the Empire’s northern border.

The Wall is a rather surprising thing to see, particularly when you only realise after the fact that you have indeed seen it.  During one train trip to Edinburgh, the train I was on passed by a rural neighbourhood near the east coast and there, nestled in a little valley between the train tracks and a farm house, was a small pile of cut stone.  Nothing so spectacular as some of the taller sections and certainly less impressive than the restored section of the wall, this little bit of Hadrian’s political power was enough to catch in my throat all the history that it stood for, and still does stand for.

Also from The Guardian, here is a cute little video of the lighting of the wall this weekend.  THe music may be a bit schmalzy, but it’s a lovely event none-the-less.

I am endlessly entertained by how enthusiastic academics will try anything to get the results they need to prove or disprove a theory about the ancient world.  Apart from the usual stories – building ballistae, recreating the building techniques during the Neolithic period, dragging huge stones to demonstrate the difficulty in building pyramids in Egypt – there are always the quick anecdotes that make me smile.

Most recently – and, as far as I’m aware, not the first time this has been implemented – a group of archaeologist who discovered a huge sealed urn utilized the X-ray machines at the Exeter Airport to determine what was inside it.  The answer was the remains of a Roman, discovered at the site of a Roman fort at St. Andrews Hill in Cullompton.

From the dates of the fort and of the urn, it appears that this site was abandoned shortly after the Romans established more definite control over the south coast of England.  This would have been years after the Boudiccan Revolt of 60-61 AD/CE and well after the sweeping invasions of Aulus Plautius during the reign of Claudius (41-54 AD/CE).  In AD/CE 43, distinguished senator Aulus Plautius landed at Rutupiae with four legions:  the Second Augusta, the Ninth Hispania, the Fourteenth Gemina and the Twentieth Valeria Victrix.  The Ninth Hispania would later march north in 117 AD/CE to support the defeat of an uprising and were never heard from again (although it is argued that they survived their stint in Britain and were thereafter posted to the East, where they were destroyed during the Bar Kochba Revolt in Judaea) .  The Second Augusta was commanded by the future emperor Vespasian, sweeping through the countryside to Wales, where they established their base of operations at Caerleon in the Usk valley.

Following my brief post regarding film footage from MEON HDTV Productions about the recent discovery of the source of Trajan’s Aqueduct, I was surprised and very pleased to be contacted by Director Ted O’Neill who, together with Producer Michael O’Neill, Professor Lorenzo Quilici and Professor Rabun Taylor, comprised the team that announced this stunning find.

Ted O’Neill was kind enough to forward the press release issued from Rome in January 2010, an excerpt of which is found below:

“An ancient water source in Etruscan times, the web of springs was encapsulated by the Roman engineers in a vaulted, three-chambered semicircular ‘nymphaeum’, which served as a springhouse and probably contained the statue of a Roman river god or nymph. The ancient water source was commemorated by a sestertius coin minted by the Emperor Trajan when he inaugurated his aqueduct and his public baths in the centre of Rome, 1900 years ago.

For more than a thousand years, Trajan’s sacred water source was hidden under a Christian Church, now ruined and dismantled.  The ancient aqueduct still emerges from under the church’s meagre remains.  The water collection chamber of the Caput Aquae (headwaters) and 125 metres of the Roman Aqueduct gallery are still in pristine condition as compared with many crumbling ruins in the centre of Rome.

Ancient evidence and Papal records confirm that this shrine is almost certainly the primary water source of Trajan’s aqueduct:  the vaulted ceilings are all richly decorated with expensive Egyptian blue pigment, which strongly suggests that the great Emperor Trajan, proclaimed Optimus Princeps, almost certainly was here personally for his aqueduct’s inauguration.

Until recently, this water source was considered by some to be a local, regional aqueduct of eighteenth-century origin.

However, a descent below the chapel with powerful lights for  filming of the underground galleries revealed that the brickwork and waterproof hydraulic cement lining the tunnels is absolutely characteristic of the Trajanic age.” (Provincia di Roma:  Commune di Bracchiano, Commune di Manziana, and MEON HDTV Productions, 2010).

This discovery has raised many new questions and avenues for further exploration about the history of this massive construction effort from the early second century AD/CE.  Why was a Christian Church built over the water source and nymphaeum?  Was it purely because the foundations already in place cut down on construction costs?  Or is there any evidence that local knowledge of a clean water source prompted an association with religious cleansing centuries later? 

What can be learned about the unique architectural techniques utilized in the construction of this aqueduct?  Were Trajan’s workers the most advanced engineers the Roman world had ever seen?  What information can be drawn from the Aqua Paola, the seventeenth-century restoration by Pope Paul V, about the original aqueduct? 

What new literary references can be identified to support our knowledge of this discovery? 

What geological information is available on the site about the nature of the springs that supplied Rome with fresh water? 

Can the producers’ theory that the famous Trajanic coin represents the nymphaeum rather than the fountain on the Janiculum Hill be proved beyond question, and reflect a poetic conclusion to this wonderful discovery?

It is hard to imagine that this archaeological project is still in its early stages – the aqueduct source has been identified but the long-term research on engineering and construction methods, the history of the site and its socio-cultural significance have yet to be explored, published and debated.  To the project and its restoration and conservation efforts, I say happy hunting!