This well-produced volume (albeit without colour illustrations) puts a much-needed spotlight on some of the most substantial monumental survivals from Late Antiquity – city walls. Such circuit walls were constructed primarily from the later third to fifth centuries a.d. and defined cities (or lesser successors) into the Middle Ages. They denoted massive investments of resources – materials, labour, time – requiring reshaping of classical urban spaces, notably via clearances by work-crews, materials deployment, but also inserting major features like ditches (a component frequently forgotten). These defences secured cities but also denoted status. Oddly, however, few city wall-building campaigns are actually memorialised in contemporary inscriptions, hence, as the editors note in their introduction, ‘the chronological uncertainty of many sites’, with recourse by archaeologists to tower forms especially to frame them. A more detailed, ‘empire-wide’ assessment is certainly overdue, given that Stephen Johnson's still valuable Late Roman Fortifications (1983) is now nearly 40 years old. The editors thus seek more joined-up discussion and more comparative analysis of forms, materials, roles and ‘knowledge transfers’, properly spanning Eastern and Western Roman Empires. Such would be a vast but rewarding task, although much first needs to be done at a regional and then provincial level to reveal the quality of the archaeological resource.
The contributions – all illuminating and varied in pitch and questions – rather miss a trick in trying to address the editors’ proposed ‘empire-wide perspective’. Fourteen papers are presented (we are not told in the Preface if the original Rome conference featured more), but these heavily favour the West and, in fact, Section A, ‘Regional Trends’, only covers Gaul (two papers), Hispania and Lusitania. Spain and Gaul reappear in Section C, ‘Case Studies: West and East’, where Italy also gets a look-in with the walls of Segni, and two papers cover Syrian examples (Resafa and Zenobia). There is no explicit comparative section to theorise wider or distinct trends and problems. Some comparative work does come in Section B looking at old and new capitals, with James Crow assessing ceremonial gates at Constantinople and sites in the Balkans, and Ayşe Dalyancı-Berns seeking connections and differences for the fortifications at Nicaea in Asia Minor. While Crow draws on Balkan sites (notably Hissar), we lack papers on the Danubian territories, Britannia or North Africa, where archaeologies and survivals tell equally important stories of evolving and/or fading urbanism. Interesting is the (compact) Section D, ‘The Afterlife of City Walls’, where Hendrik Dey explores the historical and archaeological indicators of upkeep of Rome's vast Aurelianic Walls under popes, barons and Senate in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries; and Jon Frey considers the short-lived Byzantine fortress imposed on an ancient sanctuary (not city) at Isthmia (near Corinth) and the afterlives of that site and its walls.
Some contributions focus on fabrics and materials: Catharine Hof deciphers both wall sequences and earthen outworks at sixth-century Resafa, drawing wider comparanda for proteichismata, and showing a transition from a ‘scenic’ to a properly defensible set of defences. J. Riley Snyder scrutinises built dimensions and materials (bricks, lime) at the late Roman to Byzantine capital of Ravenna in north-east Italy and its port-city of Classe to calculate structural volumes (c. 119,000 and 78,000 cubic metres, respectively) and labour demands (including salvaging old bricks), suggesting overall a workforce of 1,000 for 10 years. For Agedincum (Sens) in central Gaul, Pierre-Antoine Lamy and Mathieu Ribolet debate the extensive use of spolia in the urban circuit's lower levels drawn from clearance operations as the late Roman defences cut through the older urban fabric. Striking are comments on the progressive loss of parts of this notable circuit: in the eighteenth century, 30 wall-towers still stood, but by 1893 civic expansion had reduced that figure to just five.
The latter two articles point strongly to the sizeable logistical and engineering demands of wall-building and reinforce the presumption of coherent planning and both civic and state stimulus. Furthermore, Lamy and Ribolet note the uniformity of design at Sens, suggestive of an ordered, single-phase build, while Marc Heijmans outlines different ‘generations’ of urban enceintes in late Roman southern Gaul. Simon Esmonde Cleary's well-argued, wider survey of Gaul (the volume's longest paper) explicitly looks for state investment (and prioritisation) in town defences here, arguing that ‘decisions were taken which places to fortify, but equally decisions were taken over where not to fortify’ (p. 41), and that such implies army involvement in actual construction work (Carmen Fernández Ochoa and Ángel Morillo stress a Tetrarchic-period military role for north-west Hispania in their ‘reappraisal’ paper). Evident regional groups also reveal that ‘programmes’ of city wall-building could come at different times – though, as Adriaan De Man discusses in relation to Lusitania, and likewise Christopher Courault for Córdoba's walls, defining these regional responses and their agencies is problematic without sufficient evidence to guide.
Such issues certainly support the editors’ call for more archaeological attention and critical debate to be harnessed to bring these major monuments into fuller focus, thereby to shed important light on both the fragmentation of late Roman power but also efforts undertaken across the cities of the many provinces to retain control.
