David Breeze in his latest major work on Hadrian's Wall begins by quoting C.E. Stevens’ 1955 statement that ‘the course of excavation on Hadrian's Wall is littered with the bones of discarded hypotheses’. Many more skeletons have been laid down in the historiographical record since, and it has been B.'s task in this volume to excavate and analyse these skeletons, and to examine the modern bearers of their DNA. This is not a flippant analogy, as B. shows the impact of one generation's theories and opinions on the next and the way in which atoms of earlier ideas are carried forward alongside the new, influencing the continuity of thought.
As B. points out, the volume is complementary to Hingley's Hadrian's Wall: A Life, as the latter looks at broader influences of the Wall and its study, while B. concentrates on the detail of thought on the monument itself. The first two chapters summarise the history of the study of the Wall and how it came to be realised that it was built under Hadrian. Nine chapters then examine the histories of the study of key themes in the understanding of the frontier complex by going chronologically through the works of all researchers who have addressed the issues, evaluating their ideas and clearly showing how they were abandoned, amended, replaced, or indeed how they have stood the test of time and question. Two chapters then look at the process of understanding the relationships between the different elements of the frontier system and the sequence of building. The next two chapters examine the study of the foundations of the Wall and the question as to whether Hadrian himself designed the system (both issues previously discussed by B. in article form). The discussion of the foundations is an object lesson in the fact that ‘nothing is too small to be insignificant and not worth recording, for it is through these details that we can better understand the greater whole’ (74). Other chapters concern the rebuilding of the Turf Wall in stone, the elucidation of Wall history (in particular the life and death of the ‘Wall Periods’), who manned the Wall, its function and its end.
To write this book and, in particular, to write it in a way that is readable and accessible (my first reading was over a single Sunday afternoon and early evening) requires a total mastery and familiarity with the vast literature of the Wall. This B. possesses. The book is a signal service to researchers coming ‘cold’ to the study of the Wall for whom the sheer size of the Wall database can be extremely daunting. It can also be seen as a guide to the intellectual journey that led to our current ideas.
This is a challenging book — not because it is obscure or difficult to read, but because challenge is implicit throughout; the challenge to research, to rethink, to overturn the current paradigm. B. sees the study of the Wall advancing in a series of paradigm shifts — established ideas being overturned suddenly as successive models for the Wall are seen as unsustainable. This seems to be a 40-year cycle (perhaps that should be a generational cycle?). The end of the last paradigm — that of the ‘Wall Periods’ came with the 1976 publication of Breeze and Dobson's Hadrian's Wall. That volume, if it did establish a new paradigm, is indeed 40 years old, and B. asks whether we are now living through a ‘crisis’ which will result in a major paradigm shift. I think not, as circumstances now are different. Firstly, successive editions of Hadrian's Wall have always taken account of new research, for example the abandonment of the identification of individual legions as the builders of particular interval structures following the work of Peter Hill (51–3), and the adoption of new ideas on the end of the Wall following my own work at Birdoswald. Secondly, B. points out (143) that most of those discussing the Wall in the 1960s and 1970s were taught by those who had established the previous paradigm — Birley and Richmond. Those studying the Wall now are a much wider group, with some of the current researchers B. mentions coming from outside archaeology altogether.
To me, Breeze and Dobson's volume is not a paradigm, but a foundation. It has never appeared prescriptive, as has been shown by its updates. B. asks for open-mindedness in the study of Hadrian's Wall (146–7). I feel that the study of the Wall has never been so open and debate so animated and positive. A significant factor in this has been the openness of David Breeze himself. The book under review will be another foundation. B. explicitly hopes that it will help novices in Wall studies navigate the literature to understand where we are and why. It will.
