Having recently embarked on a new research endeavour focusing on the border areas of the Roman Empire, I set out to revisit places I had been before, as well as to experience other fringe regions of the Empire for the first time. I aimed to take in the landscape, sensory impressions, and environment in different ways to those most common in our fast-paced world. In particular, I wanted to be reminded of how time might have been perceived in an era when the fastest you could dream of travelling was by horseback or sailing boat. After all, the Roman world was one where most people only ever travelled by foot, if they travelled at all, so I decided to experience a selection of sites by walking between them over several days. As well as the slowness, I wanted to gain a sense of how the world would have been perceived when you could not see it laid out from above, with only the natural contours of the landscape or human-built monuments offering vantage points. Many places I visited in the past, including sites in Syria, I can now only experience on paper – through photographs, notes, and publications – some of which were outcomes of the various research visits I have made to those parts of the world. Today, they are ‘off the map’ to most researchers and tourists, since they are located in what are currently conflict-stricken regions.
My new research project, entitled ‘Locally Crafted Empires’, embraces a bottom-up perspective by focusing on locally produced portrait sculpture in the East. These representations of inhabitants of the Roman Empire were not produced at its heart and then dispersed. Instead, they were crafted in the places where these imperial subjects were living: in the provinces of the Empire – including its fringes, which were often in close contact with a range of cultures, as well as being regions where borders could easily change as political and military power shifted. To understand such sculptural representations, however, one must also gain an appreciation of the local landscapes, the architecture, the climatic conditions, and the languages spoken in ancient times. In order to immerse myself in a region that was new to me in terms of its landscape, I decided to walk the entirety of the Hadrian’s Wall National Trail, which runs from coast to coast across northern England – beginning in Bowness-on-Solway to the west and ending at Wallsend on the banks of the River Tyne. My intention was to experience a different kind of border region – another fringe of the vast Roman Empire – which in some ways marks a departure, but in other ways is comparable to the region that is the usual focus of my research, namely the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, including the region around the oasis city of Palmyra.
Locally Crafted Empires and the portrait habit
In the ‘Locally Crafted Empires’ project, a monumental corpus of portrait sculpture is currently being collected by a team of researchers. An earlier study, the Palmyra Portrait Project (CWA 111 and 118), examined more than 4,000 portraits. These were produced between the 1st century AD and the 3rd century AD, and together represent the largest quantity known from one place in the Roman world. A recently published edited volume, Portraying the Individual, sets out the aims of the new project and also shows how the Palmyra Portrait Project has changed the ways in which we are able to research local identities and means of expression through locally produced portrait sculpture and the urban environments of fringe regions of the Eastern Roman Empire – a region that did not necessarily view itself as particularly ‘niche’, but rather as central to its own world and surroundings. After all, the Palmyrenes dominated large parts of the caravan trade in the first three centuries AD, while their economic power led to an uprising in the late 3rd century AD. This, in turn, precipitated the city’s downfall, when it was invaded by a legion of Roman soldiers during the reign of the emperor Aurelian in 272 and 273. Before this, in the first three centuries AD, Palmyra’s local culture thrived. One of the outlets for this creativity and expression of local identity and place within an imperial world were the thousands of locally produced limestone portraits. The new project expands the regional coverage to the entirety of Western Asia and refines the methodologies of the Palmyra Portrait Project.
Archaeology and the silver screen