The Fabulous Tales of the Common People,Part 1: Representing Hadrian’s Wall

Abstract

Hadrian’s Wall is one of the most instantly recognizable ancient monuments in the UK. This paper explores the historical and contemporary visualization practices which have created this iconic image. Moving between the disciplines of archaeology, cultural geography, and heritage and tourism studies, the paper draws upon a variety of data sources such as paintings, photographs, models, and reconstructions to consider how the Wall is visually represented within contemporary public discourse. The paper focuses on digital photography and considers the ways in which images create and sustain particular readings of the Wall’s function and significance. These contemporary representational practices demonstrate strong continuities, and earlier images are used to provide historical context. Emphasis is placed on the monument’s landscape setting in visual representations and the importance of this environmental context for readings of the Wall’s cultural and political significance. The present paper deals primarily with representations of the Wall, but it is argued that these representational practices are also fundamentally embodied. The physical encounters of visitors and archaeologists will be considered in greater detail in the second part of this study (Witcher, forthcoming).     

The Hadrian’s Wall Major Study: a test for participatory planning in the management of a World Heritage Site

Abstract

Values-based systems of heritage management have developed hand-in-hand with the role of the stakeholder in successful management. It has become increasingly apparent that, just as in concurrent movements in Western governments to invigorate democratic society, success lies not just in consultation, but also in participation. The next stage, of participatory planning, has moved heritage management theory finally from government to governance. But does the ideal work? Vulnerabilities appeared in an established system of site management through participatory planning on Hadrian’s Wall, England, when it came under pressure from the attentions of two regional development agencies keen to find ways to make the Wall contribute better to the local economy. The economic, historical and institutional background to the resulting Major Study is examined, and the events of the consultation, publication and implementation of the report are followed and analysed, in order to draw out some broader lessons for the challenging task of managing such large and complex sites.     

The British Archaeological Association and the Genesis of J. C. Bruce’s The Roman Wall

On 31 July 1849, John Collingwood Bruce gave a lecture on Hadrian’s Wall at the British Archaeological Association’s annual Congress in Chester. This was his first lecture outside his native North-East on the subject on which he was soon to become the leading authority. Two primary accounts of the occasion survive, but are contradictory in several details. These contradictions are explored, the accuracy of the account in the JBAA upheld and the importance of the occasion emphasised.     

The Knife’s Edge of the Present: Archaeology in Turkey from the Nineteenth Century to the 1940s

This paper investigates how archaeology functioned in Turkey from the nineteenth century until the end of the 1940s. In the nineteenth-century Ottoman world, an awareness was raised to acknowledge the power of patrimony. Amidst intense reforms to Westernize the empire, archaeological artifacts were used as a means of Europeanness. The Greek, Roman, and Byzantine pasts of the Ottoman lands were the focus of this era. The foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 marked the start of a new project to create a modern nation-state out of a centuries’ old Islamic dynasty. This project rewrote the history of Turkish nation in relation to prehistoric civilizations such as the Hittites and the Sumerians. Archaeology became the primary tool of the Republic to validate the renewed history.     

Governing from the Border? Quebec’s Role in North American Security

ABSTRACT

This article aims to shed light on Quebec’s role in cross-border security governance. It exposes the challenges Quebec is facing in this area and what cross-border activities fall within its jurisdiction. The supported hypothesis in this article is that security is subjected to an increasing politicization from the Quebec government in a post-9/11 context, which contributes to the edification of an embryonic “multilevel governance.” If this politicization was noticeable in political statements and international agreements, it seems that it was more driven by conjectural imperatives than a real desire to make Quebec a leader in transnational security. Therefore, there were no diplomatic and financial commitments to make security part of the Gérin-Lajoie doctrine and develop a similar paradiplomacy as in other fields. However, on different technical and bureaucratic levels, transgovernmental relations between certain Quebec governmental organizations, including police corps, and their American counterparts were created. Consequently, they contributed to make continental action more effective, at least in a certain measure.     

Guy Vanderhaeghe’s Notes Towards the “Big Book” of His Generation: Man Descending in the Sociopolitical Context of the 1960s and 1970s

Guy Vanderhaeghe’s historical novels starting with The Englishman’s Boy (1996) have been widely discussed and celebrated in academic books and journals, but his first collection of stories, Man Descending (1982), has been largely neglected by the academic critics. An examination of sociopolitical references, with a special focus on gender and masculinity, in a coherent group of these stories (“The Watcher,” “Drummer,” Cages,” “Man Descending,” and “Sam, Soren and Ed”), reveals a writerly personality that, while acutely sensitive to contemporary social and political developments, and itself deeply implicated in these trends, nevertheless stands uncomfortably apart from and assumes a critical attitude toward the prevailing, generally progressive, sociopolitical trends of the 1960s and 1970s. In the last story of Man Descending, the protagonist-narrator Ed emerges as an aspiring thirty-year-old author who has attempted, but could not finish, two novels of his society and times, and these early stories constitute Vanderhaeghe’s own notes toward a never fully realized “Big Book” of his generation of Saskatchewan men, born in the early 1950s, coming to young adulthood in the socially and politically transformative 1960s and 1970s, and surviving into an embattled early manhood in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time, as it is depicted in these stories, in which the aspirations of 1960s progressivism were hardening into a conformist sociopolitical orthodoxy.