Crumbling Walls

   There is an interesting piece on TED by archeologist Sarah Parcak on what little we have discovered, a fact made more revealing when she mentioned: In the Egyptian Delta alone, we've excavated less than one-1000th of one percent of the total volume of Egyptian sites.  When you add to that the thousands of other sites my team and I have discovered, what we thought we knew pales in comparison to what we have left to discover.  When you look at the incredible work that my colleagues are doing all around the world and what they're finding, I believe that there are millions of undiscovered archaeological sites left to find.  Discovering them will do nothing less than unlock the full potential of our existence.  It's interesting to think that we have so much left to discover, although in reading Rory Stewart's recent book, The Marches, he tells of discoveries in Scotland being re-buried in order to save them from both visitors and looters alike.  Hadrian's Wall is one example; 400 years ago its height in places was still at 10 feet (this some 1500 years after its construction); author Stewart writes that back then: ...visitors could scratch moss from the stones to reveal inscriptions: which gave hints of Roman units drawn from Syria, or the report of the death of a Dacian baby.  At the cavalry fort Chesters near Hexham, a statue of the God of the Tyne was half-visible, his bearded head sticking out of the turf...But in 1745, the invasion from Scotland led by Bonnie Prince Charlie convinced the government to upgrade its military infrastructure.  So General Wade demolished part of the wall and used the rubble to construct a new military road...Then entreprenuers began to use the wall as a source of limestone, saving them the cost of quarrying.  Now the bulk of the wall is little more than a stumbling block, the vegetation and flowers that inspired poetry from Walter Scott now removed, the crumbling Roman mortar replaced by concrete, the "statues, altars, and military equipment...dug up, cleaned, and  placed in museum storage vaults..."

   This is much the same in many parts of the Great Wall in China (and full disclosure, this is coming to me from books and pictorials since I haven't been to either wall), where NPR reported that nearly a third of the 12,000 original miles of the wall are now little more than dust.  A third...that's 4,000 miles of the wall, a distance greater than that of crossing the United States (China's Wall was built nearly 1000 years after Hadrian's). And there are others, walls and tunnels built on high in Italy for moving troops and weapons throughout the Dolomite mountains, much the same as the other walls designed to keep out invaders (or as now theorized with the Romans, to keep them safely inside the wall).  But as writer Charlie Boscoe wrote in National Geographic: Italians referred to the battles in the Dolomites as il fronte vertical.  Soldiers were fighting not only the enemy, but the elements as well: 60,000 World War I soldiers are thought to have died in avalanches in this relatively small mountain range.  Temperatures plunged to 40 degrees below freezing for days on end as troops huddled in the mountainside huts and tunnels...many of troops fighting on the fronte vertical were neither trained nor equipped to be there.  Faced with these difficulties, some units tried to flee, unable to understand who they were fighting for or why.  The Italian generals’ response: invoke the Roman policy of decimation, shooting one in 10 men from every unit that deserted.

Outpost built in the Dolomites; photo by Robbie Shone

    Such building of tunnels and walls generally came on the backs of those forced into labor or obligated to obey a "leader's" wishes.  But one need only view a timeline of history in one small part of England, that portion covering the now-English/Scottish border, the portion that Hadrian's Wall basically defined.  To paraphrase author Stewart, the Romans arrived and built the Wall around 100 AD and with 15,000 troops stationed there kept control for nearly 300 years; then Welsh-speaking tribal groups arrived and 200 years later Germanic-speaking groups took control of the area; 200 years after that came the Vikings which ruled for only 100 years before giving way to a patchwork of all three tribes; 150 years later came the Norman conquest and the border began to divide into a "Royal Forest" where human occupation was deemed illegal; 150 years after that Christian monks and the wealthy begin settling in the forested area (Robin Hood?); add another 150 years and the area turns into a war zone between English and Scottish kings; 300 years more and the Scottish king becomes the king of England and peace is restored only to fall back 300 years later when the area devolves from poetic memories by authors such as Walter Scott and William Wordsworth to military storage and staging areas as World War 1 breaks out; as the year 2000 approaches the nuclear storage areas and other munitions sites are again patched-worked and returning to being viewed as a site for environmental restoration.  Phew, still with me?  It would have been easier graphed out on a whiteboard but that will give you a tiny idea of the changing history of just one area, all battling over a definition of rocks and other pieces of earth moved to create "a wall."  

Photo: Robbie Shone for National Geographic

     
    Bones, of course, dissolve far more easily and leave far fewer traces than rocks and stones as Bill Bryson noted in his book Home, for even an ancient cemetery in a small English village will likely house nearly 20,000 bodies. Still, to think that these once-great walls of stone have continued to succumb to the erosion of time and to consider what those stones might have witnessed and perhaps buried...uncovered civilizations?  Take the Skara Brae...ever heard of them?  Here's what Bryson wrote: We don't know anything at all about these people --where they came from, what language they spoke, what led them to settle on such a lonesome outpost on the treeless edge of Europe-- but from all the evidence it appears that Skara Brae enjoyed six hundred years of uninterrupted comfort and tranquility.  Then one day in about 2500 BC the occupants vanished -- quite suddenly, it seems.  In the passageway outside one dwelling ornamental beads, almost certainly precious to the owner, were found scattered, suggesting that a necklace had broke and the owner had been too panicked or harried to retrieve them.  Why Skara Brae's happy idyll came to a sudden end is, like so much else, impossible to say.

   My brother has now left and returned home, our discussions many and our lives returning to our separate routines.  The brief awkwardness that seemed to initially exist had crumbled as quickly as it had appeared.  If only we could all watch our emotional walls break down as quickly throughout life; instead it would appear that the walls we create from our minds and our hearts are more like those now breaking down in China and Scotland and elsewhere throughout the world, many still hard as stone and their towering might only now giving way to dust.  One quote from the National Geographic piece caught my eye, a quote from Heinrich Harrar's  The White Spider: Self-confidence is the most valuable gift a man can possess, but it is not a gift freely granted.  The blindly arrogant possess it least of all.  To possess this true confidence, it is necessary to have learned to know oneself at moments when one was standing on the very frontier of things, times when one could even cast a glance over to the other side.  Perhaps that other side is as simple as peering over a wall, or tearing one down.