Understanding Hadrian’s Wall. Edited by Paul Bidwell. Pp 143, b&w ills. South Shields: Arbeia Society, 2009. ISBN 9780905974828. £24 (pbk)

摘要

‘Hadrian’s Wall … has long ceased to matter as a major historical problem.’ So opined Sir Mortimer Wheeler in his review of volume 50 of the Journal of Roman Studies in Antiquity (35, 1961, 159). Indeed, Wall Studies may have fossilized themselves following a perceived ‘golden age’ of exploration between 1900 and the 1930s, a period which included the definition of the long-lived concept of the ‘Wall Periods’. In the ensuing years many of the main researchers emerged from the same ‘school of thinking’, having been privileged to have been taught by Eric Birley, John Gillam or Charles Daniels, all of whom in their own way challenged what went before but can, to varying degrees, be seen to have created new orthodoxies or reinforced aspects of those that already existed.