Many visitors (and would-be visitors) to the Antonine Wall World Heritage Site find the task of interpreting and understanding the visible archaeological remains somewhat challenging. Over a number of years in the role of Head of Multimedia in the Hunterian Museum, and as an Associate Lecturer with the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow, the author has been exploring ways of addressing this issue. Multimedia technologies have the potential to aid in the presentation and interpretation of archaeological sites, and their associated artefacts held in local museums collections, for a wide range of public audiences.

The coming of age of interactive digital information and communication technologies has provided cultural heritage organisations with a range of opportunities to utilise these ever more flexible digital technologies to provide access to their cultural resources in increasingly innovative ways. The advent of the World Wide Web, over 20 years ago now, presented heritage organisations with a unique opportunity to provide access to their resources to a truly global audience. Resources which hitherto were only available to those fortunate enough to live within travelling distance of archaeological sites or museum collections were suddenly accessible via the then new medium of web technology. Moreover, many museums around the world saw the potential to turn this new medium into additional virtual display space in which to reveal many artefacts that had been languishing in storage or in reserve collections.

Introduction

In 2005, the Limes Museum in Aalen was provided with new media equipment, including a virtual reconstruction of Roman Aalen. At the same time a partial reconstruction of a Roman cavalry barracks was constructed at 1:1 scale in the adjacent archaeological park. These new installations jointly convey to visitors an impressive and easily understandable picture of the Roman past. These reconstructions play a vital educational role in establishing the limes in the public consciousness, thereby helping to ensure better protection of the archaeology.

The fact that large parts of the Upper German-Raetian limes lie hidden in the ground, invisible to the observer, distinguishes the limes from many other World Heritage sites. An understanding of the sensitive archaeological monument is significantly impeded for many visitors by its invisibility. Interpretation of the limes for visitors both within the landscape and in museums brings special challenges that cannot be addressed without the use of reconstructions. Existing interpretation points for the limes can be grouped into four types, each with specific strengths and weaknesses (Kemkes 2008).

The Limes Archaeological Monument in the Landscape

The majority of the limes frontier system, including the course of the earth banks and ditches and of the Limes wall where it existed, as well as the majority of military installations from watchtower to fort, are either invisible or barely visible on the surface of the ground. Since there are no easily visible traces in the landscape, a considerable intellectual effort is required from the visitor, which has to be stimulated by appropriate signs or mobile information systems.

The Handbook to the Roman Wall is an unusual publication. On one level it is a guidebook, albeit a detailed guidebook, to a single monument — Hadrian's Wall — but as that monument is massive in its size and complex in the range of its elements, the Handbook is perforce a considerably larger guidebook than normal. Further, the Handbook is generally regarded as the statement of current knowledge and of those interpretations which command the support of the archaeologists working on the Wall. Hence, it is directed at a wide readership of visitors, archaeologists, cultural resource managers and the mythical general reader. It would not be pitching its claims too high to say that it is the bible for Hadrian's Wall, the place to which all readers seeking knowledge about the frontier would turn first.

The task of preparing a new edition of the oldest archaeological guide in Britain, as I was invited to do in 1998 by the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne, was therefore a daunting prospect. How was I to deal with the weight of tradition and the authority of one's predecessors? How far was change possible? Was any innovation possible? How was I to ensure that all available evidence was taken into account in preparing the new edition? Was it possible to produce a corporate view?

The Development of an Idea

Our special interest is the presentation of archaeological information to the public using modern technologies and moving images (Walkshofer and Dobat 2005). At the Limes Congress in Newcastle in 2009 we presented the film The Limes on the River Main. This film was designed to present the different forts of the Main Limes and its archaeological remains through the website www.museen-mainlimes.de. The challenge was to create a short 13-minute film that could be watched in sequences so that web designers could link a specific archaeological site directly to the corresponding sequence in the film.

Based on that project we developed the idea of presenting film sequences at the archaeological sites themselves, using mobile phones. The Landesstelle für die nichtstaatlichen Museen and the Bayerische Sparkassenstiftung agreed to initiate a prototype project for the Limes in Bavaria to explore the possibilities of this new technology. We had been experimenting with video on mobile phones for as long as we had been interested in the project, but, in terms of user experience, the quality of video on the small colour displays available at that time was poor. However, the idea that in the near future the viewer would have in their pocket the hardware to view multimedia content anywhere was constantly on our minds.

Introduction

This chapter explores the legacies of Hadrian's Wall in the physical and cultural landscape of the north of England. It also addresses how we might develop a rather different appreciation of the archaeological significance of the Wall. Archaeological accounts tend to emphasise the construction of the Wall during the AD 120s and its disuse as a Roman frontier structure in the early fifth century (see for example symonds and Mason 2009). It is clear, however, that this monument did not suddenly cease to exist when Roman Britain came to an end. An alternative approach suggests that the considerable significance of this monument has, effectively, kept its remains alive throughout its lengthy history. Hadrian's Wall has been uncovered and described by many since the sixth century and these accounts and images have added to the life of the Wall, emphasising its continued presence.

Archaeologists have helped to define their subject by developing ways to determine the sequence of passing time, including the techniques of stratigraphy, artefact analysis and radiocarbon dating. From the late 19th century, a detailed body of knowledge has been accumulated that provides a chronology for the Roman period, emphasising the history and transformation of Hadrian's Wall from the 120s to the fifth century (Maxfield 1982; Symonds and Mason 2009). This body of information provides a foundation for the definition, protection and management of this World Heritage Site (Young 1999).

Introduction

In 2009 Hadrian's Wall Heritage (HWHL) commissioned the Centre for Interpretation Studies, Perth College-UHI and Zebra square to carry out a programme of public engagement research as part of the process of developing the Hadrian's Wall Interpretation Framework. The purpose of the research was to explore and measure the views of a number of different audiences and stakeholders, all of whom were important both to the future sustainability of Hadrian's Wall as an overall attraction and to all of the individual sites and museums. The research was informed by the market data and audience research already in existence. As such, the public engagement research aimed to add to existing knowledge, providing a greater level of detail than previously existed — particularly in terms of visitor and non-visitor perceptions of Hadrian's Wall and the visitor experience. Full details of the research are available as an appendix to the Hadrian's Wall Interpretation Framework (Adkins and Holmes 2011).

The existing audiences for Hadrian's Wall are declining, yet the pool of potential visitors is large. A study by ERA (2004) found that 4.2 million people live within 40 miles or an hour's drive of Hadrian's Wall, 85% of whom are in North East England. A further 1.9 million live within 80 miles. Furthermore, some 5 million tourists, 4.4 million of whom are from the UK, stay within 40 miles of Hadrian's Wall each year. Yet despite being less than an hour's drive away, the majority of these potential visitors choose to visit other places instead.

Introduction

All Year 7 pupils who attend Burnside Business and enterprise College in Wallsend explore aspects of Hadrian's Wall, including its history. The college is located near Segedunum Roman fort and was designed with a ground plan based on the shape of a flattened Roman legionary helmet. Roz Elliott is Deputy Head and, for her and her students, perhaps the most important aspect of the Wall and all that it represents is how it helps to promote community cohesion by providing a context through which to explore contemporary issues of identity and multiculturalism. The soldiers stationed at Segedunum and at other forts along Hadrian's Wall came from many different parts of the Empire. The students can explore what it might have been like to have been stationed in a foreign land, to marry locally, to adapt to local ways of life yet maintain links with home, and relate this to their modern world.

Introduction

No re-enactor can ever come anywhere near to the experience of being a Roman soldier, in much the same way as neither Laurence olivier nor Kenneth Branagh could ever be Henry V. Each could and can think themselves into the part, assuming the mantle of the persona, but it will always (and can only) be mimesis, an impression of the desired model, perhaps coloured by the experiences and imagination of the individual playing the part and informed by research into the subject, but it is never the thing itself. Re-enactors (despite some extreme examples) cannot really eat, think, walk, drink, talk or live like a roman. Thus, we must acknowledge from the very beginning that the only truly authentic Roman soldiers were those in the service of rome many years ago.

Performance

It is no accident that a re-enactor will talk of their impression of a particular character from the past, for they too are acknowledging the gap between what they can achieve and the reality of life in the roman period. They adopt a roman name and this helps give them a focus for their character. The character is a fabrication based on many different sources, as is the appearance of the re-enactor, since a similarly disparate range of information will have helped shape the clothing they wear (sumner 2009) and equipment they carry (Bishop and Coulston 2006).