Barcino Redux

With around 20 million visitors each year, Barcelona is one of the world's most popular destinations. In 2018, those figures included the 3000 or so delegates, including myself, of the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA) conference. A year later, this October, I found myself back in the Catalan capital for a workshop on agrarian landscapes. This visit, however, took an unexpected turn with the announcement by the Spanish Supreme Court of the conviction, on charges of sedition, of nine Catalan separatist leaders. As the news spread around the seminar room, our hosts quickly rescheduled the workshop programme in order to complete all the presentations early, for the following day the university was to remain closed amid concerns about protests. Within hours, the airport had become the focus of the first of a series of demonstrations.

The following morning, with an unexpected day to hand, we headed into the city to wander the streets and to visit sites such as the Museu d'Història de Barcelona in the Plaça del Rei, with its huge, in situ display of Roman and Late Antique remains. Aside from the ubiquitous red-and-yellow Catalan flags hanging from apartment windows, it felt very much like business as usual, and the casual observer might have been forgiven for not noticing the unfolding political turmoil. But it would be too easy and convenient to imagine that a day spent investigating the city's rich archaeological heritage would offer an escape from the politics of the present. For archaeology, politics and identity are always entangled, and Spain, Catalonia and Barcelona are no exceptions.

The evidence for prehistoric activity across the wider Barcelona region continues to accumulate, but the city itself owes its origins to the Roman foundation, under the Emperor Augustus, of Colonia Faventia Julia Augusta Pia Barcino—soon shortened to the more manageable Barcino. Despite the modern city's regional pre-eminence, Roman Barcelona was a modest affair, its walls enclosing just 12ha, and it was thoroughly overshadowed by the much larger provincial capital of Tarraco (modern Tarragona). Nonetheless, the citizens of Barcino soon grew wealthy on the profits of wine production, and the colony prospered during the first centuries AD. Yet the impressive city walls visible today relate to the late Roman period a few hundred years after, when the citizens undertook to rebuild the circuit more or less on the original line, but considerably thicker, higher and with many more towers. This was as much a statement of civic and economic power as of defensive necessity; these were the most substantial city walls in the province and they helped to facilitate the gradual rise of Barcino over Tarraco during the subsequent centuries. Today, the remains of these late Roman walls can be traced for 1.3km around the historic centre, with the opportunity to view impressive stretches of exposed stonework, towers and gates. A century ago, however, the visitor would have found this circuit of walls much less visible. Indeed, walking around many of the modern European and Mediterranean cities descended from Roman origins—and not least Rome itself—it is easy to forget that the 2000-year-old walls, arches, temples and theatres of these ancient urban centres are more visible today than they were a millennium ago. This is the result of concerted efforts over the past century to re-materialise the Roman past in contemporary cityscapes. In marked contrast, traces of the Berlin Wall have all but disappeared from the streets of the German capital since that barrier was breached 30 years ago in November 1989, although various chunks, big and small, are dispersed around the world in museums and bedroom drawers.Footnote ¹ The Berlin Wall is a reminder that the prominence or otherwise of monuments in modern urban landscapes is the result of contested valuations and deliberate decisions.

In Barcelona, interventions to ‘liberate’ the cathedral from the clutter of houses and medieval structures that crowded around it were set out as early as the late nineteenth century. Similarly, plans were made to free up and make visible the Roman city walls, long incorporated and concealed within later buildings. But the implementation of these plans was long delayed by the political events that culminated with the Spanish Civil War. By the time that the works commenced in earnest, in the 1940s and 1950s, the results would come to take on new and unintended significance in the context of the Francoist era.Footnote ² Today, the Barri Gòtic and public spaces such as the Avinguda de la Catedral and the Plaça Nova appear to be timeless features of the urban landscape, but they date back less than a century and are entangled in the history of political differences between Madrid and Barcelona.

During the Civil War, Francoist air raids levelled many of the buildings in the city centre that had already been identified by planners for demolition. With the end of war, the city authorities reactivated their pre-existing plans, clearing the bomb-damaged buildings and laying out new urban spaces. In order to create coherent groups of monuments, street façades were homogenised and clear sight lines opened up with new streets and squares. Subsequently, work began to remove the buildings and structures that concealed the late Roman city walls, towers and the north-west gate. By the 1950s, however, the wider political climate in Spain was very different from when the works were first planned and, although the initiative was largely driven and funded by the municipal authorities, the results were drawn into the rhetoric of the Francoist regime. Among other themes, the Falangist historians put ideological emphasis on ‘empire’, and hence Spain's Roman past and Barcelona's colonial status in particular were emphasised. Franco provided his personal endorsement with a photo opportunity as he arrived in the city via the newly restored Roman gate, evoking the adventus of a Roman emperor. The exposure and reconstitution of the city's Roman monuments were therefore drawn into the wider political history of mid twentieth-century Spain.

Today, Barcelona continues to invest in its Roman past. The ‘Barcino Plan’ of the city's Archaeology Service aims to encourage residents and tourists alike to access and enjoy Barcelona's extensive Roman archaeological heritage and to generate an “emotional bond” between citizens and Roman Barcino.Footnote ³ To these ends, for example, the service is currently completing a €350 000 project to investigate and display a stretch of the city's Roman aqueduct, discovered several decades ago incorporated into the fabric of a building on the Carrer de Duran i Bas (Figure 1). Yet, despite the value of these remnants of Barcelona's Roman past for tourists and residents alike, today these monuments are perhaps less central to the wider political confrontation between Madrid and the supporters of Catalan independence. For in this context, attention has shifted to other historical periods. Delegates at the 2018 EAA conference, for example, were welcomed with a reception at El Born Cultural Centre. Excavations beneath this nineteenth-century iron-framed market hall revealed an extensive late seventeenth-century residential quarter that had been cleared for development in the aftermath of the siege and fall of Barcelona in 1714. The centre, with the in situ archaeological remains at its heart, opened in time for the three-hundredth anniversary of these events (Figure 2). Materialising the collective memory of 1714 and the subsequent suppression of Catalan culture, language and political status, El Born has become a focus for Catalan cultural life and the wider objective of independence.Footnote ⁴

Figure 1.

The newly displayed arches of Barcelona's Roman aqueduct preserved within the structure of a later building on the Carrer de Duran i Bas (photograph by R. Witcher).

Figure 2.

View of the excavated late seventeenth-century structures on display at El Born Cultural Centre (photograph by R. Witcher).

Of course, it is not just in Spain where the contemporary finds resonance in the past. The discovery of the “oldest known natural pearl in the world” during recent excavations of a Neolithic site on Marawah Island off the coast of Abu Dhabi has been hailed by the Emirate's Department of Culture and Tourism as evidence that “our recent economic and cultural history has deep roots that stretch back to the dawn of prehistory”.Footnote ⁵ Whether monumental walls or tiny pearls, the material traces of the past remain a potent social, economic and political resource.

Dealing with the dead

Just a couple of weeks after the imprisonment of the Catalan leaders came the news of the exhumation of General Franco and a reminder that the dead are no less a powerful source of historical memory than are imposing monuments. Franco's legacy has been the subject of much scrutiny by archaeologists, including analysis of the development of archaeological thought under his dictatorshipFootnote ⁶ and the study of internment camps.Footnote ⁷ Scholars have also examined Franco's attempts to construct and obstruct historical narratives. The Valley of the Fallen, outside Madrid, was commissioned by Franco as a monumental focus for national reconciliation, and tens of thousands of victims from both sides of the country's Civil War were interred anonymously at the site. Unsurprisingly, the triumphalist architecture of the complex, and the burial of Franco himself in the basilica at its heart, have made the Valley of the Fallen one of the most contentious sites in Spain. As a lieu de mémoire, it exemplifies how historical memory can be created and contested, and the significant role that human remains can be made to serve. Conversely, elsewhere, the ‘absence’ of Franco's victims, denied individual burial and commemoration, served to weaken family memories and to diminish collective consciousness among Franco's opponents. Hence, both the presence and the absence of the dead can be problematic for historical memory.

Franco's death was followed by a ‘pact of forgetting’ that enabled the rapid embrace of democracy. But that consensus has gradually broken down as new generations come to recognise the politicisation of their lost relatives and the manipulation of historical memory. Since 2000, exhumations from mass graves have sought to reconnect families with the victims of the Civil War and to help them to understand what happened to their relatives and even to take back personal possessions. Archaeologists and physical anthropologists have been key to this ongoing process, both in terms of the methods needed to retrieve and identify the victims and to enable families to engage materially and emotionally with their lost relatives through reburial and commemoration.Footnote ⁸ The exhumation of one man, Franco, has inevitably grabbed the headlines. Yet the wider work to excavate the mass graves of the Civil War and to confront the legacy of dictatorship is a reminder that nation building and collective memory relies not only on monuments and objects, but also on the mortal remains of the ancestors, whether powerful leaders or the anonymous soldiers and victims of violence.

On the topic of exhuming and reburying historical figures, a quick update on Captain Flinders. Back in the April editorial, I reported on the discovery of the sea captain's grave during excavations in advance of the High Speed 2 rail developments at Euston Station in London. After his epic travels around the globe, Flinders's final journey will be a more sedate drive up the A1, back to his birthplace for burial in Donington, Lincolnshire.

Dead in a trench

By the time you read these lines, the UK may, or may not, have left the EU. As well as polluting the English language with a variety of ugly neologisms—Brexit, neverendum, flextension—this ongoing political experiment has also provided plenty of slogans, from the Prime Minister declaring that he would rather be “dead in a ditch” than delay departure beyond the 31 October deadline through to the Halloween-inspired ‘zombie parliament’ and, inevitably, the festive, ‘turkeys voting for Christmas’, general election. The 2016 vote to leave the EU has also made itself felt in relation to the mobilisation of archaeological interpretations within political discourses of nationalism and identity. As explored in a recent Antiquity debate feature, events such as the submergence of Doggerland or the Roman conquest of Britain are being drawn, often with little rigour, into wider political narratives.Footnote ⁹ (Strangely, recent news of an unexplained drop in the water level of a Scottish loch leaving an Iron Age crannog vulnerable to damage has not yet been annexed for Brexit purposes; ancient Roman authors would have leapt on this ominous portent of impending disaster!)

More empirically, however, the Royal Society has released a report documenting some of the effects of Brexit uncertainty on UK research funding.Footnote ¹⁰ The headlines include a substantial reduction in income from EU funding schemes and a decline in the number of incoming researchers. From 2015–2018, UK research funding via Horizon 2020 slumped from €1.49 billion to €1.06 billion per annum. It goes without saying that archaeology has only ever claimed a tiny portion of these vast sums; indeed, subsumed within ‘humanities and the arts’, archaeology is barely visible in the Horizon 2020 framework.Footnote ¹¹ Nonetheless, European funding has been a vital if unevenly spread source of funding for archaeological research in the UK, so its loss will be felt at a disciplinary level.

The drop in overall EU research funding secured by UK researchers is not, as some might surmise, the result of a conspiracy, for the reduction in income broadly tracks the 39 per cent fall in the number of UK applications over the same period. Researchers based in the UK, it seems, have lost the confidence or the will to apply in the first place. Yet national neurosis is not the only problem. The report also notes that the numbers of incoming researchers has similarly declined. Marie Skłodowska Curie fellows, for example, have fallen from 515 in 2015 to 336 in 2018, choosing instead to head to countries such as Italy and Switzerland, both of which have experienced significant increases over the same time span. In real terms, the UK has long ‘punched above its weight’ or ‘eaten more than its fair share of the pie’, depending on one's perspective. Either way, Brexit has significantly affected the UK research environment. If and when this political divorce finally does come to pass, it will be vital for UK research bodies to establish new collaborative frameworks to restore and strengthen European ties.

Meanwhile, in the absence of the faintest idea about the next convoluted chapter in the Brexit saga, we can muse instead on plans by artist Anthony Gormley to situate one of his signature sculptures on the coast of northern France. Previous installations have featured human figures positioned around the British coastline looking out to sea, beckoned by the horizon, curious about the wider world. Gormley's proposal for a figure on the rocky coast of Brittany, gazing north towards Britain is intended to ‘respond’ to the nearby monumental Neolithic long mound at Barnenez and to underscore the shared heritage born of millennia of seafaring back and forth across La Manche.Footnote ¹² From the monuments of Roman Barcelona to the passage graves of Neolithic Brittany, the archaeology of Europe remains as politically significant as ever.

In this issue

In this final issue of the year, we present our usual rich mix of archaeological research and debate from around the world, travelling via Kenya and Ethiopia to Cambodia and Chile. En route, we discover how early seafarers did not colonise the islands of East Asia, and how children in the Pacific Northwest developed their atlatl skills. We also feature a debate section on ‘sustainable archaeology’—for what, or rather for whom, is archaeology intended? Hutchings and La Salle argue that the objective of sustainable archaeology is not to contribute to a healthier planet and a more sustainable future, but rather to maintain the profession of archaeology itself. The respondents debate the authors’ characterisation of sustainable archaeology as futuristic rhetoric concealing an unsustainable discipline.

Also in this issue, Sadie Watson argues that the current model of commercial archaeology in the UK, constrained by both time and money, is failing to innovate and develop more flexible field techniques capable of responding to the challenging large-scale infrastructure projects currently underway. Sadie's article coincides with her recent award of a UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship, one of only two that focus on archaeology from a grand total of 78. Funded by the UK government to advance cutting-edge, multidisciplinary research, her four-year project will seek to measure and maximise the public benefit resulting from state expenditure on infrastructure developments, aiming to facilitate not only better data collection but also more socially meaningful research outcomes.

Finally, this issue features an article on the first archaeological evidence for Egyptian ‘head cones’. Widely visualised in Egyptian art, examples of this headgear have to date eluded archaeologists, leading some even to suggest that they never existed as real objects. The two examples presented here come from excavations of the cemeteries at Amarna. Analysis demonstrates that they are made of wax, and the authors argue that they were possibly intended to enhance the fertility of the deceased and to help ensure rebirth in the afterlife. On which note, we thank the many authors and reviewers who have supported Antiquity over the past 12 months through their research, expertise and guidance, and we wish all of our readers and contributors a peaceful and prosperous 2020!