VerteriusThesis PDF

S.
Verterius
Between History and Heritage:

Redrawing the Roman Limes into a Locus of
Public History
i
MASTER THESIS IN CULTURAL HISTORY
STUDENT: SORIAN VERTERIUS

SUPERVISOR: DR HENDRIK HENRICHS
WORDS : MAIN BODY (21.402)
TITLE:
Between History and Heritage: Redrawing the Roman Limes into a Locus of
Public History
ii
Contents
List of illustrations ........................................................................................................................ v
Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... vi
Abbreviations .............................................................................................................................. vii
Note............................................................................................................................................. vii
Preface ....................................................................................................................................... viii
Introduction: The Heritage Phenomenon ...................................................................................... 1
Case study ................................................................................................................................. 4
Methods of investigation .......................................................................................................... 5
Structure and outline ................................................................................................................. 6
Part I Theoretical framework: Heritage and the Past .................................................................... 7
Why is heritage important......................................................................................................... 8
The role of public history and public archaeology ................................................................. 10
Part II The Limes in the Roman Period ...................................................................................... 13
The word limes........................................................................................................................ 14
Genesis of the Limes zone ...................................................................................................... 16
Topography ............................................................................................................................. 21
The Limes as ‘contact zone’ between peoples ........................................................................ 22
Conclusion: the function of the Limes .................................................................................... 25
Part III Uncovering the Limes .................................................................................................... 27
The interpretation of the Limes through the ages ................................................................... 27
The Limes as WHS ................................................................................................................. 32
The heritage values of the Limes ............................................................................................ 35
Low visibility—authenticity ................................................................................................... 38
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 44
Part IV The Limes: a Lernort of History? .................................................................................. 46
The role of the adjacent museums .......................................................................................... 47
iii
Re-enactment and other methods of experiencing history ...................................................... 49
Commemorating the Roman past............................................................................................ 56
Conclusion: The Limes as a locus of public history and public archaeology ......................... 57
Summaries and Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 59
Appendix..................................................................................................................................... 61
Glossary .................................................................................................................................. 61
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 63
Sources ........................................................................................................................................ 67
iv
List of illustrations
Cover image: Metal demarcation of the Limes fort at Domstraat, Cover

Utrecht, the Netherlands page
Figure 1 Map showing the Limes in the Roman provinces of p. 13
Germania Inferior, Germania Superior and Raetia
Figure 2 The consecutive phases of building of the Limes in p. 18
Germania Superior
Figure 3 Detail from a signpost showing the construction of p. 19
the watchtower ‘Marienhöhe’, Germany
Figure 4 Germania Inferior as illustrated in a map of P. p. 28
Kaerius
Figure 5 Plaque at the entrance of the reconstructed fort with p. 33
the UNESCO logo, Saalburg, Germany
Figure 6 One of the panels at the entrance of the heritage site p. 39
of Saalburg
Figure 7 Representation of a soldier’s everyday life inside a p. 40
reconstructed barrack of a cavalry fort, Aalen,
Germany
Figure 8 Visualisation of a fort’s moats in Ruffenhoffen, p. 41
Germany
Figure 9 An artistic impression of the fort Traiectum in p. 43
Utrecht, the Netherlands
Figure 10 Reconstructed Roman barge in Woerden, the p. 54
Netherlands
Figure 11 Reconstructed Roman tower in Hoge Woerd p. 56
accompanied by detail, Utrecht, the Netherlands
v
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor Dr. Hendrik Henrichs of Utrecht
University for his continued support, patience and encouragement as this thesis moved
slowly towards completion. I would also like to thank the team of the German re-
enactment society Limes Cicerones for their hospitality and help during my excursion in
the Upper German Limes in the summer of 2013. In particular, I feel the need to thank
Ms Edda Hochstein, who welcomed me in Germany and was kind enough to show me
around in the Roman Museum of Osterburken and the remnants of the Limes in the
nearby district.
I am especially grateful to the people of the Initiatief Domplein in Utrecht who
welcomed me into their team and gave me a chance to come into direct contact with
visitors of the archaeological site in the centre of Utrecht.
I have had the good fortune to have my whole thesis read by Tom Johnston who not
only corrected my English but also made useful comments as an independent reader. Of
course any mistakes and interpretation problems are my own responsibility.
vi
Abbreviations
ICCROM International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration
of Cultural Property
ICOMOS International Council on Monuments and Sites
ILS Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae
OED Oxford Dictionary of English
UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation
WHS World Heritage Site
Note
For the ancient authors I have used the publications of Loeb Classical Library. For the
glossary I was largely based on ‘Das Limes-Lexikon’ by Planck and Thiel, the OED and
the glossary included in the book ‘Der Limes: Grenze Roms zu den Barbaren’. There is
no guarantee that the content of internet websites referred to in this paper will remain
persistent or appropriate and I have no responsibility for their accuracy except from the
time accessed.
vii
Preface
The present thesis explores questions that have fascinated me during the two years of my
studies on cultural history and heritage at the University of Utrecht, but its seeds go back
to my lingering interest in classical antiquity. By considering the relation between ancient
Roman history and heritage presentation of the Limes I aspire to interpret the heritage
site of the Limes in the light of the debate between history and heritage.
The Limes is a cultural heritage site that invites the public to encounter the Roman
past first through a great variety of media such as reconstructions, signposts, visualisation
techniques and museum collections and second by activities such as re-enactment,
storytelling, commemorative practices and educative programmes. On the one hand, all
these methods promise participants and viewers a journey back in time, leisure-time
recreation and authentic experiences of the Roman past. On the other hand, they focus
attention on a frolicsome encounter with the past, where historical narratives serve
mainly as a legitimising background.
The growth and popularity of cultural heritage reflects not only the nostalgic desire of
the modern man and woman to find refuge in a simple and idealised past, but also the
need to learn about the past in an easy and speedy way. By examining in this paper the
interface between the discipline of history and the practice of heritage I hope to
contribute to the on-going debate between them and define ways of better cooperation.
viii
Introduction: The Heritage Phenomenon
‘To get the story right matters’ (John Tosh).
In the last decades of the twentieth century public interest in the past increased
substantially and heritage acquired a prominent role in the Western world. People are
eager to encounter the past and enjoy a cultural experience either in cities or in the
countryside. Many European cities and towns celebrate heritage by branding their old
centres as places of exceptional aesthetics and authentic representatives of their history.
Tour operators on the one hand, advertise heritage trips and cultural institutions and local
authorities on the other, see their revenues boosted by global tourism. Not only urban
fabrics but also non-urban landscapes have gained value as cultural and/or natural
heritage sites. Some heritage sites are multifold, such as the heritage site ‘Frontiers of the
Roman Empire’, parts of which are found in urban, semi-urban and rural areas in several
modern countries of Europe, Asia and Africa.
The meaning of heritage is elusive as it is underwritten by a range of notions and
cultural, political and social discourses. I will try to draw the framework within which
heritage unfolds. Heritage is a capacious term that contains tangible as well as intangible
forms. Tangible alone encompasses a huge range of things, from tiny coins to large
maritime vessels, from humble huts to grandiose palaces, from natural landscapes to
constructed parks and the list can expand from a primordial finding to a relatively recent
construction, trivial or lavish. Material residues are the tangible evidence of the past and
essential signs of authenticity. They are discernible but they can also consist of minimal
traces that are hardly or partly visible. As intangible heritage we understand, mainly
under the influence of non-Western cultures, a range of traditions, skills, customs and
ideas that characterise the cultural life of different groups of people.
Heritage, however, is not only the above. As Smith quite forcefully argues, heritage is
made by contemporary cultural processes strongly linked with commemoration and
performance. 1 The actual physical sites (landscapes and buildings) in which this process
takes place are themselves mute and serve as a theatrical stage, which reinforces this
cultural process. In other words, the physical sites (e g. Hadrian’s Wall in Britain) form
an appropriate and vital context for the performance of heritage, but they do not
1
Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (London/ New York 2006) 44.
1
constitute the heritage itself. 2 Within the heritage discourse tangible remains are turned
into pricey material and intangible expressions into praiseworthy legacies. Heritage has
to be experienced by people in time and place through participation in events that enliven
history, an experience that varies considerably according to the cultural, academic and
personal background of the participants.
Heritage has emerged from the affinity of people with places, objects and practices of
the past and is supported by creative and imaginary representations of them. Heritage
helps to keep cultural (human) creations and natural (non-human) environments alive in
the present and future and legitimates claims upon places, objects and practices. 3 But
how did it grow from being the hobby of some well-off individuals and patrician clubs to
a prominent popular phenomenon? Concern about the past is not recent. Indeed, it is
inherent in the human nature, but the development of practices and ideas regarding the
past since the eighteenth-century romanticism has marked a shift in this concern. What
started as an elite hobby has been transformed into a set of national plans and an almost
obsessive concern with the preservation of the remains of the past. The rise of civic
society in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the industrialisation of the
economy that started from Britain in the eighteenth century, awakened concerns about
future development, altered the attitude of the society towards the past and fostered the
conservation movement.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the growing democratisation, the
emergence of historical associations and the development of international fairs and
congresses evoked interest in heritage in the decision-making centres and in the
intellectual elite of the Western world. 4
Following the end of the World War II, concern about natural and cultural heritage of
world importance was internationalised under the umbrella of UNESCO inhering in
material authenticity, monumentality, distance in time and Western-minded aesthetics. In
response to all the evil of the war, heritage has been considered as an instrument for
pursuing noble goals like peace, reconciliation and sustainable development and as an
indicator of civilisation that promotes knowledge and respect for other cultures and
5
societies. The great scale of destructions inflated the culture of protection and
2
Smith, Uses of Heritage, 46.
3
Ibidem., 4-5.
4
Astrid Swenson, The Rise of Heritage; Preserving the Past in France, Germany and England, 1789—
1914 (New York 2013) 16.
5
Swenson, The Rise of Heritage, 1.
2
preservation. This protection movement has led to the listing of heritage sites by
UNESCO; categorisation and regulation have been seen as measures against a potential
threat. 6 The senses of risk and threat have been reinforced by an emotion of nostalgia for
a past that vanishes quickly due to the rapid scientific and technological progress. The
memory boom of the second half of the twentieth century increased further the
preoccupation with the past which in turn urges a system of classification and formal
categorisation.
UNESCO has produced a number of charters, conventions, guidelines and
recommendations in order to frame the heritage discourse and to define the criteria for
protection, evaluation and management of heritage sites. The 1972 UNESCO convention
for the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage is a leading text that
echoes international concerns about the common heritage of humanity, generates a
universal aestheticism, reinforces the Western notions of heritage and the authority of
heritage professionals. The Convention has established both the World Heritage
Committee and the World Heritage List, a statutory register on which the first inscription
of cultural and natural sites started in 1978. Henceforward, places of special cultural
and/or natural significance have been inscribed on this list and have obtained the coveted
status of a World Heritage Site (WHS). The growing list of World Heritage and the
struggle of heritage institutions to attract tourists has given rise to the so-called ‘heritage
industry’ and has fuelled the history-heritage debate. The ‘heritage industry’ promotes
the marketing of the past by developing historic places into leisure time parks and by
producing all kind of memorabilia set for sale in museum shops. This ‘heritage industry’
deprives many heritage sites from their history and turns them into a spectacle for
popular consumption.
Does heritage as it has been developed since the last decades of the twentieth century
in the Western thought and practice and especially through national programmes and the
UNESCO regulations lead to a broader and better understanding of the past by the lay
public? What is the role of history—both as historia rerum gestarum and as res gestae—
in what I have briefly sketched as ‘heritage industry’ and does history have a place in a
heritage site? The primary aim of this paper is to examine the relation between heritage
and history and to show if and to which degree the heritage phenomenon interacts with
6
Rodney Harrison, Heritage: Critical approaches (London/ New York 2013) 7.
3
the discipline of history and contributes to the diffusion of historical knowledge and the
growth of historical awareness among the lay public.
From an academic point of view, this research is facilitated by studies on the
phenomenon of heritage and its interface with history (in particular, Lowenthal, The Past
is a Foreign country-Revisited, Smith, The Uses of Heritage, Harrison, Heritage, Critical
Approaches). It also embraces the growing literature on the role of history in the public
terrain (Jordanova, History in Practice, De Groot, Consuming History, Rafael, Theatres
of Memory, Tosh, Why History Matters) and it places itself within analyses of presenting
the past in heritage sites (Merriman, Public Archaeology, Magelssen and Malloy
Enacting History). Departing from concepts and discussions presented in prior studies
my intention here extends beyond what has been published by focusing on issues of
heritage presentation and historical knowledge and by eaxmining if there is room for an
effective cooperation between heritage experts, on the one hand, and historians and
archaeologists, on the other.
Case study
Since I am more familiar with ancient history I will use as case study for the research of
the abovementioned issue the heritage site of the ‘Frontiers of the Roman Empire’ in
present-day Germany and Netherlands, in other words, the frontiers of the ancient Roman
provinces of Germania Inferior, Germania Superior and Raetia, which are widely known
as Limes.
In my attempt to give an adequate answer to the relation between historical
knowledge and heritage narratives, I will analyse the extent to which the Limes reflects
the history of the north-western part of Europe in the Roman period and I will interpret it
in the light of the on-going debate between the discipline of history and the practice of
heritage, a debate to which I refer in the first part of my thesis. In particular, I ask, how is
the Limes presented as a heritage site? Is it a Lernort of history or a ‘must’ sightseeing
location for cultural tourists? Most crucially, is heritage representation of the Limes
shaped by historical records and events of its Roman past or does it shape them? I hope
that my thoughts and conclusions will be useful not only for the presentation of the
Limes to the public, a process still going on especially in the Netherlands, but also for a
better cooperation between heritage and history.
The ‘Frontiers of the Roman Empire’ is also a case that raises a number of interesting
issues: it is one of the few heritage sites that surpasses the frontiers of the current nation-
4
states and forms cultural links among them at least as far as European countries are
concerned; by contrast, in North Africa and in the Middle East the Roman frontiers recall
memories of colonisation rather than ideas of cooperation. These totally different
perceptions of the Roman frontiers could form an interesting topic for investigation.
Methods of investigation
The intricacy and amorphousness of heritage makes its delineation difficult. What kind of
tools—physical, practical or intellectual—should we use to study the phenomenon of
heritage? Because the field of heritage studies is new many methods are borrowed from
other disciplines: history, geography, archaeology, art history, cultural history, media
studies and marketing. 7 Therefore, the study of heritage is multi-disciplinary.
In this paper I will employ primarily methods from the disciplines of history, ancient
studies and archaeology. Firstly, I study texts of ancient (mainly Roman) authors and
early modern and modern literature related to the Limes; secondly, I adduce material
such as ancient inscriptions, old and recent maps, websites, information boards, guide-
books, ‘heritage’ products and popular publications necessary for mapping out the
diachronic reception of the Limes; and thirdly, I use an ethnographic approach—a
detailed account based on participant observation, in which I was involved in a trip along
the Upper German Limes in the summer of 2013.
During that trip I attended activities, such as a historical re-enactment
commemorative of the campaign of emperor Caracalla against the Alamannen in 213,
and I had the chance to be very close to participants as well as to spectators. My
participation was an attempt to immerse in the feelings and experiences of the re-
enactors, occasional or determined, who devote much of their free time in organising and
carrying through these activities. Apart from having enjoyed the trip, I had the privilege
to discuss with re-enactors and interview some of the organisers. I also spoke to visitors
and listened to their conversations and remarks regarding the ‘heritage exhibition’ of the
past. This engagement with the public was very helpful in understanding the kind of
relation that people build with the past when they visit a heritage site.
For the sake of comparison, I will use throughout this paper information related to the
Hadrian’s and Antonine walls in Britain because they had been important parts of the
7
Marie L. S. Sørensen and John Carman, ‘Heritage studies: an outline’, in: idem, eds., Heritage
studies, Methods and Approaches (London/ New York 2009) 11-28, q. v. 21.
5
Roman frontiers, they had been constructed at the same period as the Limes and they are
essential parts of the WHS ‘Frontiers of the Roman Empire’.
Structure and outline

This thesis is divided into four parts. Having sought to outline in the introduction the
scope of this paper, I clarify in the first part the theoretical framework that structures the
debate between history and heritage, necessary in order to analyse their interrelation in
my case study.
The second part details the origin and function of the Roman Limes in the antiquity. It
is based on intensive research of ancient sources, analyses of archaeological records and
personal visits to many locations and museum exhibitions. Borrowing from postcolonial
theories this part finishes by introducing the notion of a ‘contact zone’, a concept that
provides an interpretative framework for the sociocultural and economic impact of the
Limes in the antiquity.
The third part aims to examine how the Limes had been understood, interpreted and
represented after the antiquity with an emphasis on the historiography after the
Renaissance. It also discusses the importance of the inscription of the Limes on the
World Heritage List and sheds light on the issue of authenticity, since it is a key criterion
for the inscription of sites on the World Heritage List.
The fourth part highlights the heritage presentation of the Limes by analysing
reconstructions, visualisation practices, re-enactment activities, commemorative
performances, museum exhibitions and education programmes and further examines how
heritage presentation relates to and is affected by historical records.
Subsequently, the conclusion draws together the three shared themes—ancient history,
diachronic interpretation and heritage presentation of the Limes, heritage-history
interface—and provides a reflection on the impact that heritage presentation has on
public historical knowledge. Based on the conclusions, I express in the epilogue a
number of thoughts that can be useful in the debate between heritage and history and
make suggestions for further research.
6
Part I Theoretical framework: Heritage and the Past
This part discusses a number of issues inherent in our encounter with the past and
clarifies theoretical stances under consideration in this paper. History and memory along
with heritage are the modes of access to the past. All three refer to the past but they look
at it in a different way. Memory being a human faculty is based on a subjective,
emotional and selective look at the past and we can distinguish between individual and
collective memory. By contrast, history as an academic discipline remaining faithful to
the Rankean principle of ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’ aspires to explain and analyse the
past beyond subjective perceptions and time limitations, as it actually happened.
Heritage, nevertheless, is not based on reason and analysis, but on experience and display,
it domesticates the past and mandates an ardent approach to it. Heritage and memory
exhibit common elements, such as affectivity and selectivity.
Today we can speak in the Western world of the homo culturalis, who approaches the
past emotionally and prefers to experience history rather than to read about it. Heritage
has become a global phenomenon that provides an extra-curricular public history
education to everybody, no matter their age, gender, race or nationality. The development
of a ‘popular historical consciousness’ has attracted the attention of cultural historians.
This ‘historicist turn’, to use Samuel’s term, demonstrates a kind of nostalgic reaction to
the rapid transformation of our lifestyle since the late twentieth century and a desire of
communities to construct their own self through a sense of narrative continuity. 8
‘The citizens of the twenty-first century need a history that addresses their concerns
as citizens of particular nations, but also as world citizens.’ 9 They need historical
knowledge and historical consciousness in order to understand the historical continuity
and change through time and space, to be able to interpret different historical narratives
and to situate themselves in human history. 10 Historical literacy is of great importance for
the development of citizens in democratic societies and is not only acquired through
formal education. In a process of lifelong learning, heritage sites and museums claim
educative and cultural authority.
Based on nostalgic sentiments, heritage engages audiences in a fictional travel to
good old times and urges reverence of the past and its aged and decrepit remains.
Heritage idealises the authenticity of the experience, blurs fact with fiction and reality
8
Rafael Samuel, Theatres of Memory (London / New York 20122) 169.
9
Siep Stuurman and Maria Grever, ‘Introduction: Old Canons and New Histories’, in: idem, eds.,
Beyond the Canon, History in the Twenty-first Century (Basingstoke/ New York 2007) 1-16, q.v. 3.
10
Stuurman and Grever, ‘Introduction: Old Canons and New Histories’, 11.
7
with romance and enthrones a performative spectacle. The Roman frontiers in Britain and
in Germany, for instance, are presented as a vivid experience: people attend festivals,
activities and workshops, participate in mini-excavations, pause to enjoy a ‘Roman’
atmosphere or even take part in ‘Roman’ events. This experience ‘in situ gives the
greatest imprimatur of authenticity.’ 11
All these engagements may stimulate historical interest, however they do not
constitute history, because they do not attempt to explain the Roman past but to illustrate
it as a simplistic and linear evolution of events and facts that can be repeated, rehearsed
and relived.
Why is heritage important

As I have already mentioned, heritage as a practice of preserving, restoring and
displaying monuments and memories of the past does not have a long history, but it goes
back to the early nineteenth century, when Europeans started to perceive the past as
different from present times. 12 Like all human enterprises, heritage has advantages and
disadvantages.
Used as a malleable political instrument heritage may serve disparate political ends,
from imperial to national interests and from inter-national cooperation to regional
diversification.
Heritage, as I have already mentioned in the introduction, is a lucrative industry that
turns the past into a commodity for consumers and consequently, it becomes a
respectable and respected branch of Western capitalist economy. The increase in leisure
time, disposable income and life expectancy in the Western world, in combination with
easier, cheaper and faster ways of travelling, has inflated mass tourism since the last
decades of the twentieth century.
With its simplicity and immediacy heritage popularises history. Heritage has become
the tool that allows people, even without any previous historical knowledge to familiarise
with the past. This, in first sight, seems a positive development, but for a great number of
people ‘heritage has become virtually synonymous with history’, although it is not
11
Tim Copeland, ‘Site Seeing: Street Walking Through a Low-Visibility Landscape’, in: Emma
Waterton and Steve Watson, eds., Culture, Heritage and Representation: Perspectives on Visuality and the
Past (Surrey/Burlington 2010) 229-247, q. v. 243.
12
David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country-Revisited (Cambridge/New York, 20152) 4.
8
concerned with historical explanation. 13 However, it cannot be denied that the advance of
heritage made history egalitarian and democratic, more domestic and more feminine. 14
Among the positive aspects of heritage counts also the contribution of heritage sites to
the quality of life, especially for inhabitants of modern crowded cities. Many people visit
a heritage site in order to step back into the past and to solace their current tensions and
woes with the alleged comfort and simplicity of a pure past, remote or recent. 15 In this
case, past becomes a refuge and heritage serves more as ‘a therapy than as a source of
historical information’. 16
Related to the above is the importance of heritage for supporting memories and
reaffirming identities. 17 A visit to a heritage site or a museum supports and enriches one’s
own memories, reaffirms roots and strengthens the feeling of belonging to a group. 18
Moreover, heritage with its transnational character has internationalised history and
concerns about the past and has offered a protective mantel for cultural remains and
creations of past civilisations. 19 Threats against cultural creations and intentional
destructions in war zones, like the ones recently conducted by religious fundamentalists
in the Middle East, are strongly condemned by the international community, are
recognised by UNESCO as ‘war crimes’ and launch initiatives either to prevent damage
and loss or to repair it.
Heritage has the advantage of providing the public with immediate experience and an
affective engagement with the past, qualities that the scholarly historical analysis lacks.
Heritage is readier than history for shaping the public’s conception about the past,
because it is based on concrete images and not on abstract ideas, it happens in the public
domain and not in academic contexts and it is spectacular and experiential, whereas
history fragmentary and analytical. Consequently, heritage—as phenomenon and as
sites—plays a key role in the ways people encounter, use and understand the past.
13
John Tosh, Why History Matters (Basingstoke 2008) 11-12.
14
Samuel, Theatres of Memory, 161.
15
Tosh, Why History Matters, 105; Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country-Revisited, 586.
16
Cornelius Holtorf, ‘Heritage values in contemporary popular culture’, in: George S. Smith, Phyllis
M. Messenger, Hilary A. Soderland, eds., Heritage Values in Contemporary Society (Walnut Creek 2010)
43-54, q.v. 46.
17
18
Paul Claval, ‘Changing conceptions of Heritage and Landscape’ in: Niamh Moore and Yvonne
Whelan, eds., Heritage, Memory and the Politics of Identity: Perspectives on the Cultural Landscape
(Surrey/Burlington 2007) 85-93, q.v. 86.
19
The UNESCO ‘Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict’
adapted at The Hague in 1954 is indicative of this development.
9
The above certainly justify further investigation of the relation between heritage and
history—meant both as the past itself and the accounts about it. This paper seeks to do
that. In doing so, I do not only refer to academic tensions raised by historians and cultural
theorists with a different viewpoint, but I also suggest ideas to transcend the points of
contention and find the trajectories at which heritage and history intersect.
The role of public history and public archaeology

For a long time, history and heritage have been at loggerheads. On the one hand, heritage
has been assailed as populist, superficial, nostalgic, crisis-driven, that it assimilates the
past to the present, it exalts myth over truth, it aims at entertainment rather than
education and, in short, it demotes history to a spectacle and damages historical
consciousness. 20 On the other, history is a form of knowledge and a guide to self-
determination, self-consciousness and political practice. Lowenthal, a shrewd critic of
heritage, argued that heritage is not an inquiry into the past but a popular celebration of it
or even worse a domestication of the past for present-day needs. 21 In his article
‘Fabricating Heritage’ he considered the gap between the past written by historians and
the past narrated in heritage sites and he decoupled heritage from history. According to
him ‘history seeks to convince by truth’, whereas heritage is an enterprise with different
goals: it does not invite challenge, but it appeals mostly to the sentiment and comes to
please aesthetically and to amplify the sense of loss. 22
Academic historians produce historical knowledge through study of sources,
evaluation of results, provision of references, control and contextualisation of
23
information. Historical knowledge is acquired through a series of intellectual
capabilities, which include first gathering information about and becoming aware of past
24
events and processes and then explaining, understanding and analysing them.
Notwithstanding the accuracy of the above, it has been argued that historical knowledge
is not only produced and acquired in the academy, but in many other cultural and social
settings. 25 According to Samuel, historical knowledge is a social form of knowledge—
‘the work of a thousand different hands’. 26 We live in a knowledge-based society, but it
20
Tosh, Why History Matters, 11-12; Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country-Revisited, 8.
21
David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge 1998) x.
22
David Lowenthal, ‘Fabricating Heritage’, History and Memory 10 (1998) 1, 5-24, q.v. 7.
23
Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice (London 20062) 87.
24
Jordanova, History in Practice, 90.
25
Stuurman and Grever, ‘Introduction: Old Canons and New Histories’, 9-10.
26
10
is wise to acknowledge the provisional nature and the incompleteness of historical
knowledge.
And why is historical knowledge important? Historical knowledge enhances
citizenship education, provides a sense of belonging to a community, analyses the
structure of the present world, provides links with the past, helps us shape goals for the
future and promotes mutual understanding between communities with a diverse past. 27 In
short, we understand that history matters and even more important, that everybody’s
history matters. 28
In this context heritage helps to convey in a simple, popular and easy manner
historical knowledge to people outside the academy, to that great majority that have not
followed history studies. But is then historical knowledge distorted through the simple,
popular and easy lenses of heritage as many historians have argued? How can historical
knowledge reach the wider public?
Public history came to bridge the gap between the academic historiography and the
need and desire of the lay public to acquire information about the past in a simple way.
Public history, as Jordanova has defined it, is an umbrella term covering a variety of
genres and agents that aim to secure the relationship between the lay public and history. 29
My concern here is with public history as it is applied in the heritage world. Heritage
institutions along with museums have become primary agents of public history in order
to attract the public and make the past a popular engagement. 30 They design visitor-
friendly exhibitions, compose understandable information panels and signage, provide
audio-visual tours and re-enactment activities and ensure adequate media coverage.
Museums are following the same pathway in order to boost their popularity and revenues.
It would not only be undemocratic to refuse visitors what they want, but also
unprofitable. In the twenty-first century amid concerns about climate change, quality of
life, sustainable development and a large-scale despoilment of cultural heritage in
conflict zones, the word ‘heritage’ has gained topical interest.
Similarly, public archaeology not only refers to archaeological practices conducted by
amateurs who are interested in the past, but also to the work of professionals who manage
archaeological sites by preserving natural and cultural resources, cooperate with native
27
Tosh, Why History Matters, 7.
28
Elaine M. Franklin and Jeanne M. Moe, ‘A Vision for Archaeological Literacy’, in: Robin Skeates,
Carol McDavid and John Carman, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Public Archaeology (Oxford 2012) 566-
580, q.v. 570.
29
Jordanova, History in Practice, 130.
30
Ibidem., 127
11
communities involved with or interested in archaeological heritage and intend to bring
their knowledge to the wider public. 31 The primary goal of public archaeology is ‘to
communicate archaeological work in ways that the public finds understandable and
compelling’. 32 So, in essence, public archaeology is also an umbrella term that suffuses
engagements which make archaeological records understandable to the lay public. 33
Public history and public archaeology, therefore, aim at making knowledge of the
past accessible and understandable to non-professionals. The opening up of the academic
knowledge to the public was encouraged by the democratisation of the Western societies
in the second half of the twentieth century and the advance of the digital era. These
subfields of the two main disciplines of the past are important, because they study the
processes whereby the knowledge of the past becomes part of a wider public culture. By
approaching the public, academics seek not only dissemination and appreciation of their
work, but they also meet the general public’s educational, social and cultural needs.
31
Barbara Little, ‘Public Archaeology in the United States in the Early Twenty-First century’, in:
Marie L. S. Sørensen and John Carman, eds., Heritage studies, Methods and Approaches (London/ New
York 2009) 29-51, q. v. 30.
32
Little, ‘Public Archaeology in the United States in the Early Twenty-First century’, 40.
33
Franklin and Moe, ‘A Vision for Archaeological Literacy’, 569.
12
Part II The Limes in the Roman Period
Fig. 1. Map showing the Limes in the Roman provinces of Germania Inferior, Germania
Superior and Raetia from the first to the third century CE. Source: Anne-Marie Wittke, Eckart
Olshausen and Richard Szydlak, Historischer Atlas der antiken Welt. Der Neue Pauly,
Sonderausgabe (Stuttgart/Weimar 2012) 211.
The purpose of the present chapter is to describe the origin, function and scope of the
Roman Limes in Germany and the Netherlands from archaeological and historical-
anthropological perspective and to form the basis for considering if and how the history
of the Limes comes back to the contemporary heritage presentation. This is shaped by a
number of shared questions. Why and where was the Limes constructed? How did it
function in the antiquity? How did the Limes affect the relation between the Romans and
their northern neighbours?
Beginning with a description of the installations and the topography of the frontier
area I will move on to discuss the purpose and function of the Limes in the Roman
13
period. The span of time encompassed by this part runs from the building of the first
military constructions of the Limes in the years of Augustus to the beginning of the fifth
century, when the Limes was abandoned.
The frontiers of the Roman Empire were either natural (rivers, seas, deserts,
mountains or forests) or artificial (linear barriers built from turf, wood or stone). The
Atlantic Ocean in the west, the Red Sea in Egypt and the Black Sea in the east provided
natural edges to the empire. In northern Africa and the Middle East the mountainous and
desert areas formed natural obstacles that were not often crossed. Similarly, in the north
the rivers Rhine and Danube defined for the greater part the extension of the Roman rule.
But for a distance of 550 km between the two rivers ran the ‘Upper German and Raetian
Limes’ as a continuous structure of watchtowers, fortresses, forts, walls and gates linked
by roads, which is now part of the WHS ‘Frontiers of the Roman Empire’.
By using the word ‘frontiers’ we imply today a guarded linear boundary between two
countries with tense relations. This definition stimulates me to pose two questions; first,
what was the function of those military constructions, which are now known as Limes, in
the Roman period; and second, how did the Limes affect the relation between the Roman
world and the Germanic tribes. Before going on, it seems advisable to consider briefly the
concept of ‘the frontiers’ in the Roman world.
The word limes

It is undisputable among scholars that in the period from the Roman Republic (second
century BCE) to the Julio-Claudian emperors the word limes was not used to invoke any
territorial frontier. 34 Initially, the Latin word limes (plural limites) had been a surveying
and agricultural term meaning a footpath or byway in plots or fields used for separating
properties as well as for communication between them. 35 It designated a boundary zone
rather than a line without width. 36
Subsequently, from the end of the first century CE the word found its military parallel
with the edges of the empire and it denoted a lane or a road opened up for military
34
Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory (Chicago 2013) PDF e-book, chapter 2, q. v. 82.
35
Oswald A. W. Dilke, The Roman Land Surveyors (Newton Abbot 1971) 134, cf. Jan Willem
Drijvers, ‘The Limits of Empire in the Res Gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus’, in: Olivier Hekster and Ted
Kaizer eds., Frontiers in the Roman World: Proceedings of the Ninth Workshop of the International
Network Impact of Empire Durham, 16-19 April 2009 (Leiden/Boston 2011) 13-29, q. v. 15, cf. Elden, The
Birth of Territory, PDF e-book, chapter 2, q. v. 86, cf. Theodor Mommsen, Gesammelte Schriften V,
Historische Schriften II (Berlin 1908) 444. According to Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary s.v. limes, the
broad path in a Roman field running from east to west was called limes decumanus and the one from north
to south cardo.
36
Dilke, The Roman Land Surveyors, 87, cf. Mommsen, Historische Schriften II, 458.
14
purposes, such as those between forts and watchtowers along the River Rhine and
Danube. 37 Although the usage of the word had broadened, its original meaning had not
and in the early imperial period limes did not yet imply any fortified frontiers but a strip
of land or a road for military purposes along the borders. 38 Instead, the words finis
(boundary, frontier) and terminus (the remotest limit) had been used by Caesar, Cicero,
Roman historians and Augustus himself in the Res Gestae in order to mark out
geographical boundaries or limits of rule. 39 The first who introduced the term limes for
the land-boundary of the Roman Empire was the historian Tacitus (56—117) in his work
Agricola published at 98 CE. 40 But from the second century onwards the term limes
broadened further to indicate a frontier with permanent military structures. 41 From the
second century we also have two interesting Greek parallels for the interpretation of the
42
term by the historians Appianus (ca. 95—165) and Aelius Aristides(117—180).
Writing Roman history in Greek—even if they both intended to …. emperor Antoninus
(138—161)—they described the boundaries of the empire as a fortified system consisted
of permanent military structures—walls [τείχη], army camps [στρατόπεδα], towns by the
frontier or probably vici [πόλεις ἐφορίας]—built as κύκλος (here in the sense of a
surrounding fortified wall). I believe that these passages refer to what at the time was
known in Latin as limes. However, it was the historian of the fourth century Ammianus
Marcellinus who made wide use of the term limes to denote the frontiers both in Britain
and in the Rhine and Danube regions. 43 It should be added that the limes in the antiquity
was, in truth, distinct from naturally defined boundaries such as the riverine [ripa]. 44
Broadly speaking, therefore, the definition of the word limes seems to have expanded
steadily in the antiquity from military roads along the edges of the empire to demarcated
37
Vell., Res Gestae Divi Augusti 2.120.2; Tac., Ger. 29.4; Tac., Ann., 1. 50; Tac., Ann. 2. 7. The
interpretation/translation of these passages is disputed ranging from ‘military roads’ to ’fortified
boundaries’, but I agree here with B. Isaac, who suggests the former rather than the latter: Benjamin Isaac,
‘The meaning of the terms Limes and Limitanei’, The Journal of Roman studies 78 (1988) 1, 125-147, q.v.
126-128.
38
Theodor Mommsen, Römische Geschichte V (Berlin 1885) 112; idem, Historische Schriften II, 459-
460, cf. Isaac, ‘The meaning of the terms Limes and Limitanei’, 126-128, cf. Dilke, The Roman Land
Surveyors, 134, cf. Drijvers, ‘The Limits of Empire in the Res Gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus’, 15, cf.
Elden, The Birth of Territory, PDF e-book, chapter 2, q.v. 75.
39
Elden, The Birth of Territory, PDF e-book, chapter 2, q.v. 57, 69 and 81, cf. Isaac, ‘The meaning of
the terms Limes and Limitanei’, 126.
40
Tac., Agr. 41, cf. ILS 451.
41
ILS, 2487.
42
App. Ῥωμαϊκά, Προοίμιον, 7; Aelius Arist. Εἰς Ῥώμην, 80-82.
43
Drijvers, ‘The Limits of Empire in the Res Gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus’, 24.
44
SHA, Vita Hadr. 12. 6; ILS, 8913.
15
artificial boundaries and to fortified frontiers, indicating also in late antiquity,
incidentally, frontier districts.
The word was reintroduced in the nineteenth century by German scholars in order to
describe the circa 550 km defensive structures of the Roman Empire in the provinces of
Germania Superior and Raetia. 45 Theodor Mommsen dedicates two chapters of his
second volume of his Historische Schriften to define the term. I feel the need to refer to
his ideas because they have largely influenced the modern interpretation and usage of the
word limes. First, he argues that limes was not every part of the Roman frontiers, but only
the artificial ones, which had been deliberately constructed by the Romans for military
and administrative purposes, the two walls in Britain included; 46 second, the limes was
not just a simple line, but a zone of considerable width including roads and military
fortifications and, unlike via (road), was hermetically closed; 47 and third, the limes in the
Roman province of Germania Superior, albeit not in Raetia where the situation was more
peaceful, blocked rather than enabled communication between Roman and Germanic
territories. 48
Today the idea that the limes was a zone rather than a line constructed in areas where
no natural element could serve as boundary, is widely accepted and is strengthened by
archaeological findings. However, Mommsen’s idea of closed frontiers that aimed to
prohibit the crossing and to limit trade and communication has been challenged by
historians and recent archaeological findings (which Mommsen could not have known). 49
Today the two walls in Britain are not known as Limes. However, for the sake of
heritage simplicity we speak of the ‘Dutch Limes’ (Romeinse Limes Nederland) or
‘Lower German Limes’ though it was a naturally defined part of the Roman frontiers.
Genesis of the Limes zone

From the conquest of Italy in the fourth century BCE successive victories against all
rivals on almost every front gave the Romans the impression that their imperium was
without limits, sine fine. 50 Therefore, there was no need for territorial frontiers but only
for bivouacs where troops could hibernate waiting for the active campaigning of the
springtime.
45
Isaac, ‘The meaning of the terms Limes and Limitanei’, 125.
46
Mommsen, Römische Geschichte V, 112, 171; idem, Historische Schriften II, 446, 448.
47
Mommsen, Historische Schriften II, 446.
48
Ibidem., 447, 451.
49
Elden, The Birth of Territory, PDF e-book, chapter 2, q. v. 90.
50
Verg. A. 1. 279
16
The first military constructions in the conquered areas of Germania are dated in the
beginning of the first century CE and were built as an offensive instrument of further
expansion rather than as defensive works. Part of the fortifications in the Rhine delta was
built for the invasion into Britain, which had been planned by Caligula (37—41), but
took place under his successor Claudius (41—54). Archaeologists have dated the forts at
Valkenburg, Zwammerdam and Meern in the Netherlands to this period. 51 In referring to
the Batavian revolt (69 CE), Tacitus points out the lack of defensive works in the fortress
at Vetera I (Xanten). 52 Consequently, during the earliest part of the first century the
Limes constituted an open frontier with watchtowers, forts and fortresses along the
riverbank.
But, after the abandonment of the expansion plans to the north, the suppression of
internal uprisings and the establishment of the Germanic provinces in 85 CE, the Limes
started to develop. Stone constructions built under emperor Trajan (98—117) helped to
solidify positions. His successor, Hadrian (117—138) demonstrated his military qualities
not by following the expansionist policy of his predecessors, but instead by giving up
untenable territories (Assyria, Mesopotamia, Armenia) and consolidating the defence of
more important areas. 53 Following his line Antoninus Pius preferred defensive works to
offensive campaigns. 54
Four phases can be distinguished in the development of the Limes in Germania
Superior. 55 In the first phase at the end of the first century and the beginning of the
second, timber towers were built approximately one kilometre apart from each other and
were joined by roads (Fig. 2 no.1). In the second phase, dated in the middle of the second
century, the Limes—in those areas where the river did not coincide with the frontier—
was defined by a timber palisade that resembled a stout fence (Fig. 2 no.2). 56 Thirdly, in
the late second century, stone forts for permanent auxiliary troops were built, and the
former timber towers were gradually replaced by stone ones (Fig. 2 no.3). For defensive
purposes and because the timber palisade was decaying and needed replacement, a
51
H. van Enckevort and W. K. Vos, ‘De Limes: Een natte grens dwars door Nederland’ (versie 1.0,
augustus 2006), http://archeologieinnederland.nl/sites/default/files/19-Limes%20%2B%20links.pdf p.8
(accessed on 19-3-2016).
52
Tac., Hist., 4. 23.
53
Eutr., Breviarium ab urbe condita, 8. 6.
54
Eutr., Breviarium ab urbe condita, 8. 8.
55
Claus–Michael Hüssen, ‘Grabungen und Forschungen der letzten 40 Jahre im obergermanischen und
rätischen Limesgebiet’, in: ‘Der Römische Limes in Deutschland’, eds. Gabriele Süsskind and Angelika
Wigg, Sonderheft, Archäologie in Deutschland (1992) 33-70, q. v. 37.
56
Brend Steidl, ‘Enge Nachbarn – unterschiedliche Welten’, Archäologie in Deutschland (2016) 1, 34-
37, q. v. 35.
17
protective earthen bank and a ditch were constructed in the inner side of the palisade
(Fig. 2 no.4). In the province of Raetia the timber palisade was replaced in the beginning
of the third century by a stone wall, but no ditch was constructed there. 57
Fig. 2. The consecutive phases of building of the Limes in Germania Superior. Source: Egon
Schallmayer, Der Odenwaldlimes, p. 35.
In the Germanic provinces, the legionary bases lay near navigable rivers (in Xanten,
Cologne and Nijmegen) probably for the sake of communication. Forts and fortresses
were built at irregular distances close to the frontier line to guard passes and control
merchant routes. In the earlier empire, a fort was built according to a standard square
plan with four gates [portae] and two crossing roads [via praetoria and via principalis].
A typical earlier fort is that beneath the Domplein in the centre of Utrecht in the
Netherlands (Fig. 9). In the late empire (from the end of the third century) the forts
assumed a more defensive character, with thick walls and only two gates. 58
Gates on the Limes were watched over by towers. An example is the Dalkingen gate
in Germany, which led out of the Roman province of Raetia to Germania Magna. Many
watchtowers were surrounded by a wooden palisade or a rampart, and one or two ditches
57
Hüssen, ‘Grabungen und Forschungen der letzten 40 Jahre im obergermanischen und rätischen
Limesgebiet’, 37-38.
58
Breeze, The Frontiers of Imperial Rome, 46.
18
ran in front of the palisade on the outside for more protection, as shown in figure 3
below. Towers were essential for observing the enemy, signalling and maintaining
security on supply routes. 59
Palisa
Tower
Timber Ditch
Ramp
Ditch
Fig. 3. Detail from a signpost showing the construction of the watchtower ‘Marienhöhe’,
near Osterburken in the Upper German Limes. (Photo detail and explanations are mine).
On the Danube and the Rhine the military fleet played a role in the maintenance of
security, the communication and the transport of goods. Besides galleys and military
ships, barges were used for carrying heavy equipment and goods. About twenty Roman
shipwrecks have been discovered in excavations in the Netherlands providing us with
plenty of information about the fleet at this outermost point of the Roman rule.
Military installations were but one aspect of the life at the frontiers and it is widely
accepted that they could not have been an effective fighting platform. In periods of peace,
the soldiers were engaged in civilian projects, such as building aqueducts and roads or
manufacturing military equipment but also bricks, tiles and pottery. 60 Their main duty,
however, was building and maintaining frontier installations such as palisades, forts,
ditches and walls especially from Hadrian’s time onwards. 61
The Limes brought new settlement patterns. Civil settlements—called vici when next
to forts and canabae legionis when next to legionary camps—were built for the families
of the soldiers as well as for merchants and craftsmen who provided military equipment,
59
Ibidem., 44.
60
Ibidem., 51.
61
ILS, 2487.
19
everyday goods and services to the army. 62 These camp villages had a semi-military
character. Workshops, warehouses and storage sheds that have been excavated indicate
that the presence of the Roman army had served as a stimulus for the local economic
systems. Findings from these settlements and from adjusted burial sites with
resemblances to Roman traditions as well as to Germanic ones (e.g. food rests, weapons
and horses buried together with warriors) indicate a mixed society where Romans and
natives lived side by side.
Merchants from different ethnic groups were active on both sides of the frontiers. 63
According to Tacitus, traders—with the exception of the Germanic community [civitas]
of Hermunduri—could only cross the frontiers at special points and only under Roman
escort. 64 This bolsters the argument that the Limes was a zone where communication and
movement were allowed but only under the rules of the Romans.
Additionally, an essential part of the Limes was a network of roads that made the
communication between military forts and with the hinterland possible. Along these
roads, guesthouses and shops were developed for soldiers, traders and officials travelling
throughout the empire. 65 Guesthouses with facilities for travellers have been excavated
outside the auxiliary forts in Saalburg and Rainau Buch in Germany and outside the
legionary fortress in Nijmegen in the Netherlands. 66 Such guesthouses [mansiones] in
turn had functioned as the very beginnings of small settlements.
The Limes had functioned as a frontier zone for about two hundred years. The
building of the Limes was not an organised Grand Strategy, as Luttwak argued, but it was
constructed in several phases and periods and according to local interests and military
needs. 67 Towards the end of the third century, it became a flexible zone of considerable
depth and of mainly defensive character. 68 In the fourth century, the Germanic invasions
resulted in the reinforcement of the military posts at the Limes with thicker walls, towers
and ditches and in their relocation to higher and safer positions. 69 Many civilian centres
62
Carroll, Romans, Celts and Germans, 76.
63
Tac., Hist.4.15; Dio 71. 15.
64
Tac., Germ. 41.
65
66
Museum Het Valkhof, Nijmegen, Oudste Stad van Nederland (Nijmegen 2005) 32.
67
Archeologie Nederland, http://www.archeologienederland.nl/nieuws/nederlandse-limes-erfgoed/
68
augustus 2006), http://archeologieinnederland.nl/sites/default/files/19-Limes%20%2B%20links.pdf, p. 9
(accessed 3-7-2015).
69
Amm., Res Gestae, 28. 2.1.
20
were depopulated or destroyed and rebuilt on a smaller scale and fortified for safety
reasons. 70
Topography
Germania Inferior was a narrow strip of land in the north-western part of the empire,
bounded by the River Rhine (Fig. 1.). The Rhine was always a symbolic boundary for
both the Romans and the Germanic people and even Caesar had reluctantly consented to
that. 71 The river embodied a useful and substantial marker, provided a route of
communication between the military installations and between the inland area and the
coast and facilitated transport.
The Rhine as well as the Danube were also considered as natural barriers with a
deterrent effect on intruders. 72 Their courses determined the location of forts and
watchtowers. 73 However, neither the Rhine nor the Danube had been permanently
bridged until the reforms of emperors Diocletian (284—305) and Constantine (306—
337). 74 This presumably bolsters the previous contention that rivers were generally being
seen as safe natural barriers at least as long as the empire was powerful.
Unlike Germania Inferior, Germania Superior extended beyond the Rhine for almost
two centuries (c. 70—260) and that necessitated the construction of a linear barrier,
which ran from north of the headwaters of the Rhine along the back of Taunus
Mountains, continued to the south and eastwards coinciding for some miles with the
River Main and headed through the Odenwald towards the province of Raetia to meet the
Danube just before modern Regensburg. For some miles the River Main had a role
similar to that of Rhine and Danube, serving as a riverine boundary and separating the
Upper German Limes into a northern and a southern part. That underpins the argument
that the Limes, at least in its initial phase, did not function as a defensive installation but
was primarily a marker of the Roman territory. When the landscape served as such,
another type of marker was considered redundant.
The Limes zone at the edge of the Roman territory was not homogeneous, but related
to the landscape and the availability of building materials. The Black Forest in southern
70
Klaus Frank, ‘Germanen links und rechts des Niederrheins’, Archäologie in Deutschland (2016) 1,
26-29, q. v. 29.
71
Caes., Gal., 4.19.
72
Tac., Hist., 4.26.
73
ILS, 8913.
74
Breeze, The Frontiers of Imperial Rome, 99-100.
21
Germany obviously provided the material for the timber palisade, which, unlike Raetia,
marked the Limes in Germania Superior.
Like the two walls in Britain, the almost 900 watchtowers and 120 forts transformed
the landscape in the Germanic provinces on a previously unknown scale. Built at the
intersections of roads and at the confluences of major landscape features like rivers,
swamps and forests, towers and forts functioned as witnesses of the Roman presence.
This transformation could not but influence the local communities and their interaction
with the Roman world. 75
The Limes as ‘contact zone’ between peoples

Having defined the zone of the Limes and its purposes and function in the antiquity, I
will proceed to discuss the impact of it on the life of the people living within that zone by
considering the organisation of the Roman military units and the accompanying civil
settlements. My intent here is to trace social developments in the Limes zone in the
antiquity and not to discuss the vexed issue of Romanisation, which was used by the late
nineteenth-century scholarly tradition to designate the spread of the Roman culture to the
conquered peoples and has occupied ancient historians ever since.
The consolidation of the Roman military presence along the Rhine, which can be
dated to the period of Tiberius (14—37) imposed upon the region economic, political and
cultural changes. 76 The Roman army represented the imperial power and hegemony
along the Limes and had a profound impact on the interaction between Romans and the
various native populations. The soldiers who served in the legions were Roman citizens,
but they were not necessarily of Roman or Italian origin. The auxiliary regiments at the
frontier zone, however, were levied by natives from the provinces. However, tribal units
stationed in their own region were no longer considered reliable after the Batavian
revolt. 77 Therefore, men from tribes fulfilling their tax obligations by supplying
manpower, and volunteers were recruited into different auxiliary troops and dispersed
along the frontiers. 78 By doing that, the Roman state created multi-ethnic regiments in an
attempt to attenuate the link between military units and original native populations.
75
Peter S. Wells, The Barbarians Speak (Princeton 1999) 138.
76
Wells, The Barbarians Speak, 125.
77
78
Tac., Ann., 14. 27.
22
The army was apparently becoming a vehicle for the integration of native populations
in the Roman imperial system. 79 Military service offered good salary and other privileges
such as Roman citizenship, land, bonuses and pension and it stimulated local people to
pursue a military career in the frontiers. Soldiers of non-Roman origin acquired Roman
names, learnt Latin and introduced Roman-style living, eating and dressing patterns in
their own communities. 80 When discharged they became Roman citizens. As veterans
they could find employment in the Roman administrative and bureaucratic system either
in their hometowns or often in colonies near the frontier, where they had served. In their
new role they acted as mediators between the Romans and the indigenous populations
and between the military and the civilian worlds. Therefore, they contributed to the
diffusion of the Roman culture along the Limes zone. 81
Many natives who had served in the Roman army, like Arminius and Julius Civilis,
had ties with both the Roman and their own Germanic culture. 82 It was not uncommon
for an individual within the mobile and multi-ethnic nature of the Roman Empire to have
two fatherlands, the local birthplace and the universal Rome. 83 This, however, did not
discourage them from rising up in arms against the Roman administration.
Moreover, in the late empire the former division between the legionary troops of
Roman citizens and the auxiliary troops of natives became blurred and gave place to a
division between units stationed in the frontier zones and units responsible for the core of
the empire. 84 The troops, therefore, came to take on distinctively regional identities.
According to Wells, we can understand the character of the frontier zone in Europe, if we
forget the distinction between Romans and natives. “In the course of the fourth century,
all along the frontier, burials on the two sides became increasingly similar making the
distinction between ‘Roman’ and ‘barbarian’ ever more obscure.” 85
79
augustus 2006), http://archeologieinnederland.nl/sites/default/files/19-Limes%20%2B%20links.pdf, p. 31
80
Nico Roymans, ‘Ethnic recruitment, returning veterans and the diffusion of Roman culture among
rural populations in the Rhineland frontier zone’, in: Nico Roymans and Ton Derks, eds., Villa Landscapes
in the Roman North, Economy, Culture and Lifestyles (Amsterdam 2011) 139-160, q.v. 156.
81
Roymans, ‘Ethnic recruitment, returning veterans and the diffusion of Roman culture among rural
populations in the Rhineland frontier zone’, 157.
82
Wells, The Barbarians Speak, 138.
83
Cic., Leg., 2.2.5
84
David Potter, ‘The Roman army’, in: Michael Peachin, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Social
Relations in the Roman World, (Oxford 2011) 516-534, q.v. 529-530.
85
Peter S. Wells, ‘Peoples beyond the Roman imperial frontiers’, in: E. Bispham, ed., Roman Europe
(Oxford 2008) 316.
23
The presence of the army was also an impulse for the local economy and the
foundation of new civilian settlements in Germania Inferior, Germania Superior and
Raetia. 86 Except vici and canabae (which I have already mentioned in a previous section),
colonies, where Romans and natives were living side by side, were built and developed
near or along the Limes: Xanten [Colonia Ulpia Traiana], Trier [Augusta Treverorum],
87
Mainz [Mogontiacum]. The transformation of existing autochthone settlements
[oppidum Ubiorum] into Roman colonies [Colonia Claudia Ara Aggripinensium]
(present-day Cologne) makes up the third thread of civilian settlements at the Limes
zone. However, such developments were not homogeneous; in what is today the
Netherlands we do not find any important Roman colony. The existence of two relatively
small towns, Ulpia Noviomagus (Nijmegen) and Forum Hadriani (Voorburg), shows that
the natives of the lower Rhineland were not willing to move from the countryside to
towns for financial and/or cultural reasons. 88 Similarly, inhabitants of other parts of
Germania Inferior southern to Cologne maintained their traditional lifestyle. 89
Soldiers of native origin were welcome in the army, local traders and craftsmen
undertook business with the army and native deities were worshipped alongside Roman
ones (e.g. the temple of Matronae in Colonia Ulpia Traiana). Archaeological findings
from the Limes area and beyond decidedly show that there was interaction between
Romans and non-Romans based also on peaceful activities, such as trade, building and
diplomacy. 90
Consequently, I presume that contacts and interactions between local communities
and the Roman world varied considerably among tribes, elites and non-elites, men and
women, military personnel and civilians, rural and urban inhabitants.
It seems that the Limes functioned as a ‘contact zone’ between the Roman and the
non-Roman world. I borrow the term from Mary Louise Pratt and I use it here to refer to
the Limes zone as a space where Romans and locals lived next to each other, co-existed
and interacted often in highly asymmetrical relations. In her book Imperial Eyes: Travel
and Transculturation (20082) she calls ‘contact zone’
86
Wells, The Barbarians Speak, 172-173.
87
Ibidem., 173-175.
88
89
Frank, ‘Germanen links und rechts des Niederrheins’, 28.
90
Frank, ‘Germanen links und rechts des Niederrheins’, 29; Steidl, ‘Enge Nachbarn – unterschiedliche
Welten’, 35. Indicative of the trade between Romans and their neighbours is an inscribed tablet of 29CE
found in Tolsum in West Friesland that documents the sale of an ox and is displayed now in the Fries
Museum in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands.
24
the space of imperial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and
historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing
relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and
intractable conflict. 91
The structuring context of the ‘contact zone’ is the existence of a metropolis (in this
case, Rome) and a periphery (in this case, Limes). The Germanic tribes in the Limes
zone, who had been previously separated from the Romans by geography and history,
came into contact with them through the expansionist initiatives of Rome. Being
subjugated, they could not determine what the dominant Roman culture was bringing
upon them (Latin language, settlement patterns, institutional structures, material culture,
burial customs) but, as Pratt notices, ‘they did determine to varying extents what they
absorbed into their own culture, how they used it and what they made it mean’. 92
Other determining elements of the ‘contact zone’ that can be traced in the Limes are
interaction, coercion and conflict. The recruitment of natives in the Roman army
involved a certain degree of coercion. Even when men joined the army voluntarily, they
did so in order to achieve a certain status, earn their living and gain privileges. The
consolidation of the Roman dominance did not happen without conflicts: the battle in the
Teutoburg forest, the Batavian revolt, the wars against the Chatti are only a few
examples.
Assuredly, in that relation the Romans were the dominant part in military, economic
and cultural terms, but they did not necessarily deprive the subordinated local
communities of their social, economic and cultural traditions, as far as the latter remained
loyal to the imperial administration and fulfilled their financial obligations. Romans and
non-Romans linked by the reality, interacted, co-existed and traded with each other in the
Limes zone and beyond.
Conclusion: the function of the Limes

Regarding ancient sources and a great variety of studies on the Roman frontiers, I have
tried in this part to analyse what the Limes was and to get the story as right as possible.
91
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel and Transculturation (New York 20082) 8.
92
Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel and Transculturation, 7.
25
In the first century CE the Limes (I would permit myself this anachronistic usage) had
not got a defensive character since the mentality of the Roman state and army had not
been defensive. But a drastic change came during the reign of emperor Hadrian and his
successor Antoninus Pius. The Limes was the product of a new military policy, an
‘imperial frontier’, by which the Roman Empire sought to consolidate its territory, control
communication and assert its power among the peoples living within this zone and
beyond it. However, it was not intended to be an effective defensive structure in case of
war, a point on which a rare consensus has been achieved among ancient historians and
archaeologists.
The Limes was consisted of an advanced network of roads, landscape features (rivers)
and military constructions (walls, palisades, ditches, gates, forts, fortresses, towers)
accompanied by civilian settlements (vici and canabae). Those constructions were
standardised in type, but heterogeneous in time and space depending on the terrain, the
climate, the available materials and the decisions of the provincial administration. It was a
dynamic zone in the sense that it was continuously developed, modified, improved or
relocated till the beginning of the fifth century according to real needs and conditions.
The Limes therefore, was a multifaceted zone of a military, administrative, economic and
sociocultural character.
On sociocultural level the Limes was the space where the colonisers Romans and the
colonised non-Romans met and influenced each other. It was a ‘contact zone’ where
peoples unavoidably interacted but on an unequal sociocultural and financial terms, which
were shaped by the relation between conqueror and subjects.
Considering the Limes from the perspective of the ‘contact zone’ and the ‘imperial
frontier’ will help to address later a number of key questions: how is the Limes
interpreted today? Is the multifaceted character reflected in the heritage presentation?
26
Part III Uncovering the Limes
After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Limes headed towards decay, desolation and
demise and was subsequently misinterpreted. It was not long before the building
materials began being recycled for later use. This happened, for instance, in the centre of
Utrecht in the Netherlands, where the cathedral square is situated upon the site of an
earlier Roman fort, and in Xanten, where the abandoned Roman city was used as an
immense quarry for building the nearby medieval town.
After centuries of obsolescence the Limes became a subject of serious archaeological
and historical research since the nineteenth century. In the late twentieth century the
Limes has undergone transformation into an accessible and attractive ‘serial’ heritage
site. Using examples, I will attempt below to analyse the importance of the Limes as
heritage site and to investigate if and to which degree the history of the Limes—as
analysed in Part II—is part of the heritage presentation. Before turning, however, to the
contemporary heritage presentation, I consider it useful to refer to the historiography of
the Limes.
The interpretation of the Limes through the ages

In the Middle Ages, where territorial claims were less important than personal vassalage
frontiers in the Roman sense of the word were actually irrelevant. 93 Remnants of the
Limes were visible, but as their provenance had faded into history, mythical explanations
became popular. The legend of the Teufelsmauer (Devil’s wall), which the Grimm
Brothers included in their anthology of German sagas in 1816, had been for centuries a
popular explanation among the lay people of the stone wall of the Raetian Limes in
Bavaria [jene Trümmer und dieses Riff nennt das Volk: Teufelsmauer]. 94 But beside the
vernacular interpretations of the Limes, official (academic and political) interpretations
can be traced since the Renaissance, when the classical antiquity came into vogue.
On a political level, the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation
(1512—1806) encouraged at various periods the study of ancient Rome in order to
establish historical links with the Roman Empire. 95 In the Beyerische Chronica (1526—
33) of the humanist Johann Turmair or Aventinus (1477—1534) the Raetian Limes was
93
Whittaker, ‘Roman Frontiers and European Perceptions’, 464.
94
Brüder Grimm, Deutsche Sagen, 1 (Berlin 1865) 237.
95
Martin Kemkes, Jörg Scheuerbrand and Nina Willbruger, Der Limes, Grenze Roms zu den Barbaren
(Ostfildern 2006) 264.
27
identified with the wall of the Romans in Bavaria (vallum der Römer in Beyern). 96
Although most of that work, commissioned by the Bavarian duke, was fiction, it was the
first important attempt to write a Bavarian history drawing upon biblical and classical
events so that the newly established state would acquire links with the past. His friend
and fellow humanist Beatus Rhenatus (1485-1547) wrote the work Res Germanicae, in
order to explain German antiquity. In the first book he sketched the geographical
boundaries between Germania Magna and the surrounding Roman provinces and he
described the migration of tribes. 97
Fig.4. Germania Inferior as illustrated in the map Belgii Veteris Typus. Source: Petrus
Kaerius, Germania Inferior id est (Amstelodami 1617) 1.
An example from the Low Countries is the atlas published in Amsterdam in 1617 by
the Dutch cartographer and publisher Petrus Kaerius with maps of the Roman province of
Germania Inferior. In the above map (Fig. 4.) the Castra Legionum Germaniae is situated
near the coast of Katwijk and the Tricesimae vel Ulpia Legio XXX is found in the region
of Xanten. In both the map and the text the words terminus or fines—and interestingly not
the word limes—are used to denote the boundaries between Roman and Germanic
territory. 98 In the Germanic territory near the Teutoburg Forest there were, according to
96
Johannis Aventini, Beyerischen Geschichtschreibers Chronica (Frankfort am Mann MDCXXII) 288.
97
John D’ Amico, Theory and Practice in Renaissance Textual Criticism: Beatus Rhenatus Between
Conjecture and History (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London 1988) 187.
98
Petrus Kaerius, Germania Inferior id est (Amstelodami 1617) 1, 5.
28
the cartographer, remains of Arae Barbarorum, an indicator of a belief that the Roman
frontiers were moral barriers between civilisation and barbarism.
Moving to the eighteenth century and to Germany, scholars were increasingly
interested in the Roman past and considered the Limes as a wall structure that had
marked the territory of the Roman Empire. Christian Ernst Hanßelmann (1699—1775)
was the first to do serious research on the Limes. He published his findings in a work
from 1768 in which he described the unearthed and remarkable [his emphasis] Roman
monuments and other findings and tried to figure out the whereabouts of the Roman
Limes in ancient Germania. Hanßelmann identified the ‘Teuffels Mauer’ with the Vallum
Romanum. 99 It seems that assumptions of Christian provenance and popular myths were
beginning to fade away.
Ever since the late seventeenth century and especially in the eighteenth the interest in
classical antiquity and its products was increasing among the elite. Upper-class European
young men were undertaking a Grand Tour, the cultural trip to Italy and Greece that can
be considered as the precedent of today’s cultural tourism. During the nineteenth century
and the Romantic era the exotic grandeur of ancient Greece acquired a dominant position
within European psyche, but Roman ruins still intrigued classicists, revolutionaries,
intellectuals as well as Romantic travellers. 100 It was during that period that the heritage
ideas about the preservation of the past emerged.
In the nineteenth century, in the newly established kingdom of the Netherlands there
were no visible traces of the Limes but knowledge of sources led to excavations initiated
mainly by the museum of antiquities in Leiden. The building of the fort in Vechten in
1867 and other civilian or military building projects brought Roman remains into light,
but their study was not systematised. 101
At the same time the Roman Empire functioned as a historical precedent and model
for the establishment of the Second German Empire, the British and French colonial
powers and the Italian state and it legitimated their imperialistic policies. It was the
discipline and efficiency of the Roman army that exerted an irresistible influence upon
99
Christian E. Hanßelmann, Beweiß wie weit der Römer Macht in den mit verschiedenen teutschen
Völkern geführten Kriegen, auch in die nunmehrige Ost-Fränkische, sonderlich Hohenlohische, Lande
eingedrungen (Schwäbisch Hall 1768) Tab. I.
100
Catharine Edwards, ‘Introduction: shadows and fragments’, in: idem, ed., Roman Presences:
Perceptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789—1945 (Cambridge/New York/Melbourne 1999) 1-18, q.v.
4.
101
Wilfried Hessing et al., Romeinen langs de snelweg, Bouwstenen voor Vechtens verleden (Abcoude
1997) 25.
29
the intellectuals as well as the statesmen of the emerging European powers. 102 British
scholars such as Pelham, Haverfield and Collingwood drew comparisons between the
Roman frontier system and the then Indian frontier of the British Empire. 103
Interestingly, the Second German Empire (1871—1918) encouraged archaeological
and historical research, introduced ceremonies and constructed or reconstructed
monuments in an attempt to naturalise the past. Within the unionistic framework of
nineteenth-century Germany the Hermannsdenkmal was erected to honour Arminius for
his victory over the Roman legions in the forest of Teutoburg in 9 CE. That monument,
which was officially inaugurated in 1875, obtained a symbolical value on national,
political and cultural level. Arminius was venerated not only for his victory but also as a
founding father of the German nation and a symbol of German identity. His Latin name
was Germanised into Hermann, the monument was erected in the gothic style, which was
supposed to be authentic German, and the statue was built with an orientation towards the
southwest where not only the supposed site of the ancient battle was located, but also
France, a great enemy of Germany in that time. 104 The concepts of Deutschtum and of
105
frontiers were gaining importance. This is the background to the exemplary
reconstruction (between 1897 and 1907) of the Roman fort in Saalburg along the Upper
German Limes, which was initiated and sponsored by the last German emperor Wilhelm
II.
Conforming to the nineteenth-century political climate in Europe, academic historians
encouraged the professionalisation of history, played down forms of popular narrative
history and promoted academic historical research. 106 Under those circumstances the
Roman frontiers was incorporated into the academic and intellectual debate in Germany
and in Britain. Theodor Mommsen, who was a key figure in that debate, considered the
Roman Limes in Germany ‘a remarkable historical monument of the antiquity worthy of
serious research’. 107 The Reichs-Limeskommission was established upon his initiative in
1892 with the task to define the location of the Limes in Germany. That commission
102
Edwards, ‘Introduction: shadows and fragments’, 13; Whittaker, ‘Roman Frontiers and European
Perceptions’, 465-466.
103
Henry F. Pelham, Essays on Roman History (Oxford 1921) 172, 178; Francis Haverfield, ‘An
Inaugural Address delivered before the First Annual General Meeting of the Society, 11th May 1911’,
Journal of Roman Studies 1 (1911) xi-xx, q. v. xviii; R. G. Collingwood, Roman Britain (London 1923) 32.
104
Elke Treude, ‘Hermannsdenkmal, Detmold’, in: Dieter Vorsteher-Seiler, Straße der Monumente,
Nationaldenkmäler des Deutschen Kaiserreiches (Dresden 2011) 38-50, q.v. 44-45.
105
Whittaker, ‘Roman Frontiers and European Perceptions’, 470.
106
Edwards, ‘Introduction: shadows and fragments’, 14.
107
Mommsen, Römische Geschichte V, 134.
30
came to bridge the previous fragmentation in the research field and figured out the course
of the Upper German and Raetian Limes in fifty-six publications from 1894 to 1937. 108
The Nazi regime in Germany (1933—1945) brought a halt to serious and independent
archaeological and historical research. Although the Nazi’s admired the classical
antiquity, they regarded Rome merely as a useful example of a world power that declined
and ultimately fell because of miscegenation. 109 The Nazi ideology showed enthusiasm
for research that would establish the concept of Lebensraum, which was articulated by
the ancestry and superiority of the German race and language and was not restricted by
traditional perceptions of frontiers. Hence the Limes research, which was linked to the
Roman domination of the Germanic people and had already exceeded the first financial
estimates, was not encouraged. Indeed, the Reichs-Limeskommission was suspended in
1939. 110
In the aftermath of the Second World War the intensive use of the landscape for
agriculture and the priority given to building projects brought to light many remnants of
the Limes primarily in Germany and secondarily in the Netherlands, but they were
inadequately studied and lost due to the lack of expertise and personnel. 111 In 1949 the
first International Limes Congress took place in Newcastle in North England, where
researchers working on different aspects of Roman frontiers could meet and exchange
views. Since then this congress is held every three years in different countries
(interestingly, always in Europe, except twice, in 1967 and 2000) through which the
Roman frontiers ran. In the 1960s and 1970s under the influence of the heritage
movement’s call to save the world’s cultural items from depredation, the Limes regained
importance, especially in Germany, where it was systematically researched by the
Römisch-Germanische Kommission, protected as a cultural heritage site and displayed to
the public. In 2003 the Deutsche Limeskommission was established and in 2005 the
Upper German and Raetian Limes was registered as part of the WHS ‘Frontiers of the
Roman Empire’.
108
Rainer Braun, ‘Die Geschichte der Reichs-Limeskommission und ihre Forschungen’, in: ‘Der
Römische Limes in Deutschland’, eds. Gabriele Süsskind and Angelika Wigg, Sonderheft, Archäologie in
Deutschland (1992) 9-32, q. v. 18-19.
109
Volker Losemann, ‘The Nazi concept of Rome’, in: Catharine Edwards, ed., Roman presences:
Perceptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789—1945 (Cambridge/New York/Melbourne 1999) 221-235,
q. v. 227.
110
Braun, ‘Die Geschichte der Reichs-Limeskommission und ihre Forschungen’, 24.
111
Hüssen, ‘Grabungen und Forschungen der letzten 40 Jahre im obergermanischen und rätischen
Limesgebiet’, 36.
31
In the Netherlands the political and academic interest in the Limes has substantially
increased since the inclusion of Hadrian’s Wall and of Antonine Wall as well as of the
Upper German and Raetian Limes in the list of UNESCO, but also as a result of legally
required excavations prior to the development of new neighbourhoods in modern cities
and towns along the Limes (Utrecht, Woerden, Alphen aan de Rijn) at the end of the
twentieth century.
Before going on to analyse how the heritage boom affected the Limes, I would like to
mention another political interpretation, one that departs from the current political
situation in Europe. Being a supra-national heritage site, the Roman Limes, from a
European point of view, could not only reflect the EU policy of ‘free movement of
people and goods’, but also serve to legitimise a multi-ethnic, unified continent.
The Limes as WHS

In this section I examine how important is the World Heritage status for the Limes and
what are the consequences of the nomination.
The registration of a location as WHS happens only after a detailed process of
preselection, nomination and evaluation and is based on the selection criteria described in
the World Heritage Committee’s ‘Operational Guidelines’. 112 The mere existence of the
concept of WHS has a number of positive effects: it gives monumental status to
registered sites, fosters heritage consciousness around the globe and encourages
educational programmes and activities in situ and in adjusted museums; the UNESCO
logo (Fig 5.) has become a brand, a symbol of certain status and value, a tool that confers
prestige and guarantees large numbers of cultural tourists. 113 ‘World Heritage is a
cosmopolitan political project that aspires to create an imagined cultural tourist
community’. 114
While some parts of the ‘Frontiers of the Roman Empire’ have been widely
researched, officially recognised and enlisted by UNESCO, others are undergoing now
this process and others remain to be analysed and documented. Hadrian’s Wall in
England was the first part which was enlisted by UNESCO in 1987. The first nomination
was followed in 2005 by the Upper German and Rhaetian Limes, extending from
112
UNESCO, World Heritage Sites; A Complete Guide to 890 UNESCO World Heritage Sites (Paris
/New York 2010) 808-9.
113
Harrison, Heritage: Critical Approaches, 89.
114
Marc Askew, ‘The magic list of global status: UNESCO, World Heritage and the agendas of states’,
in: Sophia Labadi and Colin Long, eds., Heritage and Globalisation (London/New York 2010) 19-44, q.v.
29.
32
Rheinbrohl in Essen to Regensburg in Bavaria. The Antonine Wall in Scotland gained the
same status in 2008. All three were inscribed on the World Heritage List on basis of the
following selection criteria: a) their important interchange of values, b) their exceptional
testimony to cultural tradition and c) their significance in human history. 115
Fig. 5. Plaque at the entrance of the reconstructed fort with the UNESCO logo, Saalburg,
Germany. (My photo).
Yet, not all parts of the Roman Limes enjoy the status of WHS. Croatia has submitted
its own respective portion for inclusion into the transnational WHS ‘Frontiers of the
Roman Empire’. The Netherlands, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia, Romania and
Bulgaria are working towards the same goal. The subset between the North Sea coast in
the Netherlands and Bonn in Germany (Lower German Limes) is going to be nominated
by both Germany (the federal states of Nordrhein–Westfalen and Rheinland–Pfalz) and
the Netherlands. The Netherlands has already included its part of the Limes in the
Tentative List, which is the first important step towards the nomination and a successful
outcome. 116 This has already had positive consequences first, in the improvement of
physical access to the sites, second, in the creative integration of archaeological remains
in urban areas and third, in public awareness and interest in the Roman past.
To my opinion, however, the Dutch Limes still lacks the cohesiveness of a serial site
that would link all the visible and hidden remains. On this field the establishment of the
Stichting Romeinse Limes Nederland in 2013 hopes to bring remedy. It also lacks a
certain degree of recognisability due not only to the integral problem of low visibility but
115
UNESCO, World Heritage Sites, 273.
116
S. M. van Roode, ‘Op weg naar Werelderfgoed: De Romeinse Limes’, Vitruvius 7 (2014) 28, 22-26,
q. v. 23-24.
33
especially due to the choices that various political and cultural authorities (provinces,
municipalities, organisations) have made on the grounds of visualisation, issues that I
will analyse later in this paper.
In the case of the Lower German Limes the valuable information that findings
(organic materials, boats) disclose about the purpose and function of the Roman frontiers
in the antiquity as well as the riverine frontier could underpin the criterion of the
‘uniqueness’ of the site, as well as that of ‘the exceptional testimony to a cultural
tradition or to a past civilisation’, that of the Roman past of the Rhine region.
Additionally, the Lower German Limes will have to be of comparable status and
importance to the already designated parts. 117
Despite the fact that the nomination of the Lower German Limes should be prepared
by both Germany and the Netherlands, two different national [my emphasis] files have to
be submitted. 118 This manifests that the nation-state remains a powerful agent in the
heritage arena and the national politics of the States Parties intersect with UNESCO’s
projects and priorities. National and sub-national political and cultural authorities harness
the nomination of heritage sites in order to promote identity politics, enhance their
cultural status and generate income. 119
In the case of the Limes however, the national states are not the sole agent for reasons
that relate to the very nature of the Roman frontiers. Firstly, the Limes is a monument
that intersects many countries and ‘ownership’ in terms of ancestral claims cannot be
seriously supported by any single present-day European country. Secondly, the Limes
and the Roman frontiers in general cross current national boundaries and require
therefore collaboration between different national authorities. Ultimately, if the entirety
of the Roman frontiers is included in the World Heritage List, this will result in a major
ensemble of sites, a ‘serial site’ of micro-global nature expanding beyond Europe and
embracing countries of diverse cultural background. 120
117
Sophia Labadi,‘World Heritage, authenticity and post-authenticity: international and national’, in:
Sophia Labadi and Colin Long, eds., Heritage and Globalisation (London / New York 2010) 66-84, q.v.
67.
118
Roode, ‘Op weg naar Werelderfgoed’, 24.
119
Askew, ‘The magic list of global status’, 23.
120
In order to make this possible, international bodies such as the Intergovernmental Committee and
the Management Group, which are made up from key proponents and stakeholders in the transnational
WHS, coordinate between UNESCO and the countries involved in the site. The Bratislava Group acts as a
scientific advisory body. Under the guidance of these bodies several international projects have prepared
the ground for Roman Frontier sections in Europe to be included and plans are underway to work towards
the future inclusion of frontier sections in the Near East and North Africa. Deutsche Limeskommission,
http://www.limes2015.org/limes/roman-frontiers-and-world-heritage/ (accessed on 1-9-2014).
34
But is the initiative to have another section of the Limes added to the UNESCO list
indicative of a mainstream phenomenon of a steadily expanding World Heritage closely
linked to what is known as ‘heritage industry’, or does it show a genuine interest in
promoting the historical past and knowledge?
I strongly believe that recent projects in the Netherlands, such as the excavations of
the Roman forts in Utrecht and Woerden, permanent museum exhibitions (Romeins
Vechten), resurrections of ‘lost’ Roman forts (Hoge Woerd, Matilo) as well as the
conservation and display of excavated Roman ships have been financed and thus realised
mainly because of the ambition of the World Heritage status and secondarily, if at all, for
the sake of the historical knowledge. 121 Therefore, the status of World Heritage for a
historic location weighs more than its history. On the one hand, the historic location
becomes widely known and obtains a function, but on the other hand, the historical
complexity is downplayed.
The heritage values of the Limes

The aim of this section is to draw together the values of the heritage site of the Limes and
the ways that they are demonstrated.
A heritage site has two components: the first is the concrete physical constituents,
which in the case of the Limes are rests of forts, towers, wooden palisades, shipwrecks
and of the associated civilian settlements as well as various smaller findings and organic
materials, and the second is the abstract values that we attribute to these physical
constituents. 122
In conforming to Smith’s premise that heritage locations do not have any inherent
value based on tangible constituents, I would argue that since the late nineteenth century
the Limes has been uncovered and has become a site worth of conservation and display
not for any innate and immutable values and aesthetic qualities of the sparse rests or the
reconstructed parts but because of the political meanings, cultural values and historical
debates that the various agents—as I have described them in the beginning of this part—
have diachronically attributed to the frontiers of the Roman Empire.
On European level the Limes and the Roman frontiers as a whole can encompass
different layers of significance. The Limes is undoubtedly a historical evidence of a
121
In relation to the nomination process a number of Limes-links have been put together through which
the Limes becomes widely known http://www.utrecht.nl/erfgoed/werelderfgoed-in-utrecht/de-limes/
122
Jeffrey Altschul, ‘Archaeological heritage values in cross-cultural context’, in: George S. Smith,
Phyllis M. Messenger and Hilary A. Soderland, eds., Heritage Values in Contemporary Society (Walnut
Creek 2010) 75-85, q. v. 82.
35
large-scale Roman influence in Europe, but it serves also as a symbol of the Greco-
Roman identity of the Western civilisation. Here, it is noteworthy that the term
‘civilisation’ has an existential weight for Europe and plays a substantial role for securing
a privileged status in a highly competitive globalised world. In this sense, the
‘civilisation’ idea that is attributed to the Limes becomes witness of what L. Smith calls
‘Authorised Heritage Discourse’, a term that promotes the idea that heritage has objective
intrinsic values regulated and referenced by ‘experts’. 123 Therefore, the Limes could
serve to reaffirm the link of present-day Europe and Europeans with the cultural milieu of
the classical civilisation (‘everything started here’ as one visitor of a Limes site told me)
and become prop of a historical, cultural and political superiority.
The above do not deprive the Limes of its historical meaning and evidence, which
resides in the first component of the heritage site. But it shows that heritage valuation is a
subjective process which does not intend to serve history but political, cultural and
financial ends of imperial, national and regional or commercial agents. Interestingly,
within the present globalised environment regional communities and national entities (for
instance, Catalans, Scots) strive for international recognition by highlighting their distinct
roots and securing their own historical past. In this process cultural heritage plays
essential role because it ‘contributes to people’s self-understanding as members of a local
community, inhabitants of a region or citizens of a nation-state’. 124 From this point of
view, it would be interesting to investigate whether the Antonine wall in Scotland has
been used or could be used to promote the diachronic otherness of the Scots.
As I said in part I (p. 8) heritage supports memories. Interestingly, the Limes in
Germany seems to solace discontent memories of the first half of the twentieth century.
After the Second World War and within a frame of a rising anti-militaristic culture,
Germans have found in ancient history a distant ‘foreign country’, upon which consensus
is easily managed and the contested and problematic issues that have haunted the country
as a result of the Nazi regime are eschewed. From my discussions with German visitors
of the Limes I have got the impression that the average citizen feels comfortable visiting
a historical place, which does not suffer from the ‘pain and shame’ of the difficult
heritage of the twentieth century. Arguably, the Limes functions in this case as a remedial
heritage for a national group who wants to escape not from an everyday ‘grey present’
but from a ‘grey past’.
123
124
Holtorf, ‘Heritage values in contemporary popular culture’, 46.
36
The Limes has also financial importance, which results not only from the flow of
tourists measured in tickets issued and products sold, but also from the increase in
employment within and around the heritage location. In an attempt to entertain and attract
visitors, marketing and advertising practices are widely applied: books, toys and a
promiscuous variety of memorabilia satisfy every taste, ‘original’ food products and
‘authentic’ furniture and utensils are pieces of a historical backdrop, which seeks to bring
visitors back to the Roman period. Unsurprisingly, many visitors find heritage nice,
exactly because it seems authentic.
The knowledge economy requires from the current Western visitor a certain degree of
historical knowledge. Some heritage visitors seek to enrich their knowledge and can
never have enough information. This group of people asks for guided tours, is willing to
read the accompanying boards and to gather informative leaflets. The recently erected
Castellum Hoge Woerd in Utrecht is an example of a heritage micro-site, which although
re-constructed on the basis of few historical and archaeological evidence, aspires to give
plenty of historical information. The initiators aim to improve the local historical
awareness by offering guided tours, to enhance the cultural status of the region by
organising meetings but their foremost aim is to put it on the map of the Lower German
Limes and eventually of the WHS ‘Frontiers of the Roman Empire’. The perspective of
the nomination was actually the real driving force behind this resurrection.
The Limes is also important for the sustainable development of the environment,
because almost all sites are parts of urban or rural settings. In a world where the need to
protect the environment is urgent cultural heritage can play an essential role. The cultural
matrix of the Limes zone plays a positive role in preserving and promoting the rural
landscape as well as in designing sustainable urban fabrics and emphasising aesthetic
qualities in the cities.
Having analysed some abstract values of the Limes, I would like to close this section
by returning to the first component of the heritage sites, the tangible remains which in the
case of the Limes are relatively few ancient ruins scattered in the landscape. According to
Garden a heritage site needs to be visible, cohesive and concrete so that visitors can
identify it and understand it. 125 I would add that a heritage site is expected to exhibit a
plausible degree of authenticity in the sense that it consists of and displays real findings.
These original findings carry the story of the past and are representatives of the historical
125
M. C. Garden, ‘The Heritagescape: Looking at Landscapes of the Past’, International Journal of
Heritage Studies 12 (2006) 5, 397.
37
reality. But it’s the responsibility of historians to tell the story of the past based on this
historical reality and the interpretation of it.
Moreover, authenticity has always been an essential qualifying criterion for the
inclusion of a site in the World Heritage List. 126 In the case of the Limes the issue of
authenticity, which is loosely supported by scarce original remains, is one of the greatest
challenges of the heritage presentation. Below I will analyse briefly on grounds of
examples the ways that this problem is dealt with.
Low visibility—authenticity
Tangible heritage items and sites are articulated mainly through visual culture. Lowenthal
in his revised edition of The Past is a Foreign Country speaks of a visual turn in history
where the past is understood when seen rather than when read or told about. 127 Heritage
visitors seek out forms of visual apprehensibility, such as reconstructions, demarcation,
signage and drawings in order to understand the meaning and function of historical sites
and items. In the watery soil of the Netherlands the main difficulty with the Limes is
exactly this: the alluvium deposited by the rivers covered and razed most of the Roman
constructions and resulted to a lack of tangible remains. Therefore, in the Lower German
Limes we have either a few visible traces or just scant foundations hidden in the ground.
But it is precisely this low visibility or even invisibility that provides the Roman Limes
with charm. The paucity of material remains is not necessarily a hindrance to the
presentation of cultural heritage, as numerous presentations have proven.
Following Copeland’s interesting paper on low-visibility sites, I will attempt to
analyse the degree of visibility of the Limes site by applying Panofsky’s progressive
model. 128 I will divide the visualisation methods used along the Limes in three levels: the
pre-iconographical, under which I understand panels, maps, signposts, guidebooks and
leaflets with historical and archaeological information about the site; the iconographical,
under which I understand images, such as reconstructions, demarcations and symbolical
plantations and activities, such as re-enactment that intend to analyse the Limes; and the
iconological, under which I classify artistic impressions and representations usually
accompanied by scholarly or popular texts that intend to interpret the Limes by revealing
126
Labadi, ‘World Heritage, authenticity and post-authenticity: international and national perspectives’,
66.
127
Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country-Revisited, 14.
128
Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (London 1993) 66.
38
the principles and the political and military circumstances under which it was erected in a
certain period and region.
Examples of pre-iconographical markers are the numerous indestructible panels in
Germany, all of standard size, shape, material and format with a lot of historical and
archaeological information (Fig. 6.) as well as signs, drawings and scale-models. In the
Netherlands such informative markers are often latent and do not seem to solve the
problem of invisibility in an adequate way.
Fig. 6. One of the information panels at the entrance of Saalburg (Upper German Limes).
This image operates not only at a pre-iconographical level, but also at an iconological one, as a
symbol that includes a virtual reconstruction, an illustration, photographs and texts and stands
on two wooden palings which serve to recall the Roman wooden palisade. (My photo).
Many visualisation methods fall within the iconographical category, building

reconstructions being the most widely used. These are based on on-site foundations and
ancient iconography (e.g. Trajan’s column in Rome) and convey to visitors a realistic,
easily understandable, usually impressive and lasting picture of the Roman Limes.
Numerous watchtowers have been rebuilt along the Limes in Germany and the
Netherlands (Fig. 11.) but the most prominent and recognisable reconstruction is the fort
in Saalburg, which is now considered a heritage item in its own right, an integral and
valuable part of the historiography of the Limes.
Quite problematic are restorations in the Archaeological Park Xanten—in the
hinterland of the Lower German Limes: first, a series of reconstructed buildings that are
supposed to have been there and second, newly erected artificial ruins next to or above
original ones. The reconstructed taverns and warehouses aspire to create a ‘period’ street
where costumed staff serves the time-travellers in their journey back in time. The waiters
39
in Xanten have to be dressed up in Roman suits, if the ‘period’ food is to taste ‘Roman’.
The shoddy ruins made purposefully for visitors replicate a would-be authentic situation
by reproducing the dilapidation and the natural disintegration of the lost structures; on the
one hand, these replicas intend to imply the impact of time, to create an aura of authentic
antiquity and to compensate heritage visitors for the low degree of visibility, but on the
other hand, they manipulate history for the sake of heritage. The semi-reconstructed
temple of Juno, for instance, gives to the untutored eye, at least at first sight, the
impression that it is an original ruin of the historical Roman building although it is a
lifelike replica of hypothesised rests. This replica seems to flirt with nostalgic sentiments
closely linked to romantic ruinscapes and to interpret authenticity as a mere technique of
presentation.
The planting of flowers, bushes or trees are widely used in Germany to show the
contours of Roman forts (Fig. 8.), whereas metal demarcations are quite common in the
Netherlands—where a tourist would expect flowers, instead. The metal stripes which are
set discontinuously around the central square of Utrecht signify not only the contours of
the local Roman fort but also the entirety of the Roman frontiers through the inscribed
frontier toponyms (cover image). In Woerden a granite strip has been placed to mark the
Roman fort. These are symbols intended as touchstones between the past and the present,
but they usually remain a puzzle to the non-specialist viewer if not accompanied by
guidance.
Fig. 7. Representation of a soldier’s everyday occupations inside the partially reconstructed

Roman cavalry barracks, scale 1:1, Aalen, Germany. (My photo).
40
A more abstract iconographical method are the graphic and virtual reconstructions,
which avoid to imply accuracy and give the viewers the chance to create their own
images. 129 Such reconstructions are increasingly preferred to building ones for both
financial and aesthetic reasons.
Moving to the iconological level, I would mention artistic impressions that depict in a
discernible and informative way building complexes along the Limes in the Roman time.
In Utrecht artistic impressions of the fort Traiectum (Fig. 9), a scale-model of the site and
audio-visual explanations form an astute presentation of the underground excavation and
help visitors to understand the complexity of the site better.
Signifiers, to use a term from semiotics, are also used as interpretative symbols. The
statue of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius outside the entrance of the reconstructed
fort in Saalburg indicates the connection with the certain emperor and a certain period of
ancient Rome. Other examples are the depiction of Roman helmets as road markers near
Castellum Hoge Woerd in Utrecht (Fig. 11) and the use of wooden constructions that
recall the Roman palisade (e.g. in the museum in Osterburken).
Fig. 8. Visualisation of a fort’s moats in Ruffenhofen, Germany. Source: Matthias Pausch,

Visualisierung von Kastell und vicus Ruffenhofen: Beispiele aus der Praxis, in: Peter Henrich,
ed., Visualisierung von Bodendenkmälern. Beiträge zum Welterbe Limes 7 (Stuttgart 2013) 45.
The rough rubble foundations and the abundance of visualisation techniques and
projects raise the question of the authenticity of the Limes site. As I argued before,
heritage aspires to create an atmosphere of authenticity by visualising the invisible. But
129
An example of an abstract visualisation is the reconstruction of the northeastern gate of the cavalry
fort Celeusum/Pforring in Bayern.
41
are all visual re-creations compatible with the idea of authenticity? Indeed, how certain
do we need to be in order to visualise a site?
Different answers have been given to these questions by experts, according to their
academic and sociocultural background. The word authenticity derives from the classical
Greek adjective αὐθεντικός which was used by the Greeks to describe the truthfulness of
documents, such as testaments, contracts and letters, and it defined them as guaranteed
and authoritative and hence called for being unquestionably accepted by everybody. That
core meaning of ‘being truthful and warranted’ as opposed to counterfeit has survived in
the current definition of the word in European languages. Authenticity, according to
OED, ‘is the quality of being true and according with the facts and—when referring to
items from the past—genuine and made or done by the stated creator’, who in the case of
the Limes are the soldiers and the workers of the Roman army. This understanding of
authenticity is therefore rooted in the occidental linguistic, cultural and academic
tradition, refers to the original state of the heritage site and like in the Greek language
defines that something is true beyond question. But this is the very essence of the
problem: the actual state of the Limes as well as of many cultural heritage sites rarely
corresponds to this ideal understanding of authenticity.
Due to the importance and the complexity of this concept UNESCO organised a
conference in Nara of Japan in 1994 to define the term according to the current needs of
the world culture. That conference produced the Nara Document on Authenticity.
According to article 11 of this document, ‘authenticity is a flexible notion that reflects the
values of a specific society and culture in a certain period and can therefore be judged
only within the related cultural context’. 130 In Japan, for instance, authenticity is not
attached to the originality of material and shape, but to workmanship and functionality.
Authenticity should therefore be understood as a relative and dynamic concept that on the
one hand, reflects consecutive changes of heritage sites and the impact of time and, on
the other, is constantly under review as new evidence comes to light and different
viewpoints are considered. This is a very important statement because it challenges the
emphasis on the material aspect of cultural heritage. Subsequently, representations both
traditional and modern do not have to be and cannot be the product of an absolute
certainty, but they reflect the specific choices, the degree of knowledge and the ruling
aesthetics of a given period.
130
ICOMOS, http://www.icomos.org/en/179-articles-en-francais/ressources/charters-and-standards/386-
the-nara-document-on-authenticity-1994 (accessed on 2-1-2016).
42
That means that visualisation methods and re-creations along the low visible Limes
should not struggle to revert to the Roman past, but to bring locations into prominence,
get the (hi)story right and arouse the interest of non-specialist visitors in Roman history.
These should be the main purposes of heritage presentation and not to resurrect the past.
But do the various visualisation methods fulfil these purposes and pay heed to the history
of the Limes?
Fig. 9. Artistic impression of the fort in Utrecht (Traiectum) with an outer ditch, wall and
four gates. In the middle and on the right we find the principia (headquarters) at the junction of
the two main fort roads: the via praetoria, the road leading to the River Rhine, and the via
principalis. Source: With courtesy of Initiatief Domplein.
From the examples used above, I will single out two building reconstructions, which
represent, in a highly visible manner, the missing or partially visible past: Saalburg in
Germany, a product of the late nineteenth century and Hoge Woerd in Utrecht, the
Netherlands, a product of the early twenty-first century. Both are subjective receptions
and manifestations of a hypothesised appearance of Roman structures and therefore not
real Roman ones. But they are built upon Roman foundations and in this sense, are
related to the authenticity of the place. Their value as reproductions consist not in
representing the real building, but in bringing the Limes into prominence, in attracting
people and in awakening their interest in the Roman past. Saalburg in its long history has
attained these goals and has become an icon of the Upper German Limes. The recently
opened (autumn 2015) Hoge Woerd has already made a promising start. The fact that
43
they are so different from each other—as concepts and as constructions—helps, even
unintentionally, to challenge stereotypes about the past and reflects on a symbolical level
the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of the Limes in the antiquity.
Conclusion
It is commonplace to recognise that by reconstructing the past, heritage professionals
decide for certain historical narratives and at the same time convey information,
meanings and insights. In the case of the Limes the focus has been almost exclusively
directed on the military life and very little attention has been paid to the civilian life not
only of the inhabitants of the adjusted vici and canabae but also of the soldiers
themselves. The partial reconstruction of the barracks in the cavalry fort at Aalen on a 1:1
scale (Fig. 7.) is an example of this imbalance: a soldier sits in the barrack taking care of
the horses and cleaning his weapons. The Limes is presented as a dividing line and not as
a zone of social economic and cultural importance for both Romans and non-Romans.
But as I have already mentioned in the previous chapter, the Limes was a multifaceted
‘contact zone’ and not just a guarded line.
In many heritage sites and museums the Limes is simply interpreted as the Latin term
for frontiers and neither the long story of the shifting definitions is told nor the
reintroduction of the term in the nineteenth century. Another aspect of the Limes history
that, according to me, is not adequately represented is the phases of the progressive
construction (military roads, territorial markers, imperial frontiers) and that in relation to
the historical timeline and the changes in the domestic and foreign policy of the Roman
Empire. Most of the heritage presentation pays little attention to this progress and almost
none to the later historiography of the Limes.
When it comes to the ways of visualisation used in the Netherlands, a common
problem is that many markers (e.g. columns, panels, metal plates and stripes) are so
abstract, unobtrusive and imperceptible that they are not particularly helpful for the non-
specialist viewer. As a result if these markers have not been partially or wholly damaged,
they are either neglected by the wider public or cause odd reactions when noticed.
Summarising, I would argue that most of the heritage sites along the Limes are
successful in turning the invisible into visible, in providing ideas about the supposed
appearance of the Roman frontiers and in making the historical places lively and
accessible to visitors. However, much effort goes into the ‘photographic’ visualisation
44
and the ‘authentic’ representation of the sites for the sake of paying visitors and little to
the whole spectrum of the multifaceted and dynamic past of the Limes.
This emphasis on visualisation techniques turns the historical past into a sheer sight-
seeing where thinking and understanding are less and less present. Visitors are not
encouraged to classify, analyse or negotiate information but they are confronted with a
reconstructed ‘reality’ of the Roman past, which sometimes seems interactive and
modern but can be uniform and manipulative. In the following part I discuss if and to
what degree the Limes contributes to historical knowledge.
45
Part IV The Limes: a Lernort of History?
The UNESCO Convention anticipates that the States Parties ‘shall endeavour by all
appropriate means, and in particular by educational and information programmes to
strengthen appreciation and respect by their peoples’ of cultural heritage. 131 One of these
‘appropriate means’ are educational activities and workshops, which are organised by
museums and heritage sites often in cooperation with schools. But heritage sites have
been much more creative and have launched miscellaneous popular activities such as re-
enactment, games, shows, festivals and have introduced all kinds of ‘period’ products,
which intend to attract visitors. Is therefore, the Limes an ostentatious site or does it also
consist a Lernort, where history comes to the foreground and people learn about the past?
Is there space for historical reflection and acquisition of historical knowledge? Which
methods are used to familiarise people with the history of the Limes?
Before going on, I feel the need to explain the term Lernort, which the Germans use
in order to describe a recognised institution or a site with special characteristics and
facilities, which offers extracurricular education. 132 A heritage site, thus, is potentially a
Lernort, a template for the way history can be taught and learnt outside schools and
universities. And this, I think, for a number of reasons: first, a heritage site contains the
‘real’ historical place and links the visitors with the historical spirit and thereupon with
the past that the place represents; then, with a promiscuous variety of activities it
reanimates the context where past developments and events took place and awakens
public interest in history; and finally, a great number of people (young and old, experts
and laymen) learn about the historical past.
Visitors to the open fields of the Limes sites are apparently motivated by a genuine
interest in ancient Roman history and seek to enrich their historical knowledge. As I have
mentioned above (page 9) historical knowledge is primarily but not exclusively produced
and acquired within academic circles. In the classroom setting, on the one hand, the
active participation of learners is low and history remains an abstract subject articulated
in academic lectures and articles. I would name this situation ‘authenticity of the word’.
On the other hand, museums offer history education by explaining the object to the
participants (‘authenticity of the object’) and heritage sites by offering a vivid and
131
UNESCO, ‘Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage
(Paris 16 November 1972)’ article 27, http://whc.unesco.org/archive/convention-en.pdf (accessed on 12-
09-2015).
132
Peter Dippon, Lernort UNESCO-Welterbe: Eine akteurs- und institutionsbasierte Analyse des
Bildungsanspruchs im Spannungsfeld von Postulat und Praxis (Heidelberg 2012) 32.
46
immediate experience of the past (‘authenticity of the experience’). In the first setting the
learning process takes place on a pure cognitive level, whereas in museums and
especially in heritage sites the driving force that stimulates the learning process is the
emotional link to the ‘real’ place and the objects.
Is therefore better to learn history on site than in the seclusion of the library carrel?
And is the Limes a site where Roman history can be learnt and be learnt right? I will
attempt to answer these questions by considering the museums and various activities in
the Limes.
The role of the adjacent museums

Museums are a significant and powerful vehicle for the construction of the past and the
present and their narratives are more effective than textual history. 133 They are also part
of a visual spectacle and the repository of national narratives and institutional power. 134
From their inception in the late eighteenth century museums have been producing,
presenting and controlling historical knowledge and the museums at the Limes are no
exception to this.
Firstly, their collections are of keen importance in giving material form to the Roman
past. In order to minimalise the de-contextualisation of their artefacts, many museums
related to the Roman Limes (Saalburg, Aalen, Osterburken, Xanten—all in Germany) are
situated within or next to the actual archaeological site, where their exhibits were found.
Consequently, the interior museum space and the exterior site are linked to a coherent
and inseparable whole that forms the spatial context where the past ‘really’ happened.
This link between museum and site has still to be realised in the Dutch part of the Limes.
Secondly, the past that the museums in the Limes present is not the past of the great
men and women but the past of the everyday people. In the heritage discourse the
spotlight has turned from the exceptional to the ordinary, from the grand narratives of
politics, war and diplomacy to everyday topics of lifestyle, families, interpersonal
relationships and small communities. An example is to find in the Limeseum in
Ruffenhoffen, Bavaria, where the visitors watch a film about the daily life of December,
an invented ‘period’ soldier of the Roman Limes and later a civilian inhabitant of a vicus.
The use of technology to re-create a common man attracts visitors because it blurs the
133
Nick Merriman‚ ‘Involving the public in museum archaeology’, in: idem, ed., Public Archaeology
(London/New York 2004) 85; De Groot, ‘Historiography and Virtuality’, in: Emma Waterton and Steve
Watson, eds., Culture Heritage and Representation: Perspectives on the Visuality and the Past
(Surrey/Burlington 2010) 94.
134
De Groot, ‘Historiography and Virtuality’, 102.
47
distinction between fact and fiction and between reality and romance and because visitors
are more willing to relate to ordinary people. 135 Even if December never existed, he is
successful in shifting the focus on everyday life and in arousing the interest of the public
in the past.
Thirdly, external elements of the museum buildings, such as setting, design and
location play an increasing role in how the visitors perceive the past. These elements are
often reminiscent of the period and the place that a museum aspires to represent. The
relatively small Römermuseum in the town of Osterburken effectively recalls the Upper
German wooden palisade with its wooden exterior frame, incorporates the adjacent
archaeological site and is nicely integrated in the Limes landscape. Such a museum in a
small town consists a cultural capital that attracts tourists causing—in scale—what is
known in modern bibliography as Bilbao effect. 136 Moreover, it is a nice example of what
Jordanova calls ‘visual intelligence’, in terms of its ability to re-present a story, speak to
the visitors and move viewers. 137 By contrast, the huge and powerful building of the
Römermuseum in Xanten, although it is successfully situated within the archaeological
site and above the Roman baths and accommodates an interesting collection, fails, in my
opinion, as an iconographical marker. The building is a hyper-realistic and extravagant
construction that overwhelms the visitors and with its salient skeleton overshadows the
original remains of the Roman baths, which it is supposed to visualise. However, the
collection itself is a valid historical narrative extending from prehistory to the post-
Roman era of the area of Xanten and, in my view, it tells the story right and instructs the
public.
Fourthly, museums are not only buildings but also vivid organisations directed by
professionals in the field of history and archaeology and, more recently, by heritage
managers. Since the late 1960s educational programmes, workshops, lectures, costumed
interpretation and games have become part of a museum policy to produce and present
knowledge and to become popular, prestigious and financially sound institutions with
socio-political influence. This is also the case with the numerous museums in the Limes
sites, where schoolchildren are welcome to attend such activities.
135
Michael R. Spearman, ‘Digital Reconstruction and the Public Interpretation of Frontiers’, in: N.
Mills, ed., Presenting the Romans: Interpreting the Frontiers of the Roman Empire World Heritage Site
(Woodbridge 2013) 119-127, q. v. 126.
136
Mary-Catherine Garden, ‘Living with Landscapes of Heritage’, in: Robin Skeates, Carol McDavid
and John Carman, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Public Archaeology (Oxford 2012) 199-212, q.v. 202.
137
Ludmilla Jordanova, The Look of the Past (New York 2012) 71.
48
For similar reasons, museums in the twenty-first century strive to create an online
community of members and fans—I would say an ‘imagined community’—and they are
actively present in social media, such as Facebook and Twitter. Museums’ websites and
apps offer e-visitors the opportunity to immerse themselves in the past through virtual
reality. For the relatively huge heritage site of the Limes, digitisation offers a unique
opportunity to follow the whole site from the Netherlands to Bavaria and travel even
further to the entirety of ‘The Frontiers of the Roman Empire’ just by scrolling different
webpages and clicking on various links.
Additionally, the museums along the Limes are usually the starting point or venue for
re-enactment activities and other events that aim to re-inscribe Roman history, such as
the ‘week of the Romans’, the ‘International Roman Days’, the ‘Limes trip’ etc. Guides
in Roman clothes may look funny or eccentric to professional historians, but they convey
to visitors an impressive and easily comprehensible—though conventional—image of the
Roman past. Such activities attract viewers who are usually different from the traditional
museum visitors. 138
The static museum with holy relics displayed behind dusty vitrines does not exist any
longer. A lively variant has taken its place where information is vividly presented long
before this reaches school books and classrooms. 139 Interestingly, four museums in
Germany were officially recognised as institutions that promote the Limes as Lernort: the
Limesmuseum in Aalen in the Federal State of Baden-Württemberg, the fort in Saalburg
in Hessen, the Erlebnismuseum in der Römerwelt in Bad Hönningen in Rheinland-Pfalz
and the Römermuseum in Weißenburg in Bavaria. 140
Re-enactment and other methods of experiencing history

Historical re-enactment has become one of the most popular modes of approaching
history through bodily (mental and physical) experience. The process and intensity of
engagement varies from one individual to another according to their interests,
motivations and existing knowledge.
138
Martin Kemkes, ‘Multimedia interpretation, techniques for reconstructing the Roman past at the
Limes museum in Aalen and at the Limes in Baden-Württemberg’, in: Nigel Mills, ed., Presenting the
Romans: Interpreting the Frontiers of the Roman Empire World Heritage Site (Woodbridge 2013) 47-54,
q.v. 49.
139
Christof Flügel, ‘The World Heritage Site “Frontiers of the Roman Empire” in Museums: Revealing
the Invisible’, in: David Breeze and Sonja Jilek, eds., Frontiers of the Roman Empire, The European
Dimension of a World Heritage Site (Edinburgh 2008) 174-177, q.v. 175.
140
Dippon, Lernort UNESCO-Welterbe, 136.
49
During my trip along the Upper German Limes I had the chance to blend in Roman
historical re-enactment together with two German researchers of ‘living history’. Based
on Jordanova’s analysis of ‘public history’, I would say that historical re-enactment with
its concern with the past, its recognised conventions and its growing audiences is, in
effect, a phenomenon that can be inscribed under the umbrella of public history. 141
Historical re-enactment offers to lay people (re-enactors as well as audiences) a complex
historical interaction with the past—something, academic history cannot and presumably
does not want to provide. 142
Historical re-enactment is an old mimetic (theatrical) art that goes back to early
modern Europe and even to the medieval period. 143 Certainly, it is not a ‘tightly
organized, fully scripted and carefully rehearsed historical play’, but an attempt of groups
of enthusiasts to re-play historical events through a set of bodily actions. 144 The most
popular re-enactment activity within the heritage discourse involves combat. 145 The
Roman Limes lends itself perfectly to combat re-enactment, as it constituted the fringes
of the empire and fighting was not infrequent. Roman historical re-enactment has taken
off simultaneously with the heritage craze as a British phenomenon—Ermine Street
Guard founded in 1971 was the first of the Roman Army groups in Britain—but today is
also popular throughout continental Europe and in the US for a number of reasons. 146
First, historical re-enactment seeks to transfer both body and spirit into the past by
satisfying the quest for immediacy and by staging a theatrical visualisation of the past. 147
Interestingly, empathy and enactment are at least as important as actual historical
evidence for understanding warfare. 148 This explains the popularity of Roman historical
re-enactment among viewers and re-enactors. The latter assume Roman names just as
actors do on stage and put on clothes and armour that correspond to a stereotypical
Roman outfit.
141
Jordanova, History in Practice, 126-131.
142
De Groot, Consuming History, 106.
143
Samuel, Theatres of Memory, 180, cf. Scott Magelssen, ‘Introduction’, in: Scott Magelssen and
Rhona Justice-Malloy, eds., Enacting History, PDF e-book (Tuscaloosa 2011) q. v. 8
144
Peter Burke, ‘Co-memorations. Performing the Past’, in: Karin Tilmans, Frank van Vree and Jay
Winter, eds., Performing the Past. Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe (Amsterdam 2010)
105-118, q.v. 105-106.
145
De Groot, ‘Consuming History, 105.
146
M. C. Bishop ‘Re-enactment and Living History - Issues about Authenticity’, in: N. Mills, ed.,
Presenting the Romans: Interpreting the Frontiers of the Roman Empire World Heritage Site (Woodbridge
2013) 25.
147
148
De Groot, Consuming History, 114, cf. Jordanova, History in Practice, 90.
50
Second, historical re-enactment with all its paraphernalia strives to attain a kind of
hyper-authenticity and therefore, to create a degree of credibility necessary for viewers to
slip back to the past. Here, the selection of the location is of keen importance. 149 The
landscape of the Limes, reconstructed or ruined, forms the ‘authentic’ scene for the
historical re-enactment which, in turn, animates the landscape. The physical linkage
between the real historical locale and the costumed performance induces historical
empathy between re-enactors and the historical figures they impersonate and creates a
staged-authentic atmosphere for both participants and viewers. 150 For such reasons, the
performing of the campaign of Caracalla one thousand eight hundred years afterwards,
which I observed in the summer of 2013, chose to follow the most original possible route
that the troops of the Roman emperor were supposed to have followed.
Third, historical re-enactment increases the intensity of the visitors’ and onlookers’
experience of the past. Visitors are not separated as in the proscenium theatre, but like in
the ‘street theatre’, they can follow the enactors or take a walk-on part in the
performance. 151
But the greatest value of re-enactment is in manufacturing ancient equipment and in
testing it by practical use. 152 As I was told, many members of re-enactment societies
spend many hours in finding out details about the Roman military life and equipment.
During the re-enactment expedition that I observed, military as well as culinary
equipment—as much of the food we ate—were supposed to be ‘Roman’. Roman
historical re-enactment with the actual use of everyday tools and crafts gives researchers
the chance to study, for instance, clothes, tools and military equipment of the Roman
times, games that children played or food that people ate and to test their truthfulness—
something that has rarely ever been a topic of academic research. 153
There are also some adverse sides in the practice of re-enactment. Re-enactment
reinforces affect over historical events and structures. It is a psychological more than a
historical activity. There is no director and the enactors are free to follow their own
instinct or the disposition of the moment. The stress is on personal experience and
entertainment of the participants as well as of the spectators rather than on the past
events.
149
Garden, ‘Living with landscapes of Heritage’, 199; De Groot, Consuming History, 113.
150
De Groot, Consuming History, 113.
151
Scott Magelssen, Living History Museums, Undoing History through Performance (Lanham /
Plymouth 2007) 104.
152
Bishop, ‘Re-enactment and Living History- Issues about Authenticity’, 27.
153
Ibidem., 27.
51
In historical re-enactment past and present are confused. On the one hand, it stresses
the difference between the present and the past but, on the other, the past is accorded with
a coat that can be worn or a code that can be adopted. 154 It avoids the fragmentation and
the complexity of historical records and relegates facts to the background in favour of
complete, linear and entertaining stories. 155 In other words, while historical re-enactment
attempts at a meticulous reference to the past, its relationship with the actual past is
tenuous and superficial.
Moreover, re-enactment of remoter historical periods, such as the Roman antiquity,
involves a great deal of improvisation and reproduction of popular stereotypes shaped by
historical readings, by a plethora of popular historical films, by visits to museums and by
history classes or lectures within the Western educational system with all the distortions
that these stereotypes may carry. The re-enacted event or situation is simply irrecoverable
just as a lost Roman building, and therefore any attempt at replaying it is condemned to
be inauthentic.
Re-enactment is primarily an entertaining leisure-time pursuit practiced by
individuals, the majority of whom are decidedly recurrent, ‘obsessive leisure
participants’, according to De Groot. 156 It is a product of the heritage industry that does
not itself provide historical knowledge. However, it can be an educative stimulus: when
artistically and carefully performed, it triggers the imagination of onlookers and
especially children, who, in truth, run after costumed enactors, and consequently might
awaken their interest in history. It also opens up new terrains of research by securing
popularity and thereby financial means.
Having referred to the advantages and disadvantages of historical re-enactment, I will
analyse Roman battle re-enactment at the Limes.
Limes Cicerones, Corbulo, Ala Batavorum, Legio Secunda Augusta, Pax Romana, are
only some of the dozen or so re-enactment societies that are active in archaeological
parks and museums along the Limes in Germany and the Netherlands and aim to revive
the Roman past for time-travellers, fun-seekers, day-trippers, sightseeing-hunters as well
as history fans.
Re-enactors want to experience the past by ‘doing it exactly as the Romans did it’ as a
participant once told me in an exclamation of enthusiasm. But is ‘exactly’ realistic and
154
De Groot, Consuming History, 105-106.
155
Ibidem., 106.
156
Ibidem., 105-6.
52
possible? I still remember him running back to take the spear that he had forgotten.
Another participant was obsessively refusing to take off a small piece of his heavy
‘Roman’ military uniform although he could hardly march anymore, because otherwise
he would break his resolution to emulate to reality. In the end, he collapsed. Was that
because his equipment was not so authentic? Or because he was an inauthentic Roman
soldier? Though Roman combat re-enactors strive to imitate Roman personages, they are
people of the twenty-first and not of the first or second centuries and as Bishop points
they are not native speakers of Latin and cannot dispose of their modern lifestyle and the
obsession with health-and-safety measures which most likely did not bother the men of
the Roman army. 157
Though re-enactors do not intend to fool people that they are accurate representations
of historical figures, they are cultural actors and important builders of popular stereotypes
with which the public interprets the Roman past along the Limes. Re-enactors take over
an authoritative role in a certain public construction of the past and negotiate
meanings. 158 They consider their interpretation to be a verisimilar and legitimate way of
displaying the past. Their aim is to experience the past themselves and make it vivid for
the viewers or to escape from the present and the everyday routine. Here are some typical
answers that re-enactors gave to me, when I asked them why they participate:
‘I want to know how they managed to march’, a young boy told me.
‘It’s a nice weekend excursion’, according to a lady who was a judge in real life.
‘I’m passionate about history’, said a teacher of Latin, who was trying to practice
Latin in a bid to more authenticity.
There was also a student of history who found historical re-enactment more exciting
than studying in the library, because this kind of history offers ‘images—hyper-
realities—in place of facts, where the old becomes more palpable than the here-and-now’,
as Raphael Samuel had noticed in the Theatres of Memory. 159 They all desired or strove
to lose themselves in historicity.
Re-enactors stage a story related to the Roman past as a spectacle intended to delight
themselves and their audiences, who are generally on holiday, but they do not teach
Roman history. The public gets captured by the spectacle of the re-enactment and their
157
Bishop, ‘Re-enactment and Living History - Issues about Authenticity’, 23-25.
158
De Groot, ‘Empathy and Enfranchisement: Popular Histories’, 394.
159
Samuel, Theatres of Memory, 195
53
learning and self-creativity is stunted by the presentation. 160 Historical re-enactment is
therefore, a product of heritage industry and a helpful tool for encouraging further
acquaintance with history and pursuit of historical knowledge and by no means a mode of
historiography. This entails another level of intellectual engagement and another dynamic
between knowers and learners.
Fig.10. The reconstructed Roman barge in Woerden, the Netherlands. (My photo).
Apart from re-enactment there are also other methods of providing a living
experience of the past for heritage tourists at the Limes. A relatively recent practice is the
‘hands–on’ experience. The ‘Do not touch’ label is not any longer common in museum
halls and heritage sites and people are not only allowed to touch but also to take
‘authentic’ artefacts, usually of secondary importance, in their hands and examine them.
In the Limesmuseum in Aalen, the visitor will find a box with replicated items before the
exit. Similarly, in the Domplein in Utrecht there is a box right by the entrance with
findings from the Roman period that visitors are encouraged to examine. Museums
prepare loan boxes for schools containing authentic Roman material as well as replicas so
that schoolchildren can have a temporary mini-museum at their disposal. 161
160
Tim Copeland, ‘Presenting Archaeology to the Public: Constructing insights on-site’, in: Nick
Merriman, ed., Public Archaeology (London/ New York 2004) 132-144, q.v. 142.
161
Merriman‚ ‘Involving the public in museum archaeology’, 95, cf. Dippon, Lernort UNESCO –
Welterbe, 138.
54
Children are invited to play games that Roman children used to play. In Saalburg
castle, for example, I saw children playing ‘Roman games’ under the supervision of
period-costumed museum staff and the whole scene was a historical make-believe
exercise. Another popular activity, which I have attended, is to give children the chance
to dig in a sandbag and as young archaeologists ‘excavate’ purposefully hidden
fragments of Roman items.
Storytelling is another compelling and appealing way of capturing younger visitors.
In situ storytelling is instructive and can leave lasting memories. Using historical sources
we can reconstruct and tell the story of a soldier’s family, his friends, his daily life and
his duties at the frontier.
Similar to storytelling but more theatrical is the ‘first-person interpretation’, a
situation in which the performer acting as a personage from the past talks to the audience,
for instance, a disguised Roman soldier, who narrates in the first person present tense the
life of a soldier (‘himself’) at the Limes. The ‘first-person interpretation’ often involves
improvisation. Because the interpreter is supposed to live in the past, connection with the
here-and-now, unlike in ‘third-person interpretation’, remains problematic. 162
The ‘third-person interpretation’ is performed by a present-day individual, often in
historical costume, who interprets the life and the practices of ‘period’ people using third
person past tense. In this case the audience is engaged in an interactive process, which
stimulates new ways of learning.
Besides visitors who go to the Limes fascinated by the Roman past there are people
who prefer to combine some historical information with countryside recreation and
others who just go for the latter. Heritage walking and cycling routes have been
developed for people who prefer to experience cultural heritage in a more active way.
These routes are not only instruments of recapturing the past but also recreational paths
that combine culture and nature.
A Roman barge with rowing rig found in Leidsche Rijn in 1997, known as ‘Meern 1’,
(now gracing Castellum Hoge Woerd in Utrecht) as well as the Roman punt, known as
‘Meern 6’, have been reconstructed and visitors can enjoy sailing through the canals of
the Dutch town of Woerden (Fig. 10.). 163 Historical walking, riding or sailing along the
Roman frontiers using modern means of transport (a bus line operates along Hadian’s
162
Magelssen, Living History Museums, xxii- xxiii, cf. De Groot, Consuming History, 116.
163
Stichting Romeins Schip Woerden, http://romeinsschipwoerden.nl/onze-schepen/ (accessed 13-1-
2016).
55
Wall) or historical ones (in the future we may also see reconstructed Roman carriages)
offer ways to enjoy the landscape or to retrace the footsteps of the past.
Fig. 11. A reconstructed Roman tower in

Utrecht, the Netherlands. On the road the signs of
Roman helmets (in the detail photo) are signifiers
of the Roman troops. (My photos).
Commemorating the Roman past

The act of commemorating is an integral part of the heritage practice somewhat
entertaining but with political implications. The age-old tradition of celebrating
centenaries of somewhat more recent historical events has already been extended to
include millenaries, to celebrate events of the more distant past. Indeed, the re-enactment
activity that I observed was actually such a performance, meant to commemorate one
thousand eight hundred years from emperor Caracalla’s campaign against Germania
Magna in 213. The participants in such commemorative practices are mainly volunteers
of a local re-enactment society, although other re-enactment societies may be invited to
perform as well.
Examples of somewhat more official commemorations are the jubilees that took place
in the Dutch city of Nijmegen in 1955 and again in 2000 to celebrate the granting of
56
Roman city rights to Ulpia Noviomagus Batavorum by the Roman emperor Trajan,
although the exact year of the original event is not even known. 164
These kinds of commemorations are concerned more with what people or official
organisers believe or understand to have happened in the past and less with what actually
happened. 165 Certainly, nobody can seriously argue that commemorations of such remote
events could possibly re-activate any individual or group memories, as they go back
almost two thousand years. But they do buttress what Assmann calls ‘cultural memory’,
which in the case of the Western world is grounded in images, symbols, texts and
representations that go back to classical and biblical authors. 166
Commemorative practices may have a historical event as a point of departure, but
they are often used for political ends as it happened with the erection of the
Hermannsdenkmal during the Second German Empire. Although in that case the
historical frame of reference was the battle of the Teutoburg Forest, the monument was
meant to reinforce the historical continuity of the German nation and to contribute to the
construction of a German cultural and national identity rather than to explain the
historical event and its consequences in the Roman antiquity and the zone of the Limes.
In this respect, commemorations may depart from the past but they refer to the here and
now.
Moreover, the consecutive reanimation of remote events may canonise an invented or
fake tradition. The participants in the commemorative performance of Caracalla’s
campaign did not recall any memories of the original event, but they hoped that their
performance would provide memories and clichés for a future anniversary. Without
arguing that they created an accurate window into the moment represented, they desired
to contribute to a better—more canonical and more authentic—performance in the future.
Commemorative performances of events that are themselves lost in the mists of time
have the capacity to misrepresent the past, or to shape ‘new’ historical information.
Precisely because these performances reach wide audiences, historians should be aware
of such insidious developments.
Conclusion: The Limes as a locus of public history and public archaeology

Let us now turn to the repercussions which all these practices and activities have on the
organisation of the Limes as a Lernort of history. As I said in the beginning of this paper
164
Museum Het Valkhof, Nijmegen, Oudste Stad van Nederland, 6.
165
Burke, ‘Co-memorations. Performing the Past’, 107.
166
Assmann, ‘Globalisation, Universalism, and the Erosion of Cultural Memory’, 122.
57
(page 9), historical knowledge requires intellectual engagement, whereby information is
necessary, but critical abilities such as understanding, analysing, insight and explanation
are crucial.
Since most of the sites are situated in the countryside, they are mostly intended for
and visited by the public on holiday or during weekend excursions or daytrips. People get
a glimpse of the site, admire the remains, attend re-enactment activities, let the children
play or ‘excavate’, consume ‘period’ products and then go for a pick-nick or to a nearby
café. Thus, the past becomes part of their present time, immediate and available and the
whole process is far from being an intellectual engagement.
Yet we cannot ignore that history becomes more accessible, more efficacious and
more popular through heritage and as Samuel had noticed much less megalomaniac than
the abstracted versions of ‘scientific history’ taught in the academy. A great variety of
means is used by the heritage institutions at the Limes to hand on information and engage
the public: symposia and workshops, journals (e.g. Der Limes), folders and leaflets with
the latest information, maps for tours and outdoor activities, websites and apps (e.g.
Tijdreis Domplein). Visits of schoolchildren to the Limes museums and archaeological
parks are often part of creative classroom projects and activities.
Summarising, I would prefer to name the Limes not a Lernort of history but a prime
locus of what Jordanova defined as public history. It would be a mistake to ignore that as
well as to present visits only in terms of a ‘Roman history lesson’. The Limes functions
as a public history locus because the display of the remnants reaches wide audiences,
increases public awareness of the Roman antiquity and possibly stimulates a personal
engagement or further investigation. Without the heritage sites and the activities which
are organised there, the Limes would have been known only to a small group of
archaeologists and historians and a few individuals with a genuine love of (ancient)
history. The wider public would probably have no chance to encounter the history that
the Limes represents.
In this thesis I hope to have drawn a coherent picture of the Limes as a space where
tangible remains of the Roman past in the present European landscape are presented in a
way that enhances peoples’ acquaintance with ancient history and archaeology in the
more public sense of the words.
58
Summaries and Conclusion
This paper started with the argument that to get the story right matters and I hope that I
have demonstrated the importance of it. In an era where rapidity has substituted
reliability and quality has given way to quantity, heritage is undoubtedly a fast and easy
way to encounter the past. History has emerged as an attraction and heritage has become
the lens to look at it. Publics today develop their sense of the past mainly by watching,
listening, eating, smelling, playing or fighting in the open field of a heritage site and
secondarily, or even incidentally by reading or studying.
Considering the three main themes of this paper—ancient history, heritage
presentation and its interface with history—I would say that the heritage site of the Limes
focuses attention on the visual representation and personal experience of the past and
offers a great variety of popular activities that are meant as education, entertainment and
leisure-time recreation. When it comes to the displays, some deficiencies are worth
mentioning: the dreadfulness of the (ancient) warfare is amplified; the focus on the
Roman army is quite theatrical and fairly disproportionate to the Limes history, which
was not only military; political, social and economic issues that played in the periphery
of the Roman Empire but also the reception of the Limes in the course of centuries are
either decreased or neglected.
The heritage phenomenon, like the Roman god Janus, has two faces. On the one hand,
it offers miscellaneous images, experiences, spectacles and stories, it triggers emotions
and memories, it promises accuracy, authenticity, simplicity, innocence, effortless and
speedy learning, leisure-time entertainment and countryside recreation, all-in-one.
On the other hand, however, heritage integrates and displays an element of history,
has opened up the interest of the lay public in the past and has democratised the
engagement with history. Therefore, heritage has brought history and archaeology—the
main disciplines of the past—to the foreground. Because we live in knowledge-based
societies, where laypersons have the power to exercise agency in political and financial
decisions, but we cannot expect that everyone would study history and would become a
historian, it is crucial and desirable that experts approach the citizens, enrich their sense
of the past and provide them with tools to address present and future issues. In this sense
heritage is a useful tool in the hands of historians and archaeologists in order not to
patronise the information transmitted but to secure the integrity of it.
By considering the Roman Limes we can draw inferences for the relevance of ancient
history to universal issues, such as mingling of nations, immigration policies, the
59
limitations of military solutions, the creation of enemies and frontiers. As a place
reminiscent of exclusion and inclusion simultaneously the Roman Limes, within the
frames of UNESCO’s objectives, provides a case to help us think about ideas of
toleration, respect and cooperation among different communities. More precisely, the
study of the Limes could be useful for fuelling the current European debate about
opening, closing, patrolling or controlling frontiers.
Heritage with its ecumenical character has internationalised concerns about the past.
Even if these concerns are, as Lowenthal quite pejoratively argues, crisis driven, the point
is that people realise that the past, whether in Syria or in Japan, matters.
The discursive space between heritage practices and historical events is haunted by
issues of politics, aesthetics and clashes between formal education and popular leisure-
time activities. This very space however is one of potential and cooperation between the
historical discipline and the heritage practice and not of distortion or damage. At least not,
if historians feel more comfortable with the idea that heritage is a major cultural force
that communicates a sense of the past to wide audiences. And on the other end, if
heritage practices remain within the frames of historical records and events.
Recently I overheard a guide in a heritage site telling to a group of cultural tourists
that more important than the facts are the stories behind the facts or, in other words,
joyful tales and hilarious anecdotes are more amusing than historical information and
knowledge. But then history becomes story and we miss the crossroads where history and
heritage should meet.
60
Appendix
Glossary
Auxiliary troops: regiments of the Roman army consisted of 500 to 1000 men, usually
recruited from the native communities of the provinces.
Bilbao effect: the effect that the building of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao by
Frank Gehry had in the sleepy, former industrial city of Bilbao, which henceforth was
transformed into a popular and lively cultural destination.
Bratislava Group: group of scientists and experts from the countries where sections
of the Roman frontiers are found. The group is named after the Slovakian capital
Bratislava, where its first meeting took place in 2003. Among its aims is to create a
database and to set a management plan for the entirety of the Roman frontiers in Europe,
Middle East and North Africa and to work towards the inclusion of all separate national
sections of the Roman frontiers into the WHS ‘Frontiers of the Roman Empire’.
Civitas: administrative district of small autochthone communities in the provinces
(e.g. civitas Batavorum).
Colony (colonia): a Roman city in Italy or in the provinces founded initially for the
veterans of the Roman army. Its native inhabitants were also Roman citizens. The
foundation of colonies began in the republican era but continued into the imperial. Many
modern European cities originated as Roman colonies (e.g. Turin, Cologne).
Deutsche Limeskommission: the organisation for the protection, preservation and
presentation of the German Limes established in 2003 by those German federal states that
host remnants of the Upper German and Raetian Limes.
Germania Inferior: a Roman province founded in 85 CE, stretching from Katwijk on
the North Sea to the Ahr Valley in Germany and southwards up to Tongeren in Belgium.
Under Diocletian it was renamed Germania Secunda.
Germania Magna: the area north of the Danube and east of the Rhine where the
unconquered Germanic tribes lived.
Germania Superior: a Roman province founded in 85 CE, extending from the Ahr
Valley south of Bonn to the area east of the Schwäbisch Alb and southwards to Lake
Geneva. At the end of the third century it was divided in Germania Prima and Maxima
Sequanorum.
Legion: the backbone of the Roman army consisted of about 5000 men, who were
Roman citizens, though not necessarily from Italy.
61
Limitanei: permanent troops in the frontiers in the late Roman period.
Palisade: a fence of timber posts driven into the ground around forts and towers, along
the Limes and at the outer side of the roads that connected these fortifications.
Raetia: a Roman province founded in 85 CE, comprising areas that today are found in
Switzerland, south Germany and Austria. The Raetian Limes stretch in the German federal
states of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg.
Stichting Romeinse Limes Nederland: Dutch organisation established in 2013 by
various local, regional and national Dutch bodies with the aim to make the history of the
Limes widely known. It organizes meetings, activities and projects along the Dutch Limes.
Tentative List: an inventory of those properties which a State party of UNESCO
intends to submit for nomination.
Teufelsmauer: vulgar name by which the Roman wall along the Raetian Limes was
known (maybe from the German words Teut-Phals-Mauer, which mean Teutonic palisade
wall).
Vicus: a small civil settlement adjacent to a military fort, built mainly for the families
of the soldiers and for those craftsmen and traders who provided goods and services to the
army. Most of these settlements outlived the abandonment of the forts and eventually
developed into towns. Settlements adjacent to legionary fortresses were called canabae
legionis and were under the control of the camp.
62
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Between History and Heritage:

STUDENT: SORIAN VERTERIUS

Abbreviations .............................................................................................................................. vii

Preface ....................................................................................................................................... viii

Introduction: The Heritage Phenomenon ...................................................................................... 1

Case study ................................................................................................................................. 4

Methods of investigation .......................................................................................................... 5

Structure and outline ................................................................................................................. 6

Part I Theoretical framework: Heritage and the Past .................................................................... 7

Why is heritage important......................................................................................................... 8

The role of public history and public archaeology ................................................................. 10

Part II The Limes in the Roman Period ...................................................................................... 13

The word limes........................................................................................................................ 14

Genesis of the Limes zone ...................................................................................................... 16

The Limes as ‘contact zone’ between peoples ........................................................................ 22

Conclusion: the function of the Limes .................................................................................... 25

Part III Uncovering the Limes .................................................................................................... 27

The interpretation of the Limes through the ages ................................................................... 27

The Limes as WHS ................................................................................................................. 32

The heritage values of the Limes ............................................................................................ 35

Low visibility—authenticity ................................................................................................... 38

Part IV The Limes: a Lernort of History? .................................................................................. 46

The role of the adjacent museums .......................................................................................... 47

Commemorating the Roman past............................................................................................ 56

Summaries and Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 59

Cover image: Metal demarcation of the Limes fort at Domstraat, Cover

‘To get the story right matters’ (John Tosh).

Structure and outline

Why is heritage important

The role of public history and public archaeology

The word limes

Genesis of the Limes zone

The Limes as ‘contact zone’ between peoples

Conclusion: the function of the Limes

The interpretation of the Limes through the ages

The Limes as WHS

The heritage values of the Limes

Many visualisation methods fall within the iconographical category, building

Fig. 7. Representation of a soldier’s everyday occupations inside the partially reconstructed

Fig. 8. Visualisation of a fort’s moats in Ruffenhofen, Germany. Source: Matthias Pausch,

The role of the adjacent museums

Re-enactment and other methods of experiencing history

Fig. 11. A reconstructed Roman tower in

Commemorating the Roman past

Conclusion: The Limes as a locus of public history and public archaeology

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