Can we consider dykes as ‘deeds’: memorable and efficacious for their creation and placement more than their longevity of use? This paper presents a new framework for interpreting the significance and mnemonics of dyke-building in early medieval Britain, focusing on the process of rampart construction, their appropriation of striking landmarks and ancient monuments, and strategies of place-naming. Together, this evidence contests dykes as either purely military/ territorial constructions or conversely as royal projects whose ideological motives were focused on promoting the authority, prestige and fame their creators. Instead, I suggest that linear earthworks fostered and transformed mobilities and social memories through their construction and implementation. This approach is explored in relation to archaeological evidence for the largest of Britain’s linear earthworks – Offa’s Dyke and Wat’s Dyke – as well as smaller-scale linear earthworks in the Anglo-Welsh borderlands, East Anglia and southern England. As complex monuments built to transform landscapes and control movement through them, I present the case that linear monuments created a genealogical and legendary ‘fame’ as a strategy of memory-making which worked to articulate and project the identities of kings and kingdoms beyond their core territories into contested frontier zones.
Rethinking the building of linear earthworks
I review important new work that identifies the importance of the utilising the concept of chaîne opératoire to inform the process of construction of early medieval linear earthworks in socio-political, economic, territorial and military terms and specifically in projecting this process across the landscape and into memory. This involves challenging the persistent misunderstanding of the scale and character of work involved in the following key processes:
- The clearance of vegetation
- Construction of counterscarp banks
- Ditch digging and elements
- Quarry ditches and scoops
- Earth-moving for landscaping
- Creating banks
- Possible revetments, walls and palisades
- Constructing gateways
- Installing towers on, in front and behind linear earthworks
- Building and maintaining beacons
- Establishing and maintain routes along and across linear earthworks
- Fortlets and settlements
A second element of understanding linear earthwork building is further consideration of the adjusted-segmented design of linear earthworks (as identified by Ray and Bapty 2016) as part of the chaîne opératoire of design-construction-use of these monuments. Rather than a unique element of Offa’s Dyke, I not only identify further earthworks where this construction method was used, but I also consider how it reveals the organisation and performance of earthwork building.
Placement in the landscape
Having considered the process and construction of building early medieval linear earthworks, we now move to consider their landscape placement, I focus on four points regarding how they were installed to operate in relation to observing and controlling mobility in the early medieval landscape, and again projecting social memories of their buildings onto those navigating the landscape on local, regional and national scales:
- Strategies of surveillance
- Impeding and directing biaxial movement
- The neglected hydraulics of early medieval linear earthworks on multiple scales
- The appropriation of pre-existing sacred geographies and places of assembly by early medieval linear earthworks
Placing and naming: creating fame
The third strand of the argument is to reconsidering early medieval ‘dykes as deeds’ by rethinking place-names as a strategy for creating fame. There are two elements to consider here:
- Mythologising the monuments themselves through naming practices and narratives of construction;
- Mythologising the landscape contexts of the linear earthworks through naming practices associated with the course and traversing of dykes.
Wat’s Dyke as a case study
Briefly, I will apply this approach to rethinking Britain’s third longest linear monument (behind Offa’s Dyke and Hadrian’s Wall) as a case study, considering each of these three strands to consider how the monument might have operated as a ‘deed’ which asserted and constituted social memories of their creators and their claims to identity, power and history through the performance and placement of the construction and subsequent use to choreograph mobility over land and water, as well as through its naming.
Conclusion
Together, this mnemonic approach to early medieval linear earthworks helps us to shift away from monofunctional explanations and to navigate between contrived oppositional stances that perceive these earthworks as military and territorial barriers or alternatively as symbolic expressions of kingship and political hegemony. Instead, through a range of new research on the dating, construction, landscape placement and broader historical and archaeological contexts of linear earthworks of the 5th-9th centuries AD, we can identify their roles in the manipulation and projection of social memories as integral to strategies for the construction and use over the short-term, as well as dykes’ longer legacy and remembrance in the British landscape.
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Biograhy
Howard Williams is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Chester and researches public archaeology and archaeologies of death and memory. He co-convenes the Offa’s Dyke Collaboratory - https://offaswatsdyke.wordpress.com/ - co-edits the Offa’s Dyke Journal (2019-present: http://revistas.jasarqueologia.es/index.php/odjournal/index) and writes an academic blog Archaeodeath: https://howardwilliamsblog.wordpress.com/ . Email: howard.williams@chester.ac.uk