Linda ellis
As the geographer D. B. Knight has stated, “in a sense, territory is not; it becomes, for territory itself is passive, and it is human beliefs and actions that give territory meaning.”780 781 territories, provinces, nations, or whatever designation we choose, are spatial patterns on the landscape and can be “produced” and “reproduced” as society, politics, and economics dictate, so that their boundaries become culturally generated “geographies of the mind.”782 every human group assigns a symbolic meaning to its landscape, which in itself is sufficiently powerful to give rise to conflict.
Since the late 1980s, the discipline of regional geography, and especially human (or cultural) geography, has witnessed a theoretical transformation. This philosophical renaissance analyzes “place” and “territory” and how human geography can study land categorization within the context of social theory.783 this study explores some ideas from the field of “new regional geography” and how they might assist our understanding of human relations, delimiting territorial boundaries, and defining place during late antiquity.784 this is a behavioral, rather than an ethno-linguistic, approach to understanding identity; socioeconomic relations are spatialized and cultural landscapes develop as a result of human practice. the criteria for identifying communities and their behavior, however, do not remain fixed; all human groupings and their geographical connections are “fluid” and metamorphose through time, as categories of relatedness (Roman vs. peregrine, for example) and their territoria encroach upon one other. The characterization of Late Antiquity as a “migration period,” the movements of peoples across space, is significantly symbolic of this geographic approach to identity.
A “place,” according to geographer R. J. Johnston,785 is a set of institutionalized relationships composed of (1) the geophysical environment, (2) the built environment, and (3) the population. If we step back momentarily from the idea of a place being fixed in geographic space, we might notice that places, like cultural identity, are also mutable and quixotic. With the benefit of centuries of historical and archaeological evidence, scholars of late Antiquity are in a unique position to analyze how and why cities and provinces were places that were repeatedly transformed, why the Romans were preoccupied with the “betweenness”786 of space, and the perceived danger so-called “barbarians” posed in turning a Roman “place” into a state of “placelessness.”
The cultural-geographic example used here is the Roman province of Scythia Minor (modern Dobrudja in southeastern Romania), from the end of the Dacian wars (106 CE) to the migrations of the Slavs at the start of the seventh century. Scythia Minor was defined by two geomorphological borders: the Black Sea to the east and the final stretch of the lower Danube river on the west and north. Over the course of the Romano-Byzantine period, the area was divided into overlapping native, Greek, and Roman cultural-political domains: (1) The Black Sea coastline had a string of well-established Greek cities eventually taken over by Roman imperial interests; (2) local, Iron-Age populations occupied the interior hinterland, into which the Greeks rarely ventured but where the Romans colonized and established new cities; and (3) the Danube was a land-based frontier that was porous to human migration and therefore needed constant supervision by military bases established by the Roman army and navy. The Roman establishment of Scythia Minor as a buffer zone with provincial limes, epitomizes Roman cenophobia (fear of new ideas), a natural apprehension of empty space beyond regularly occupied areas and their (un)known boundaries.
From Terra Nullius to Tropaeum Traiani
Necessary to the understanding of Roman-barbarian relations and the transformation of the landscape was Roman metageography itself, that is, how the empire defined, categorized, and utilized geographic space. Perhaps no more dramatic example of Roman identification and control over place was the establishment of Tropaeum Traiani (“Trajan’s Trophy”), near the modern-day village of Adamclisi in southeastern Romania. After the two wars with the Dacians (101-102, 105-106 CE), a military memorial complex consisting of a monument, altar, and mausoleum was completed ca. 109.787 Located 600 meters from Adamclisi and 1,500 meters from the triumphal monument is the fortified city of Tropaeum Traiani, built by Roman veterans of the wars, sustained for five centuries, and then finally abandoned after the Slavic invasions of 602.788
The betweenness of place that characterized the region surrounding Tropaeum Traiani—southeast of the Danube, west of the Black Sea coast, and north of Moesia— demanded a Roman response, a built environment, to this horror vacui, that was manifested in the construction of a massive enclosure wall fortified with 22 towers to define the city, the creation of new spaces for human activities on the landscape (including cemeteries, baths, quarries, aqueducts, and cultivation), and roads linking dissociated Roman communities.
The emperor Trajan (98-117) founded Tropaeum Traiani in a good agricultural zone, but inconveniently distant from a source of water and distant from river and maritime transportation—in other words, a veritable “non-place.”789 the Romans typically established cities at or near pre-existing population centers in conquered territories precisely because most people congregated within walking distance of available natural resources for survival. In scythia Minor, the Romans sensibly emplaced cities along the Danube, took over the Greek cities on the Black Sea coastline, and founded inland cities with easy access to water and trade routes (see map of Scythia Minor, Fig. 18.1). But “Trajan’s city” was founded on terra nova and was not a necessity for economic or geographic purposes. Unlike many other Roman cities that often were palimpsests emplaced on autochthonous communities, Tropaeum Traiani became a new place and assigned political identity in Trajan’s name.
In fact, the regional surveying program currently being undertaken by the author has revealed that, in order to provide safe water for tropaeum traiani, an abstruse network of subterranean aqueducts permeated the surrounding landscape. Significantly then, a new territorium, a new ecology, and a vertical geography beneath and above the ground, also were being created from no pre-existing support system. No longer terra nullius, the empire created new places for human interaction, and Roman identity, on the landscape: aqueducts, quarries, basilicas, baths, and burial places.
The conflict between Roman forces and the Dacian-Sarmatian-Germanic coalition on the Adamclisi plain was one of the bloodiest battles, with an immense loss of life, of any Roman war. this complex at tropaeum traiani, which endured throughout Late Antiquity, was unequivocally Trajan’s political footprint on the
Figure 18.1 Map of Scythia Minor showing Greek and Roman cities and major trade routes.
Landscape. The trophy monument could be seen from all directions—even from the Danube on unusually clear days—and thus provided three inescapable messages from the empire. To the Roman military, “Trajan’s Trophy” became a conflation of memoria and place—a Roman Iwo Jima. To the colonists, the city and its fortified walls provided land, water, and above all security. And to foreign peregrini, and potential enemies of Rome, who crossed the danube and entered the empire via scythia Minor, the monument with its graphic scenes of victory over barbarians gave an unambiguous warning.
But barbarian raids in this region continued to threaten the edge of empire. periodic imperial reconstruction and building programs not only re-established Roman control over a region or city but also emplaced another emperor’s imprint, and thus identity, on the landscape. The city was attacked again in the latter half of the third century by the Carpi (a Dacian people in Moldavia) in alliance with the Goths. Much of the city was destroyed.
At the beginning of the fourth century, under the co-emperors Constantine I (306-337) and Licinius (308-324), Tropaeum Traiani was rebuilt and renamed
Civitas Tropaeensium, as indicated by a commemorative inscription dating to 316 and discovered by the east gate of the city:
By the defenders of Roman security and liberty, our lords Flavius Valerius Constantinus and Licinianus Licinius, pious, happy, and eternal Augustuses, by whose virtue and wisdom peoples of barbarian gentes everywhere have been defeated in order to establish the oversight of the frontier, the Civitas Tropaeensium was built, with the work happily undertaken from the foundations. The praetorian prefects [were] the vir clarissimus petronius anianus and the vir perfectissimus lulius lulianus, always devoted to the divine will of these [emperors].11
Although Trajan’s name disappeared from the city and its landscape, imperial identity continued uninterrupted.
After economic growth during the fourth century, tropaeum traiani faced both economic and cultural decline, as did the province of scythia Minor as a whole, in the fifth century due to both poor fiscal conditions and repeated attacks by the Huns. But at the end of the fifth century and continuing into the latter half of the sixth century, during the reigns of the emperors Anastasius (491-518) and Justinian (527-565), the city began to flourish again, becoming an important civil and religious center. This development is quite apparent in the built environment through the construction of both public and religious buildings: at tropaeum traiani, archaeological excavations have revealed five basilicas built within the city walls during this time frame.
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