Living on the Edge

A wall or a road? A remote sensing-based investigation of fortifications on Rome's eastern frontier

“…Poidebard was praised by his contemporaries for his technical achievement and his wideranging discoveries (Dussaud 1934;Jones 1934;Hopkins 1935), and his findings helped inspire a long history of scholarship that explored dimensions of Roman military, economic and political policies along its eastern periphery (e.g. Isaac 1990;Kennedy & Braund 1996;Fisher 2011;de Jong & Palermo 2018). Nonetheless, many scholars have argued that the forts could not have functioned as a wall because they were located too far apart from one another to prevent passage into the province.…”

“…Since the 1930s, historians and archaeologists have debated the strategic or political purpose of this system of fortifications (e.g. Graf 1978;Liebeschuetz 2007;de Jong & Palermo 2018), but few scholars have questioned Poidebard's basic observation that there was a line of forts defining the eastern Roman frontier. This article presents the results of a regional-scale remote sensing-based survey utilising declassified CORONA and HEXAGON spy satellite imagery from the 1960s and 1970s (Casana 2020a & b), which demonstrate there are far more forts than previously recognised, extending over a much larger region.…”