By Adrián MaldonadoThere’s been a lot of commentary over the weekend on the effect of two years of the Trump presidency. One overlooked aspect of this is the surprising amount of archaeology-related activism that has arisen over the same...
There’s been a lot of commentary over the weekend on the effect of two years of the Trump presidency. One overlooked aspect of this is the surprising amount of archaeology-related activism that has arisen over the same period. From peer-reviewed takedowns of populism to fact-checking Trump’s theory of ‘wheels and walls’, archaeology has become one of the most consistent methods used to troll Trump.
The most interesting part about this is that it is not only archaeologists who are archaeotrolling Trump. The best example of this is the way journalists have begun reading up on the famous border walls of history. They have not done so of their own volition, of course, but because of Trump’s repeated misuse of ancient monuments to lend justification to one of his signature campaign promises. It is one of the most obvious ways in which archaeology is being dragged into current events, and thus deserves comment as ‘pop culture’ archaeology.
Trump’s argument for the wall has increasingly relied on citing historical walls, both specific (the Great Wall of China) and nonspecific (“medieval”), as precedent. It is the kind of ‘common sense’ argument that sounds legit as long as you don’t think about it. In response, several news sources have found themselves rushing to slap together short pieces on famous historical walls (usually just the ‘big three’: Great Wall, Hadrian’s, and Berlin), in which some light Wikipedia research is dressed up as fact-checking. But even a cursory reading of past border walls quickly allows journalists to troll Trump’s intentions. Archaeology is powerful this way.
Famous walls of history
Notably, several scholars of archaeology, anthropology and history have also taken part in this trend, whether by being cited in these pieces, or having original pieces published in news outlets. Denigrating Trump’s Wall using facts and a long-term perspective is now a whole subgenre of political commentary and is allowing archaeology to take centre-stage in matters of global import.
However, it should also be clear by now that the combined heft of these pieces have not remotely dissuaded Trump or his base from believing that the Wall is a good idea. So this subgenre of journalism is due a bit of source criticism. Here follows a preliminary, non-scientific survey of online news and commentary on ‘famous walls of history’ in light of the Trump Wall.
I am choosing here to divide the genre into two groups – those led by journalists (including some with academic credentials, but whose main output is through an online periodical) and those led by academics (whether in a blog or periodical). This is to roughly distinguish between public archaeology (in which experts share knowledge for public benefit), and the reception of archaeology by the public (in this case, journalists).
Journalist-led
History via Google search (source)
Much of this work consists of little more than going through the ‘big three’ in turn, conflating three very different times and places in the assumption that a wall is a wall.
Why Trump’s comparison of his wall to the Great Wall of China makes no sense
8 March 2016 – early in 2016, when Trump was by no means the frontrunner in the Republican primaries, he began making outlandish comparisons between his wall and the Great Wall of China. In response, Michelle Ye Hee Lee put together a fact-checking piece for the Washington Post highlighting some unsavoury aspects of the famous world wonder. “Labor conditions were so appalling that some 400,000 people are estimated to have died building the wall…through most of Chinese history, the wall was a negative symbol of oppression, cruelty and death…the wall as a symbol of strength and resourcefulness is a part of the myth and misconception of its true history.”
11 December 2016 – long read by Thomas de Monchaux (design and architecture critic) for the New Yorker. Shows he’s accessed good scholarship on Hadrian’s Wall, pointing out all the ways its design shows it was not meant as a hard border. Concludes with some incisive archaeotrolling: “some distant Anglo-American memory of [Hadrian’s Wall] may help to explain the political power behind the idea of a wall—even as theories suggest that this wall’s purpose may have been very different, perhaps directly opposite, from that of the wall evoked by our President-elect.”
How Trump’s Wall compares to other famous walls
25 January 2017 – Cheap rundown of the ‘big three’ for BBC Newsbeat, featuring embarrassing graphics about which is the longest and the tallest with barely hidden phallic undertones, which I’m sure Trump would actually retweet.
Trump’s Wall vs the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall and the Berlin Wall
29 January 2017 – off-the-shelf roundup of the ‘big three’ again for a history news blog, including howlers like “Hadrian’s Wall was built as a defensive measure to keep out nomadic tribes, in this instance the Picts of Scotland”. (Fact-check: Scotland did not have ‘nomadic tribes’, nor was the wall built as a defensive measure against nomadism, nor did the Picts exist in the second century.)
The history of walls is long. Here’s where Donald Trump fits in
30 January 2017 – Time correspondent Olivia B. Waxman provides a very hazy history of no specific ancient walls, but does better in modern times. Notes that walls attract and bind communities of their own, as seen in the afterlife of the Berlin Wall. Sadly ends on the facile lesson that walls are some kind of inevitable social logic: “one thing is certain: walls are not going anywhere…it’s an impulse that’s only human.”
What can Scotland teach Donald Trump about walls?
2 Feb 2017 – featuring yours truly. I was approached by a reporter during this wave of wall histories for a lighthearted feature on BBC Scotland. The focus was on the lesser-known Antonine Wall, and marks its only appearance in this list. Abandoned by the Romans after little more than a generation, “The Antonine Wall is the epitome of a symbolic victory.”
The (anthropological) truth about walls
7 February 2017 – In a post for the Anthropology in Practice blog on Scientific American, Krystal D’Acosta uses a few ancient walls, but mostly Hadrian’s Wall, to troll Trump’s vision of a wall as a hard border. “As a concept, the idea of a wall suggests permanence, security and identity. Physical boundaries help define people by establishing a shared experience of place and time. But this is a very simplistic view of national barricades. It overlooks the ways in which these monuments function as sites of exchange, and the ways in which they generate their own experience of identity and place.” Negative points for, again, mistakenly making the Picts into Hadrian’s antagonists.
The fears that fueled an ancient border wall
26 April 2017 – decent history of Hadrian’s Wall by Carly Silver for the Smithsonian, with Trump slotted in as the lede. Featuring guest appearance by wallchaeologist Rob Collins, but despite expert advice still manages to make the mistake that Hadrian was fighting the Picts, who, again, did not exist yet. Valuable observation that it was fear, not strength, which fueled Hadrian.
What walls mean from Hadrian to Trump
2 May 2017 – another flying survey of walls through time from the BBC, but does well to cover the modern wall-mania sweeping the world beyond Trump. “Of course, walls remain practically rather useless barriers, rendered increasingly obsolete by new technologies like drones. Yet they clearly retain their psychological value as demarcations of a dream of purity, keeping out all those threats to self-identity.”
Building walls may have allowed civilization to flourish
5 October 2018 – National Geographic featured this interview with David Frye, author of Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick. Judging solely from this summary, it is clear the author equates wall-building with ‘civilization’, splitting peoples into ‘wallers’ and everyone else, denigrating those who didn’t build empires as the uncultured losers of history. In doing so, he ends up parroting the propaganda of emperors and autocrats through time.
Academic-led
Undergirding all the above commentary were the archaeologists and anthropologists who have weighed in, producing new pieces rather than waiting to be approached by journalists. Notable here is how early these voices began to weigh in, many well before Trump was elected president. Here in the ‘expert’ column I am including early career and student voices which have joined the fray.
How Trump’s Wall would trample hundreds of archaeological sites
21 March 2016 – One of the first to enter the field was public archaeologist Kristina Killgrove in her widely-read Forbes column. Here she drew attention to the violence the Wall would perpetrate upon indigenous heritage, a symbol of the ethnocentric agenda that embodied the Trump campaign.
The Wall: a monument to the nation-state
17 April 2016 – Maximilian Forte, Professor, Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University, for his Zero Anthropology blog – the densest academic tone of the pieces reviewed here, a rebuke against those that rail against Trump’s ‘fascism’ while ignoring the forces of globalisation and neoliberalism that brought us to Trump. Some alarming rhetoric about 'globalists’ and George Soros, though, and the 'Let’s watch and see’ conclusion certainly did not age well.
Hole(s) in the wall: Trump’s implausible solution to the problem of immigration
22 July 2016 - Rosemary Mitchell, Professor of Victorian Studies at Leeds Trinity University, punctures the myth that Hadrian’s Wall separated civilisation from barbaricum, but in fact acted as an “economic magnet for people and goods”, similar to the way the actual southern border in America currently acts. Negative points, and I can’t believe I have to say this again, because the wall is said to border onto the Picts, which, how many times can I say this, did not exist for the first two centuries in the life of Hadrian’s Wall.
For five millennia, politicians have proposed walls like Trump’s. They don’t work
29 July 2016 – Adam T. Smith, Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University, takes us straight back to Mesopotamia for some top-notch fact-based archaeotrolling, where “walls were spectacular failures…Barrier walls are not simply clumsy, imprecise solutions to problems of population movement, past and present; they also represent a catastrophic failure of political imagination endemic to totalitarian thinking.”
Archaeology in Trump’s America: borders, immigration, and revolutionary remembering
10 November 2016 – a fiery call to action from PhD candidate Patricia Markert, published on Binghamton University’s public archaeology blog, just days after the election in 2016. “Contemporary archaeology of the border opens spaces to critically engage those who fear undocumented migration in new conversations that include real people rather than abstract villains, foster empathy rather than hate, and lead to constructive conversations about immigration policy in our country…Trump’s discourse is one of forgetting, and a dangerous one at that. Archaeology is a discipline of remembering, and that may be one of the most revolutionary tools we have for the fight ahead.”
Trump, Brexit and the archaeology of exclusion
10 November 2016 – across the Atlantic, PhD candidate Cait Scott also submitted her take on the catastrophic politics of 2016 for her blog Archaeology Stories right after Trump’s election. Linking Trump’s unsubtle wall with Brexit’s conceptual walling off of Britain from Europe, she notes their symbolism is directed inward. “Imagined safety, though, is a seductive idea; the election of Trump and the Brexit referendum results demonstrate its power. The manipulation and misuse of immigration narratives by politicians legitimises and reinforces the desire in everyday people for this imagined safety.”
The Trump Wall in archaeological perspective
14 November 2016 – An archaeological volley written soon after the election in November 2016. Howard Williams, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Chester, argues that we can use history to understand Trump’s Wall, but we can also use Trump to help us understand archaeology. Extra credit for introducing the early medieval Offa’s Dyke, which rarely makes it into the discussion but may be one of the closest archaeological parallels to Trump’s Wall. “Was Offa’s hegemonic project incomplete or subverted once it was realised just how unsustainable it was as an enduring frontier work?” One of the few blogs cited here that has crossed over into academic literature, cited by Gardner in his archaeological reflections on Brexit.
Clovis anthropologist challenges Trump’s Wall
7 April 2017 - Manuel Peńa, in an editorial for the Fresno Bee, argues that we forget the past when we wall it off. “I happen to be a descendant of the colonists who first settled the Texas side of the river. We did not immigrate to this country: it migrated to us… the promotion of the wall is at base a symptom of the historical amnesia that defines a surging neo-nativist ideology. Besides denying the diverse origins of our nation, this nativism is of a piece with the ethnocentric/racial intolerance that rages through several European countries at this moment.”
How walls like Trump’s destroy the past and threaten the future
24 October 2017 - Andrew Roddick, Associate Professor of Anthropology, McMaster University submitted a post on The Conversation on the problems that come with walls throughout history. Archaeological perspective advises us “to carefully think about the material impact of fear and xenophobia…anthropologists and archaeologists working with contemporary migration issues demonstrate that the costs of such walls can have long-term unintended consequences, including an increase in violence and insecurity.”
Crossing between the Great Wall of China and the ‘Great’ Trump Wall
14 November 2017 – the only journal publication I’ll mention here as it is open access. Mimi Yang, Professor of Modern Languages and Asian Studies at Carthage College goes far beyond the usual explainer about the Great Wall of China, producing a meditation on the fundamental difference between the Great Wall as the violent establishment of a new empire, and Trump’s Wall as the dying cough of an imperial era. “The Trump Wall has its foundation cemented on fear, bigotry, and above all, fundamental intolerance for difference.”
How do the walls around the world function differently?
2 December 2018 – This is a student blog submitted as part of coursework for ANTH 100 at Vassar College, but credit for being one of the few to discuss the anthropology of modern walls. “Hungary and Slovenia are two countries with the region’s largest expanse of fences. …It is revealed that people living near these barriers often find that they serve little purpose and can be psychologically damaging.”
Hadrian’s Wall, education and the heritage presenced in US ‘security’ and immigration policy
5 December 2018 - A short case study by Chiara Bonacchi, Lecturer in Heritage at Stirling University. This snippet text-mines 1000 tweets mentioning Trump and Hadrian’s Wall, showing that the public forges links between them, even if only as defensive barriers and not as “places of encounter” as wallchaeologists might prefer. Notably, these tweets often refer to Brexit as well. “It is a wall that divides, but also connects regions and peoples who are experiencing populist nationalism today… it remains a powerful but contested image and heritage site, of great resonance in today’s world.”
Trump says medieval walls worked. They didn’t
10 January 2019 - In late 2018, Trump began mentioning nonspecific ‘medieval’ walls as proof that walls always work, prompting medievalists to enter the fray. Matthew Gabriele, Professor of Medieval Studies at Virginia Tech went straight to one of America’s leading newspapers. “[C]alling the proposed 700 to 1,200 mile border wall ‘medieval’ is deeply misleading because walls in the actual European Middle Ages simply did not work the way Trump apparently thinks they did. If anything, their true function may speak to Trump’s intentions: Poor tools of defense, medieval walls had more to do with reassuring those who lived inside them than with dividing self from other.”
11 January 2019 – Gabriele was soon joined by David Perry for CNN, reinforcing the point that Trump’s use of the term medieval is not just lazy, but shows how wall-logic appeals to those with the least historical awareness, and along the way, gets in some exquisite fact-based burns. “[T]he wall won’t work – not because it’s a throwback to imagined medieval barbarism, but because it’s a con.”
What works, and what doesn’t
It is clear from the above charts that the academic-led responses largely preceded the journalists’ interests, and have carried on continuously, responding dynamically as Trump shifts his narrative. It shows that archaeologists and anthropologists are actively fulfilling their responsibility for public education. In comparison, journalists really began to take interest when it was too late, in response to one of Trump’s first acts as president, the Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements executive order which formally directed the government to seek funding and design proposals for a physical barrier along the southern border.
And while this survey begins in 2016, archaeologists and anthropologists have been trolling the impulse to build border walls for years. For instance, on this very blog, I wrote an exasperated piece bemoaning the abuses of Hadrian’s Wall in the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum of 2014, as did Britain’s eminent wallchaeologist, Richard Hingley, for The Conversation. Long before 2014, the work of Laura McAtackney and many others around the Belfast ‘Peace Walls’ has shown the value of recording the human effects of walling people from one another in real time.
On the other side of the Atlantic, archaeotrolling the Border Wall takes us much further back to its first major fortification (fencification?) during the xenophobic Cheney presidency. No discussion of archaeotrolling is complete without mention of Jason de León’s Undocumented Migration Project, with its devastating revelations of the violence perpetrated by fortifying borders. Similarly, the Migrant Quilt Project materialises the human costs of a fortified border, promoting cooperation and understanding. David Taylor’s photography has documented the border’s transformation from imaginary line to irrational severing of living communities since 2007.
All these projects put the focus squarely on the people and communities terrorised by the Wall, but also their continued resistance to it. As activist archaeologist Randall McGuire put it in 2013, the wall unintentionally “enables agency that the builders did not imagine or desire, and crossers continually create new ways to transgress the barrier.”
‘Walled In’ by John Cuneo (source)
So what hasn’t worked? It is clear that despite decades of archaeotrolling border walls, dating back to the days when Trump was known only as a walking reminder of failed 80s economic policies, the urge to build them has not abated, and has in fact increased. Despite demonstrating “A Wall Is an Impractical, Expensive, and Ineffective Border Plan” way back in November 2016, here we are, still debating it two years into the Trump era.
The problem lies with walls’ own brutal physicality. We can academically deconstruct these ancient walls all we want, but we are at the same time always told that they are wonders to be marvelled at. The way they remain standing after millennia gives them an obviousness that is blinding. Their recurring role in history makes them seem inevitable, as several of the pieces listed here concluded. And even those with the best intentions, even a fair few of the experts listed above, are hoodwinked by the mythical quality of the stories that grow up around these walls – like the notion that Hadrian’s Wall was ever seen as the end of the Roman Empire, and that it was put up against Pictish aggression, when it would be more accurate to say that Roman frontier policies created the Picts.
In his Myth of Nations, Geary called ethnic nationalism the 'poison’ of modern history, but these famous walls seem to exude the same venom. Border walls are the toxic waste of empire, spread around the globe by short-sighted regimes with no regard for the future, which continue to poison us and cloud our view of the foibles of the human past by their stubborn monumentality. If Trump gets his wall, it will not only be his legacy, but all of ours. Don’t pollute the future with another one.
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The title image is not my creation, but an unwitting self-parody by the president himself; I’d rather not link to his Twitter account, so read this instead.
