The Corinthian Hexamilion: New Perspectives on Greece’s Longest Barrier Wall

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Theorizing Warfare: Global Perspectives on Defense and Fortification" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In distinction to many fortifications in Greece that receive little scholarly attention, the early Byzantine wall known as the Hexamilion has been the subject of two major publications. The first by Timothy E. Gregory systematically studied the extant remains of the barrier wall snaking 8 km over the Isthmus of Corinth to show how the monument speaks to issues of historical significance beyond traditional assessments of military strategy. The second by P. Nick Kardulias presented new evidence for the structures within the fortress at Isthmia and adopted a theoretical approach that drew attention to the energy expenditures of an enormous labor force that constructed the wall and inhabited its fortress. Our paper builds on these studies by presenting new discoveries about the course of the wall at its eastern terminus and reconsidering the Hexamilion as a dynamic and totalizing social phenomenon that redefined the long-term human experiences of the region. Like other barrier walls that have been built or proposed throughout history and, indeed, even in our own times, the Hexamilion marks a site of countless smaller moments of social and transcultural exchange that far outnumbered those short-lived geopolitical episodes of military conflict by which it has typically been evaluated.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Theorizing Warfare: Global Perspectives on Defense and Fortification

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50723