Anchors are very powerful symbols: they can be lifted and transported wherever needed and, at any convenient spot, they can be dropped and turned into a fixed point of safety and constant reference. They represent conscious decisions to remain while giving enough leeway to orbit around. This intersection between choice and location overlaps with many aspects of the theoretical framework I am applying to my current project: Place Theory.
Place Theory distinguishes between three-dimensional environments (space) and the feelings, memories and emotions that define, in our cognitive processes, these locations (place). Individual experiences create place, but a group of people interacting at the same space will also generate a communal place. When spaces gain this shared meaning of place they become important landmarks for the community that lives in and around it; these spaces with important place meaning become landmarks, anchors.
This social and cultural importance assigned to a specific location is essential to understand human-built environment relations. When a shared meaning of place is positive in general (meaning, when a group feels that a space is good, that they need it, that it makes their life easier, makes them happy), communities will feel the need to invest resources in preserving the space. This premise, taken from the broader social sciences that study our present, like psychology and sociology, can be applied to studies of the past to nuance our understanding of urban life in Antiquity. In this way, collective investment in space can be seen as a form of community regulation; it can be part of the social contract. This agreed expectation of maintaining what is good for the group explains why and how urban communities interact with spaces that anchored them to their way of life and their past.
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| Nymphaeum at Sagalassos, Türkiye © Marlena Whiting |
To illustrate this, we can take an example particular to my project (CAUAT, Cultura Urbana del Agua en la Antigüedad Tardía = Urban Water Culture in Late antiquity). Let us imagine a Roman town that has a spring, from which locals get their drinking water. If this water spot is generally appreciated, the community might invest in improvements like a basin, a spout and even lavish decorations. This social importance might turn it into a ritualised spot, which might require a degree of monumentalisation. Then again, there might be expectations about what a fountain should look like, because of comparisons with what other neighbouring cities have done to their own fountains. Innovations from outside the community are brought to it to reinforce the meanings of place, further anchoring the people to their environment.
By late Antiquity, urban communities had had four centuries of living in Roman cities that shared a pan-Mediterranean attitude towards water supply and water uses. Moreover, Roman water culture had evolved because aqueducts had brought an overabundance of water, gushing in at rates never seen before. This water culture defined how town dwellers saw themselves in relationship to their built environment, and considering the premises of Place Theory introduced earlier, we can understand why maintaining and preserving water infrastructure was a priority to them. Investing in preserving water spaces permitted the continuity of positive place meanings, which was considered good. However, the changes of the fourth of fifth centuries meant that it became increasingly difficult to keep up water infrastructures. Fewer taxes, inflation, changing religious attitudes, and even entropy, which increased the costs of maintaining centuries-old systems, added up, prompting a crisis in Roman water cultures.
The conflict between urban communities’ expectations (their anchor to the past ways of life) and city councils’ capabilities to provide these services could be matched only for a limited point of time. At one point there was not enough money to invest in maintenance leading to reduced water flows. This systemic change forced a reaction; people in late Antiquity still wanted baths, and still wanted fountains: that was how their ancestors had lived, those were their expectations for the present. And yet, they were forced to adapt. Smaller tubs in the bathhouse, fountains with shallower basins and lower spouts, reduced heaters to save fuel, more water reservoirs to build up pressure… most of these innovations of the fifth and sixth centuries were forms of reassessing past expectations with present possibilities. The anchor was sunk deep in the Roman past, but the chain was long enough to drift off to a new location.
This situation, alas, did not last beyond the seventh century. The eventual collapse of local municipal systems and the old age of most structures meant that Roman water cultures, despite late antique adaptations, vanished. Rome and Constantinople continued some of these aspects, but as extraordinary exceptions. For most cities, aqueducts became a thing of the past, fountains were limited to natural springs, and bathhouses had become small spaces with tubs and kettles. Still, the transition from one stage to the other was not abrupt; the tension between expectations and possibilities did not cause the chain to snap. Constant innovation meant that the anchor was hauled up and dropped somewhere else where the tide was more favourable.
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| Mosaic of Fountain, Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Ravenna © Marlena Whiting |