IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 209

In AD 122 the emperor Hadrian visited Britain, the most northerly province of the Roman Empire and one that had troubled his predecessors. A later Roman writer states that Hadrian 'was the first to build a wall to separate the Romans from the barbarians'. Whether the decision was taken during the visit or shortly afterwards is uncertain, but work began within a few years, and the result was the most ambitious building project that the Roman army ever undertook in the province. The wall was not the first Roman attempt to control this northern zone: a chain of forts and a road, the Stanegate, had been established some decades earlier, and the new structure was built a little to the north of that line.

The wall was designed to run for 80 Roman miles — roughly 118 kilometres — from the mouth of the River Tyne in the east to the Solway Firth in the west, closing the narrow neck of northern Britain. Its course was not straight. For about half its length it follows the top of a natural cliff line, a hard volcanic rock that presents a steep face to the north; in the west it crosses flatter ground, where defence was more difficult and the structure itself had to do more of the work.

The materials varied with what the landscape offered. In the eastern sector, where good building sandstone was plentiful, the wall was built of dressed stone blocks, three metres or so wide and perhaps five metres high. West of the River Irthing the planners chose turf, cut in blocks from the grassland and stacked to form a broad, sloping rampart, presumably because no suitable stone was available nearby. The change of material can still be seen today, at the point where this western section was later rebuilt in stone.

At intervals of exactly one Roman mile, a distance slightly shorter than a modern mile, the builders inserted small fortified gateways now known as milecastles. Each had a passage through the wall that could be closed with doors, and room for a small garrison. Between every pair of milecastles stood two turrets, towers containing a ladder that gave access to a lookout platform. Before construction was far advanced the plan was altered: a series of much larger forts was added along the line, even though this meant demolishing finished work at those points. The forts, each holding several hundred men, became the real military bases of the frontier.

The work was carried out by soldiers of the three legions then stationed in Britain. Inscriptions set into the wall record which unit built which stretch, and small carved stones bearing a centurion's name show how the labour was divided among his men. Building on this scale also demanded vast quantities of stone, lime for mortar and timber for scaffolding, and the supply of these materials shaped the pace of the work. These records are one reason why the wall is so well documented: it is, in effect, a construction site that left its paperwork in the fabric of the building.

Why build it at all? The traditional answer, that it was a defensive barrier against tribes from the north, is now widely questioned. Few archaeologists today accept that the wall could have stopped a determined attack, since it was too long for its garrison to man in strength and could be outflanked by sea. More convincing, in the view of most specialists, is that the wall controlled movement: its gates allowed the army to monitor who entered and left the province, to levy customs dues on trade and to be seen doing so. It was also, of course, a statement of imperial power on a spectacular scale.

During construction the width of the stone wall was reduced from ten Roman feet to eight, a change substantial enough for the later version to be known as the Narrow Wall. This suggests either that resources were tighter than expected or that the original specification had been generous. The frontier did not stay in place for long. In the 140s Hadrian's successor moved the army north and built a new wall of turf across central Scotland, and Hadrian's Wall was largely abandoned for a generation before being reoccupied when that advance was given up.

Thereafter it remained a frontier of the empire until Roman rule in Britain collapsed in the early fifth century. Once the soldiers had gone, the wall lost its purpose and became a quarry. For more than a thousand years farmers, church builders and road makers carted away its dressed stone, and much of it was burned in kilns to make lime. In many villages nearby the walls of houses and barns contain blocks that once formed part of the frontier, and of the original structure little survives above knee height except in a few places.

Preservation began in the nineteenth century, when a wealthy Newcastle lawyer, John Clayton, bought stretches of land along the wall and stopped the stone being carried off. His excavations exposed the foundations at Housesteads and elsewhere. In 1987 the surviving sections were inscribed as a World Heritage Site, and in 2003 a long-distance footpath, the Hadrian's Wall Path, was opened along the entire route. Visitors today can walk the line of the frontier and, in the museums and reconstructed sites along it, see something of how the wall was built.

A cemetery excavated on the edge of a modern city yields a few dozen skeletons. The grave goods suggest that most of the people buried there were ordinary inhabitants of the town, but one grave, containing a brooch of imported design, stands out. Was the woman in it a local person who had acquired foreign tastes, or someone who had travelled from another region? Until the 1980s such questions were answered from grave goods and from written sources, where these existed. Today, archaeologists are more likely to send a tooth to a laboratory.

The technique rests on a simple chemical fact. Isotopes are atoms of the same element that differ in their masses, and natural processes take them up in slightly different proportions depending on where and how those processes occur. Strontium, for example, is released from rocks by weathering, and its two common isotopes vary in ratio: rocks that are ancient and rich in rubidium contain a higher proportion of the heavier isotope than younger rocks do. That ratio passes from soil into plants, from plants into grazing animals and hence into the people who eat them. Local geology therefore leaves a chemical signature in everyone who lives from local food.

This signature is stored in the skeleton, but not uniformly. Tooth enamel forms in childhood and then behaves almost like a mineral: once the tooth has erupted, its composition is fixed for life. Bone is entirely different. It is constantly broken down and rebuilt, so a bone sample reflects the last years of life, or even the last months in the case of the spongy interior. Comparing a molar with a rib therefore compares two periods of a person's life. If the values are similar, the individual probably stayed in one region. The sample itself is tiny: a few milligrams of powder drilled from enamel.

Oxygen isotopes tell a different story. The ratio between the lighter and heavier forms of oxygen in drinking water depends mainly on temperature, and on how far rain clouds have travelled inland and how high they have risen over mountains. The same ratio is built into teeth and bone. A person whose enamel oxygen values are unusually low may have grown up at high altitude or in a cold region, whereas someone raised in a warm lowland would show higher values. Precise locations cannot be recovered, because many regions share similar climates.

Carbon and nitrogen, by contrast, speak about diet. Carbon isotope ratios distinguish between plants that use two different pathways of photosynthesis: the great majority, including wheat and barley, and a smaller group that includes maize and millet. They also separate food from the land from food from the sea. Nitrogen values increase with each step in the food chain, so a person who ate large quantities of animal protein will show higher values than one who lived mainly on grain. There is a complication, however: the nitrogen values of infants are raised by breastfeeding.

All these measurements come with important caveats. Isotope values do not identify a place; they exclude some regions and remain compatible with many others. A town may draw its drinking water from a river whose oxygen values differ from those of its own rainfall, and a person who ate imported grain carries a signature that belongs to the field rather than the household. Bone buried for centuries can exchange atoms with groundwater, and although enamel resists this far better, it too can be altered in extreme conditions. A result is best expressed as a degree of probability, not a fact.

The most celebrated examples show both the power and the uncertainty of the method. In 2002, excavators near Stonehenge found a grave containing a man buried with gold ornaments, copper knives and archery equipment. He became known as the Amesbury Archer, and radiocarbon dates placed him in the early Bronze Age, around 2300 BC. His oxygen values were lower than local ones, implying a childhood in a cooler climate, and his strontium ratio was also unlike that of the chalk downland where he was buried. The likeliest explanation is an upbringing somewhere in continental Europe, but the evidence cannot identify a particular valley.

Other cases are less dramatic but equally revealing. The body of a man who died about 5,300 years ago and was preserved in the ice of the Alps, known as the Iceman, has been studied in the same way. Isotope analysis of his teeth indicated that he grew up in a different valley from the one in which he died; the two areas lie only a few tens of kilometres apart, yet their geologies are distinct. Migration, in other words, was not only a matter of long journeys between continents. Most people in the past probably moved shorter distances, and the method can detect those moves too.

The wider significance of the method lies in what it does to our picture of the past. Studies of Roman-era cemeteries in Britain have repeatedly found that a minority of the buried individuals had childhood origins elsewhere, sometimes in warmer parts of the empire. Such findings fit the written evidence of soldiers, traders and enslaved people moving across the empire, but they reach individuals who left no inscription. Isotope analysis does not replace DNA or the study of grave goods; it adds a biography, and in the study of the ancient dead that is a great deal.

In England, history stops being a compulsory subject at the age of fourteen. From that point pupils may drop it entirely, and large numbers do so. Every few years someone proposes that this should change, and that history, like mathematics and English, should be studied to sixteen. The proposal usually meets two objections: that forcing adolescents to study the past will merely convince them that it is dull, and that the curriculum is already overcrowded. I want to defend the proposal, but only in a revised form. The effect of the present arrangement is that a pupil may finish compulsory schooling knowing almost nothing about how the society they live in took its present shape, which is a loss both to them and to the wider public.

The strongest argument for the subject is not that it supplies useful information. It is that history is the only discipline in the school timetable whose central activity is the evaluation of evidence about human behaviour that cannot be repeated under laboratory conditions. A pupil who compares two accounts of the same event, asks why they differ and considers what each author wanted readers to believe is practising a form of reasoning that no other subject teaches so directly. In an age when claims about the past circulate instantly online, often stripped of context, that skill has an obvious public value.

There is a second case, too: a shared stock of references. Pupils who have never studied the past cannot follow allusions that pervade literature, law and political speech. A citizen who cannot recognise a reference to the Reformation, or to the slave trade, is partly shut out of the conversation their society is having about itself. But this argument is easily abused. History taught to foster national pride quickly becomes a story with heroes and villains, in which awkward episodes are softened or left out. That kind of history is not only dishonest; it is also, in the classroom, remarkably boring, because it removes the disagreements that make the subject worth arguing about.

Against all this, the critics have a genuine point about the way the subject is often experienced. A compulsory course that begins in prehistory and ends in the present, and that must therefore move at a gallop, can leave pupils with a jumble of names and dates. They may learn that a king had six wives without learning how historians know anything at all. Compulsion that produces this outcome deserves the resentment it provokes. Teachers are blamed for a syllabus that is simply too full: its content is prescribed in detail, and the pressure to cover it discourages the slow examination of a single document.

The complaint that history is irrelevant to young people's lives is, in my view, a complaint about curriculum rather than about the discipline. A course built around local buildings, family photographs and the recent past of a pupil's own neighbourhood can hold attention far better than a hurried tour of dynasties. A single well-chosen letter or diary can occupy a class for several lessons and teach more about how historians work than a dozen pages of summary. The subject should be depth rather than breadth. Three or four periods, studied thoroughly and with original sources, would be worth more than thirty skimmed in a term.

The overcrowding objection is serious but not decisive. Sciences, languages and the arts all have claims, and none of them can expand without squeezing something else. England is, in this respect, unusual: in many other European countries pupils continue some form of historical study to sixteen. Something can be found in the timetable if the will exists, and history, taught in depth, need not occupy more hours than it does already. In that case the subject could keep its present allocation and simply attempt less.

Practical obstacles remain. Many schools struggle to recruit specialist history teachers, and a subject taught by non-specialists will not develop the habits of mind described above. The problem is circular: if fewer pupils take the subject after fourteen, fewer will study it at university, and the shortage will grow. Assessment is a further problem. Examinations that reward the memorisation of long essay answers push teachers towards coverage and away from depth. Papers built around short extracts, in which pupils must judge the reliability of a source, reward exactly the skill that justifies the subject's place in the curriculum.

There remains the objection that compulsory history is an instrument of state control over memory: whoever writes the syllabus decides whose past is remembered. The worry is legitimate, and recent arguments about how the history of empire should be taught show how heated such disputes can become. But the alternative — leaving the subject to those who choose it, most of whom come from educated and prosperous homes — is not neutral either. The answer is not to abandon compulsion but to make the syllabus plural and to teach its controversies openly.

So I would keep history compulsory to sixteen, on condition that the course has less content and more depth. Fewer topics, studied with real documents; explicit attention to how historians disagree with one another; and no pretence that the subject exists to make anyone patriotic. Some pupils will remain uninterested whatever is taught, and it is dishonest to pretend otherwise. But a subject whose core is the disciplined judgement of evidence is exactly what a compulsory curriculum ought to contain.