Early Medieval Byzantium and the End of the Ancient World (original) (raw)
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European Journal of Post-Classical Archaeologies, 2020
Focusing on the use and abuse in the study of Byzantine archaeology and Urbanism of the idea of the “Invisible Cities” as introduced in literature by Italo Calvino, this article attempts to set a framework for understanding Byzantine cities within clear and scientifically defined analytical categories as part of a modernist agenda. At the same time the article examines the distorting influence of Constantinople, as the capital city, on any and all our efforts to understand Byzantine urbanism as a social phenomenon in its true scale. Italian: L’articolo vuole definire una cornice per la comprensione delle città bizantine attraverso categorie analitiche chiare e scientificamente definite come parte di un’agenda modernista, focalizzandosi sull’uso e abuso dell’archeologia bizantina e dell’urbanesimo e utilizzando il concetto calviniano di “Città Invisibili”. Allo stesso tempo l’articolo esamina l’influenza distorta di Costantinopoli, come città capitale, su tutti gli sforzi per capire l’urbanesimo bizantino come fenomeno sociale alla sua scala reale.
Perspectives on the archaeology of Byzantine Greece 600-1000 AD
The aim of this paper is not to rehearse the continuing debates concerning the archaeology of so-called 'Dark Age Greece', but rather to situate the post-classical archaeology of Greece before the 'revival' of the 10th and 11th centuries within the wider Byzantine world, particularly in comparison with the early-medieval archaeologies of the adjacent nation states of Bulgaria and Turkey and also as part of post-Roman archaeologies of northwestern Europe. The paper will review a range of differing perspectives from the varying contributions of excavation, survey archaeology, ceramic chronologies, numismatics and standing monuments. In addition it aims to consider those approaches derived from an increasing awareness and concern for environmental history and especially the greater definition of episodes of rapid climate change and their potential significance for a fuller understanding of the broader history of the Byzantine world. Finally we need to consider how far the archaeology of Byzantine Greece, and of the wider lands of the Byzantine empire, forms part of a regional/national archaeological narrative, or is an aspect of both a European medieval agenda and represents part of the long-term archaeologies of the eastern Mediterranean. Keywords Byzantine – Dark Age – Slavs – environment – churches. The end of the classical world witnessed some of the most profound changes in the long-term history and material culture of Greece and the Islands. From 550 to 700 AD historians and archaeologists have recognised a vertiginous collapse of late-Roman provincial structures, urban settlements and trading networks, which only emerge as the newly configured Byzantine 'themes' from the later 7th and 9th centuries AD. There are few regions where the end of classical urbanism and settlement appears as abrupt as in the southern Balkan provinces of the eastern Roman empire. After 600 AD in the great triangle of land from the lower Danube to the southern tips of the Peloponnese there was 'closure' and with few exceptions , it has been argued, the writ of the New Rome had expired and for many 'classical cities' there was an abrupt end, an almost paleontological extinction.
Late antiquity and Byzantium: an identity problem
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies
1975 seems light years away. In parts of the field of Byzantine studies, at any rate, the world has shifted, and perhaps most of all in that contested territory of early Byzantium, otherwise known as late antiquity. The first issue ofByzantine and Modern Greek Studieswas published only four years after Peter Brown’sThe World of Late Antiquity,1and before the ‘explosion’ of late antiquity.2This was also the start of another explosion: the emergence of late antique archaeology as a discipline, leading to its vast expansion and the enormous and ever-growing amount of material available today. For the first time, John Hayes'sLate Roman Pottery(1972) enabled reliable dating criteria for the ceramic evidence that became the foundation of a new understanding of trade and economic life.3The UNESCO Save Carthage campaign, a landmark in the reliable recording of excavations of the late antique period, began in the following year, and since then the growth in data has been exponential.
Series preface viii eries pre ace and Umayyad Spain (Sam Ottewill-Soulsby), an Arabist and historian of the medieval Middle East (Edward Zychowicz-Coghill), an archaeologist working on late antique and early Islamic Jordan and Egypt (Louise Blanke), an architectural historian exploring the transition from Byzantine to Ottoman (Suna a aptay), a late antique historian who has turned her attention to Ottoman Greece (Elizabeth Key Fowden), a PhD student with a background in Classics studying urban planning in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Italy (Sofia Greaves) and a principal investigator specializing in Roman social history and urban archaeology in Italy (Andrew Wallace-Hadrill). Other Cambridge colleagues joined our discussions on a regular basis, notably Tom Langley, writing a PhD on ideas of the city in Greek Patristic writers, Professor Amira Bennison, a historian of the medieval Maghrib, especially its cities, Professor Rosamond McKitterick, a leading figure in the study of Carolingian France and papal Rome, and Professor Martin Millett, a Roman archaeologist with a longstanding interest in urbanism. We benefited from the support and advice of the members of our Advisory Committee, both in Cambridge (in addition to the above named, Cyprian Broodbank, Robin Cormack, Garth Fowden, Alessandro Launaro, Robin Osborne and John Patterson) and beyond-Luuk de Ligt (Leiden), i dem Kafescio lu (Istanbul), Ray Laurence (Sydney), Keith Lilley (Belfast) and from Oxford, Josephine Quinn, Bryan Ward-Perkins and Chris Wickham. We also enjoyed the invaluable support of two administrators, Nigel Thompson of the Classics Faculty and Beth Clark, whose calm efficiency facilitated conferences and seminars, enabled foreign travel and smoothed contact with the bureaucracies at both ends. We invited many scholars, from Cambridge or further afield, to share their knowledge with us at our weekly seminars. We also organised one-day workshops, including one on the Roman and Islamic city in North Africa and one on Cities and Citizenship after antiquity (that led to an l as special issue) 1 , as well a panel for the 2018 Leeds International Medieval congress on 'Memory' and two three-day conferences, one in Istanbul and one in Rome. The last three underlie the three volumes in the present series. In each of those conferences, the members of our group contributed, but we knew that to cover the ground we needed to bring in international colleagues. The three volumes that constitute the present series are far from exhausting the output of the project, and each of us has papers and monographs in the pipeline or already out. Each of the three volumes has its own set of questions, but together they build up an overriding collective agenda of exploring how the cities of the Greek and Roman past, and such ideas of the city that were articulated around them, have impacted on the city and the idea of the city in later periods.
N. Kontogiannis and T. Uygar (eds.), Spaces and Communities in Byzantine Anatolia, 5th Sevgi Gönul Symposium, Istanbul, 2021
The city of Amorium located in the highlands of Phrygia in Asia Minor challenges the usual streamline narrative about the evolution of byzantine cities. Although it was already an important Early Byzantine town and bishopric (4th-6th c.), it flourished and became one of the most important cities of Asia Minor after the 7th c. and until its final abandonment in late 11th c. Amorium was benefitted from the new thematic organization of the Byzantine provinces after the 7th c. as it became the provincial “capital” city of the thema of Anatolikon, seat of a general and a critical base for the military and the civic administration in central and western Asia Minor. Amorium has been the subject of systematic excavation for more than two decades, and numerous civic and religious buildings have been unearthed in this process offering a wealth of information on the Early Byzantine, the Byzantine Early Medieval, and the Middle Byzantine phases of the city. Since 2013 a new side-project has been running focused on analyzing the historical landscape of Amorium with the use of excavation data, survey information, satellite and aerial imagery in a consolidated Geographical Information System environment. Focus of this newer project has been the western part of the lower city of Amorium, mostly unexplored until now. Aim of the proposed paper will be to combine elements from older excavation with the new informative background in order to establish the characteristics of the city (city grid, land use, monumentality) and ascertain their change from the Late Roman times to the Early Middle Ages.
The city of Amorium, located in Phrygia in the Asia Minor highlands, has been under excavation and systematic research for almost three decades. A large number of scientific publications, articles in peer-reviewed journals, and a special series dedicated to Amorium, the Amorium Reports that number already five volumes, have seen the light as the main research products of this archaeological activity along with considerable amount of popularizing guide books. The impact of Amorium excavation has affected considerably the contemporary archaeological approach to Byzantine Early Medieval and Middle Byzantine cities. Amorium has also been the stage of international cooperation for many years, and in this way it continues to bring together scholars from Turkey with colleagues from across the world. Many of our historical questions though are in an early stage, seeking for answers that the continuation of the excavation and new research will provide. At the same time innovative archaeological methods (e.g. geophysical survey, satellite imagery, LIDAR modelling) and modern approaches are being applied at Amorium, making the project one of the pioneers in the field of Byzantine archaeology. Aim of this workshop is to bring together the members of Amorium Excavations team to confer on the most recent field work and state of research. Additionally we hope to further establish a dialogue on Amorium with other scholars of Byzantium that face similar historical and archaeological questions. In the center of such a discourse stand the challenges of Byzantine historical archaeology and our understanding of the period between the 7th and 11th c. AD, and the evolution of Byzantine urbanism with the formation of “new” or renewed urban centers as provincial capitals, this largely being the essence of the new thematic system. This process is evident in the field, but also is elucidated in the historical sources. In result our two-day thematic workshop will address all kind of questions on material culture, architecture, landscape archaeology, textual history and many more concerning the Middle Byzantine cities. https://www.facebook.com/events/1187810117975764/
Between Ravenna and Constantinople : Rethinking Late Antique Settlement Patterns
Opera Instituti Archaeologici Sloveniae 46, 2023
The book presents a settlement of the pivotal period in European history in the exposed geographic area between the capitals of the Late Antique world, Ravenna and Constantinople. A fundamental overview of numerous characteristic cities, lowland settlements, and fortification is given, as well as a thorough examination of the transformation of settlement patterns. Political, military, economic, and social circumstances in late antiquity, under the strong pressure of barbarians beyond the Limes, caused the decline of former settlement forms: Roman cities were mostly abandoned in the continental part or existed only in greatly reduced and ruralized skeletons of former cities. Only urban centers in the Mediterranean region were better preserved. Lowland settlements, especially formerly Roman villas, ceased to exist as early as the mid-5th century. Therefore, the population gradually began to withdraw to remote areas and fortified hilltop sites of autarkic character, where they still maintained ancient civilizational achievements until the end of the 6th century. Among them, fortified settlements can be distinguished, which in some places reached the size and importance of smaller towns and territorial centers, temporary shelters, military fortifications, and sacred centers. Military forts were often indistinguishable from civilian settlements, and in many cases, had a strong civilian presence.The work also deals with well-recognized forts from the time of Justinian, which demonstrate a sophisticated system of protecting water and land communications between the two capitals. A diachronic overview shows the beginning and duration of changed settlement patterns, and a brief comparison with settlement patterns outside the area under consideration is also provided.