James Crow - Jorge López Quiroga - Vujadin Ivanišević - Enrico Zanini: " Byzantine City and the Archaeology of the Third Millennium ", in: Proceedings of the 23rd International Congress of Byzantine Studies Belgrade, 22–27 August 2016, Plenary Papers), Belgrade, 2016, 64-143. (original) (raw)
Archaeology and Urban Settlement in Late Roman and Byzantine Anatolia
2018
Archaeology and Urban Settlement in Late Roman and Byzantine Anatolia h e site of medieval Euchaïta, on the northern edge of the central Anatolian plateau, was the centre of the cult of St h eodore Tiro ('the Recruit'). Unlike most excavated or surveyed urban centres of the Byzantine period, Euchaïta was never a major metropolis, cultural centre or extensive urban site, although it had a military function from the seventh-ninth centuries. Its signii cance lies precisely in the fact that as a small provincial town, something of a backwater, it was probably more typical of the 'average' provincial Anatolian urban settlement, yet almost nothing is known about such sites. h is volume represents the results of a collaborative project that integrates archaeological survey work with other disciplines in a unii ed approach to the region both to enhance understanding of the history of Byzantine provincial society and to illustrate the application of innovative approaches to i eld survey.
This paper constitutes the first part of an effort to re-evaluate the available analytical categories for settlements from an interdisciplinary post-processual approach. The second part was published as: "Rural towns" and "in-between" or "third" spaces. Settlement patterns in Byzantine Epirus (7th–11th centuries) from an interdisciplinary approach. in Archeologia Medievale 36 (2009) 43 –54. A preliminary version of both papers was presented during the Conference “Town and countryside in the Mediterranean” at the University of Athens in May 2007. This paper refers to habitation in the Byzantine Empire from the 7th to the 11th centuries and attempts a reappraisal of the patterns used to describe, evaluate and interpret the distribution of archaeological remains. Based on the study of a region inwestern Greek mainland, several contradictions between the historical and the archaeological evidence on settlement are being discussed; those reveal the prevalence of dispersed rather than nuclear patterns of habitation in the area. These patterns are further discussed within the context of medieval settlement around the Mediterranean. The physical form of Middle Byzantine Episcopal sees is sought for while the term 'kastron' is examined against the “archaeological imaginary” of 6th–11th c. Byzantine fortified settlements. It is concluded that the contextualization of archaeological and historical evidence for Middle Byzantine settlements in Southern Epiros demonstrates instead a rather flexible organization of habitation; episcopal sees do not seem to have corresponded to any clear distinct type of settlement. It is therefore suggested that during periods of rapid social change expressed through a transformation of habitation, specific forms or sizes of settlements cannot be correlated to specific functions or other political or socioeconomic activities. There should rather be more of “hybrid” settlement formations of changing nature and mixed qualities. Given the dynamic development pattern of Byzantine habitats, there is room for such “open” analytical categories in the archaeology of settlements, in order to facilitate descriptions of find distributions which do not conform to the available theoretical patterns. These new categories could further lead to an emergence of new interpretation schemes bringing out the spatial differentiation and uniqueness which seems to have been very much the case in the evolution of Byzantine provincial settlement patterns.
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.
Sixty Years of Research on the Byzantine City
The Byzantine city became identified as a discrete historical entity, worthy of dedicated research, in the 1950s. Since then it has generated a large and growing volume of scholarship. My task in this paper is to give a brief review of the material, pointing out its main landmarks and directions. The period under review will not correspond exactly to the chronological limits of this volume. It ends in the fifteenth century, with the fall of Constantinople, since I consider the Ottoman town to be a different phenomenon from its Byzantine predecessor, and there are virtually no studies seriously linking the two. On the other hand, I begin in the fourth century, with the foundation of Constantinople. Despite the deep discontinuities between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and the problems of periodizing Byzantium, few Byzantinists would wish to exclude the age of Justinian from their domain, and between the empire of Justinian and the empire of Constantine no clean division can be drawn. Two of the most important monographs in the field are titled "The Byzantine City in the Sixth Century" 1. The geographical limits of my survey are similarly defined by the existence of the Roman Empire of Constantinople: I consider mainly those towns and cities that came within the political orbit of the Byzantine imperial court and its splinter states. Research on the Byzantine city has sought to answer basically the same questions that have driven the study of urbanism in the medieval West: Was it a continuation of the ancient city? What was its relationship to political and religious authority? Did the town and is inhabitants have a distinct status with regard to the rest of society, and particularly the population of its surrounding countryside? How was urban society divided, both vertically and horizontally, and what was the relationship between private, public and sacred space? What administrative, social, cultural and economic functions did it fulfil, and which of all these was its raison d'être? In particular, was the economic function paramount, and within the urban economy, did consumption take precedence over production and exchange? How did towns relate to each other, both spatially and in terms of size and importance, and what differentiated towns, within the hierarchy of settlements, from other settlement units? In short, what defined a city, what characterised the quality of urban life, and what made some towns more urban than others? The range of answers to these questions is necessarily limited and predictable for any pre-industrial society. In a comparison between Byzantium and the West, however, the
The Routledge Handbook of the Byzantine City
The Routledge Handbook of the Byzantine City From Justinian to Mehmet II (ca. 500 - ca.1500), 2024
The Byzantine world contained many important cities throughout its empire. Although it was not 'urban' in the sense of the word today, its cities played a far more fundamental role than those of its European neighbors. This book, through a collection of twenty-four chapters, discusses aspects of, and different approaches to, Byzantine urbanism from the early to late Byzantine periods. It provides both a chronological and thematic perspective to the study of Byzantine cities, bringing together literary, documentary, and archival sources with archaeological results, material culture, art, and architecture, resulting in a rich synthesis of the variety of regional and sub-regional transformations of Byzantine urban landscapes. Organised into four sections, this book covers: Theory and Historiography, Geography and Economy, Architecture and the Built Environment, and Daily Life and Material Culture. It includes more specialised accounts that address the centripetal role of Constantinople and its broader influence across the empire. Such new perspectives help to challenge the historiographical balance between 'margins and metropolis,' and also to include geographical areas often regarded as peripheral, like the coastal urban centers of the Byzantine Mediterranean as well as cities on islands, such as Crete, Cyprus, and Sicily which have more recently yielded well-excavated and stratigraphically sound urban sites. The Routledge Handbook of the Byzantine City provides both an overview and detailed study of the Byzantine city to specialist scholars, students, and enthusiasts alike and, therefore, will appeal to all those interested in Byzantine urbanism and society, as well as those studying medieval society in general.
Multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary research in Landscape Archaeology, 2016
This paper presents the methodological framework and the first results of a project launched in 2014 entitled Recapturing the Dynamics of the Early Byzantine Settlements in Crete: Old problems − New Interpretations through an Interdisciplinary Approach. Through an interdisciplinary approach, combining a careful reading of historical and archaeological evidence with the spatial analysis offered by the application of new technologies in archaeological research, the project highlights the developments of Cretan settlements from the fourth century to the early ninth century. In particular, we will examine the data categories and discuss how they are brought together for analysis in a Geographical Information System.
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.
Journal of Roman Archaeology
A monumental inscription of emperor Anastasius I (r. 491-518 CE), now to be found in the town of Mecitözü, located on the Çorum-Amasya highway in Çorum province in north central Turkey, is a key piece of evidence for the location of the Byzantine city of Euchaïta (188-89, 221-22). In late Roman times, Euchaïta was situated in the province of Helenopontus, a mountainous, upland region of Anatolia that extended along the south shores of the Black Sea. According to local reports collected in 1963 by the late Cyril Mango and Ihor Ševčenko, the Anastasius inscription had been brought to Mecitözü from the nearby village of Avkat (also spelled Avhat, and now renamed Beyözü), only some 6.7 km away to the north. 1 On the basis of this inscription, and another now at the city of Amasya (ancient Amaseia, located some 62 km by modern road from Beyözü), Mango and Ševčenko identified Avkat as Euchaïta, an argument first made by the Belgian Byzantinist H. Grégoire in 1910. 2 As this epigraphic evidence makes clear, when Anastasius granted Euchaïta civic status (probably 515-18 CE), the settlement was endowed with a bishopric and city walls in recognition of the importance of its cult of the Christian martyr Theodore Tiro (Τήρων) "the Recruit," whose original feast day fell on 17 February. Theodore was a soldier-saint said
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.
Bintliff, J. (2024). Changes in Town and Country in Late Antiquity and into the Early Medieval Period in Greece and the Aegean Islands. City, Hinterland and Environment: Urban Resilience during the First Millennium Transition. S. Simon Malmberg, E. H. Heldaas Seland and C. Prescott. Oslo, Univers..., 2024
The Greek Aegean in the Late Roman era (5th-mid-7th centuries AD) offers a degree of uniformity, developing further the novel urban and rural patterns that mark the previous Imperial centuries. Characteristically small towns with fortifications and lavish Christian monuments are surrounded by commercial villa estates, while populations shrink drastically from the mid-6th century. In the 7th-8th centuries fundamental regional divergences appear. Most of mainland Greece is lost to the Eastern Roman (aka Early Byzantine) Empire based at Constantinople, the largest towns and coastal ports excepted, following waves of Slavic settlement. A second model is found on the Aegean Islands, where reduced populations largely survive Arab raids and alien settlement through settlement displacement and negotiation. A third model is represented by the large island of Crete, free from invasion until Arab conquest in the 9th century, ironically when a revived Eastern Roman (Middle Byzantine) Empire regains control of the mainland and remaining Aegean Islands. This paper will present the evidence from archaeology for these scenarios, varying in time and space.
This paper constitutes the second part of an effort to re-evaluate the available analytical categories for settlements from an interdisciplinary post-processual approach. The first part was published as "Urban or Rural? Theoretical remarks on Settlement patterns in Byzantine Epirus (7th–11th centuries)" in the Byzantinische Zeitschrift 103/1 (2010) 171-193. A preliminary version of both papers was presented during the Conference “Town and countryside in the Mediterranean” at the University of Athens in May 2007. This second part puts on the table the underlying assumptions in research that interpretations of historical settlement should take as a given a clear dichotomy between distinct "urban" and "rural" spaces and the bipolar "urban-rural" hermeneutical schemes, based on recent archaeological and geographic research.