Landscapes of Change

Rural Evolutions in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

Neil Christie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781840146172
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351923477
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Only in recent years has archaeology begun to examine in a coherent manner the transformation of the landscape from classical through to medieval times. In Landscapes of Change, leading scholars in the archaeology of the late antique and early medieval periods address the key results and directions of Roman rural fieldwork. In so doing, they highlight problems of analysis and interpretation whilst also identifying the variety of transformations that rural Europe experienced during and following the decline of Roman hegemony. Whilst documents and standing buildings predominate in the urban context to provide a coherent and tangible guide to the evolving urban form and its society since Roman times, the countryside in many ages remains rather shadowy - a context for the cultivation, gathering and movement of food and other resources, inhabited by farmers, villagers and miners. Whilst the Roman period is adequately served through occasional extant remains and through the survey and excavation of villas and farmsteads, as well as the writings of agronomists, the medieval one is generally well marked by the presence of still extant villages across Europe, often dependent on castles and manors which symbolise the so-called 'feudal' centuries. But the intervening period, the fourth to tenth centuries, is that with the least documentation and with the fewest survivals. What happened to the settlement units that made up the Roman rural world? When and why do new settlement forms emerge? Landscapes of Change is essential reading for anyone wanting an up-to-date summary of the results of archaeological and historical investigations into the changing countryside of the late Roman, late antique and early medieval world, between the fourth and tenth centuries AD. It questions numerous aspects of change and continuity, assessing the levels of impact of military and economic decay, the spread and influence of Christianity, and the role of Germanic, Slav and Arab settlements in disrupting and redefining the ancient rural landscapes.

Chapter 1

Landscapes of Change in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Themes, Directions and Problems

Neil Christie

Introduction: Transformations

This volume offers a collection of new papers on a key theme in current historical archaeology: rural evolutions in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. The period bridges the break-up and dispersal of Roman authority across much of the Mediterranean and European landscape and addresses the characterisation of farms, villages, rural exploitation and fortified sites resultant from the imposition or creation of new political and demographic powers and from related socio-economic changes. This volume is designed to span much of the old Roman world and to seek the variety of human landscapes that emerge between AD 350–750. We will be observing in these papers aspects of old and new, continuity and discontinuity, borrowings and impositions, as well as uncertainties and complexities.

The period in question was the focus of The Transformation of the Roman World programme sponsored by the European Science Foundation (ESF), whose series of conferences and workshops have resulted in the publication of an array of edited volumes focussed on themes such as Strategies of Distinction (Pohl, 1998), The Sixth Century (Hodges and Bowden, 1998), and The Long Eighth Century (Wickham and Hansen, 2000). The interdisciplinary nature of these workshops opened valuable dialogues between historians, archaeologists and art historians, and assisted greatly in reassessing the nature and level of changes that occurred with the Transformation. Political, religious and social changes and evolutions are particularly highlighted, as is the question of economic communication.

Archaeology contributes strongly to the debate on the evolving economy, and closely linked to this is the question of settlement and population. It is frequently assumed that the late Roman Empire witnessed a population fall, accelerated in the early medieval period through war and plague and marked not just in economic downturn but principally in a debilitated urbanism and a diminished rural exploitation. Urbanism has been a theme of substantial debate for the Roman to early medieval transition since the 1990s, marked by publications such as The City in Late Antiquity (Rich, 1992), Arguments in Stone (Carver, 1993), Towns in Transition (Christie and Loseby, 1996) and, in the ESF series, The Idea and Ideal of the Town (Brogiolo and Ward-Perkins, 1998) and Towns and Their Territories (Brogiolo et al., 2000). Two most recent volumes include Recent Research in Late-Antique Urbanism (Lavan, 2001) and Urban Centers and Rural Contexts in Late Antiquity (Burns and Eadie, 2001). Here debates are informed by new excavations in town centres such as Rome and Brescia in Italy, Valencia in Spain, or London and York in England, which particularly identify reuse and survival ‘after Rome’ even if at a seemingly impoverished level, with more crudely constructed houses (chiefly in timber or spolia), reduced economic and social expressions (for example, an absence/loss of mosaics, wall paintings, baths), and with a modified sense of urban roles (such as with the presence of intramural burial). Alongside such studies are re-evaluations of old excavations and refined chronologies for ceramics, helping to fill out what remain rather ‘blank’ spaces within the former Roman towns. Further, there is much better and fuller appreciation of the vital role of the Church in ordering and, indeed, in redefining townscapes with new foci of patronage, social attention, and even economic activity. Finally, there is a healthier dialogue between West and East in terms of archaeologies and histories: the decay often recognised in late Roman towns in the West is much delayed in the Roman/Byzantine East, where civic expression and urban and rural prosperity generally endure well into the sixth century (see Banaji, 2001). Understanding the divergences promotes a sharper awareness of the levels of change and loss across the ancient world.

Towns and Territories

Townscapes and their populations were (and are) of course closely bound up with their hinterlands, territories, road links, landscapes and fields, woods, rivers and other natural resources: raw materials for buildings, communications between communities, trade activity, and, most essentially, food were all drawn and intimately connected with the surrounding landscape. Effectively, towns were required to function in unison with the countryside. As yet, synthetic volumes dedicated to the analysis of the late antique landscapes of the Roman world have been lacking (although proceedings from the 2002 Paris and Oxford meetings of the Late Antique Archaeology conference series, on the theme of the ‘Late Antique Countryside’, will do much to fill this current gap). Nonetheless, various of the volumes cited above offer papers which touch on this relationship (notably in Towns and Their Territories and in Urban Centers and Rural Contexts), and these have clearly indicated that there is often no simple equation of ‘busy countryside = busy urbanism’. Certainly in the heyday of Rome, in the early Empire, towns were expansive, active, and foci of social display (cf. Perkins and Nevett, 2000), and a burgeoning urban aristocracy was accordingly demanding of the lands around (and well beyond); in this context, the landscape is generally abundant in small to large farmsteads, working sites, slave-worked estates, holiday villas and the like, and with experimentation on crops, land clearance and drainage operations duly attested in our documentary sources (see, in general, Lloyd, 1991, stressing the variety). The results of the extended fieldwalking project immediately north of Rome, the South Etruria Survey (summarised in Potter, 1979 – even if now undergoing revision in the light of enhanced dating of fine and coarse ware ceramics), are fairly typical in displaying through distribution plots a highly exploited landscape north of Rome, closely linked to main roads and with an emphasis for many working units to be in ‘commuting’ distance of the demanding City. A similar pattern of energetic urban-related exploitation is witnessed in Roman Britain, even if not on the same scale materially as in Italy or elsewhere in the Mediterranean. Frequently, also, there is recognition of a good level of continuity from pre-Roman into Roman land use and settlement, but with a heightened density overall, combined with a highly visible industrial exploitation, suggesting the Empire as more than ‘stepping up a few gears’ from the previous levels of activity (cf. Corney, 2000: 37, 39), to supply the cities as concentrated points of human interaction.

Whilst documents and monumental buildings predominate in the urban context to provide a fairly coherent and tangible guide to the evolving urban form and its society, the countryside in many ages remains rather shadowy, a context for the cultivation, gathering and movement of food and other resources, and inhabited by farmers, villagers and miners. The late Republic and early imperial centuries are adequately served through occasional extant remains and through excavation of villas and farmsteads; arguably, also, at least for the central Mediterranean we have the writings of agronomists as well as poets, to comment on the business and the beauty of the landscape, on fine wines and fish preferences. Syria, Egypt and parts of North Africa (notably Carthage’s territory) are well served by epigraphic and literary/papyrological texts and these allow us to chart villages and even products – although often the marrying of textual and archaeological data is problematic (Vallat, 1991: 11–13). But we cannot always extend this documented image far: rural Roman Britain, for example, is almost a void in terms of text, land records, details of ownership, etc. (Dark and Dark, 1997; Corney, 2000: 37–8). Here, therefore, archaeology plays a vital role in identifying and reconstructing landscape settlement and evolution.

Landscape Archaeology: Impacts

A virtual explosion of data and interest in landscape analysis has come through the extensive adoption of landscape archaeology techniques – field survey and air photography particularly – combined with geomorphological assessment, environmental sampling, ethnographic survey, etc., to study beyond individual sites and to understand human impacts across wide areas and regions (Barker, 1991, 1995) (Fig. 1.1). The Roman period is one that can be gauged relatively coherently through the production and availability of far-flung trading items such as amphorae, fine wares, and lamps, matched by local/regional production of imitations or distinctive ‘home’ wares (Millett, 1991). Such ceramics offer key chronological guides to periods of site occupancy at least, and strong indications of origins and ends to individual units. Problems exist, of course: these guides derive, generally, from the surface of fields walked and sampled and provide no guarantee of an accurate reflection of all materials and periods related to a given buried (or destroyed) site. As with coins, the currency and longevity of ceramic types is extremely variable, although not to the degree that they fail to provide valuable indicators. Excavation is frequently needed to fine-tune chronologies and to glean fuller data regarding site function and format. Nonetheless, the application of such techniques over wide areas such as the Biferno Valley in central Italy (Barker, 1995; Lloyd, 1995), the ager Tarraconensis in eastern Spain (Keay, 1991) and the Libyan Valleys (Mattingly et al., 1996), has enabled archaeologists and historians to obtain a vastly more populated image of the Roman world.

Landscape archaeology is not an exact science or discipline: there is no single all-embracing methodology; results are dependent on sampling strategy, survivability of material cultures, field experience even; landscape evolution (alluviation, colluviation, reforestation, dam building, etc.) may mask much key archaeology; interpretations are never straightforward; emphases within projects may skew results to a given period; and poor levels of publication may counter the usefulness of any results (cf. Williamson, 1994). Certain periods are better served – the classical, as noted, has a busy and well-produced and thus eminently visible material culture. In Britain, as elsewhere, the early medieval centuries are typified by a much reduced material culture, technologically more ‘domestic’, damaging the chances of survival through centuries of plough action and weathering. In addition, quantities of such materials in active use were by then much reduced, linked to a recognised population decline for the period AD 400–900 (a very crude indicator being the City of Rome, whose population in AD 100 numbered one million, but by AD 500 may have been as low as 250 000 and by AD 650 perhaps no more than 50 000). For early Saxon Britain and early post-Roman Europe we instead know far more of burial populations than working, farming populations. When we progress to the medieval period (AD 1000–1500) the picture fills out once more, but that is often due more to the fact that documents resume on adequate levels and that we gain standing and visible archaeology – existing villages, churches, towns, plus ruinous castles, monasteries, manors, etc. Here there is less ‘need’ to explain the countyside since we can pinpoint so much more of the settlement pattern through text; not surprisingly, therefore, many landscape survey projects often fail to extend properly into the medieval and later worlds.

The intervening early medieval centuries are, however, a current focus of interest and debate: their greyness and material problems have been spurs to seek and identify sites and people in the landscape and to question images of decay and loss and thence medieval revival. Arguably, the South Etruria Survey was instrumental in this, part tied into British involvement in developing early medieval archaeologies: hence Tim Potter’s work at Monte Gelato north of Rome, examining churches and caves on a former Roman villa site (Potter and King, 1997); Richard Hodges’ projects first at San Vincenzo (for example, Hodges, 1997) and since at/around the town of Butrint in Albania (Hodges et al., 2000); Andrew Poulter’s studies along the lower Danube focussed on Nicopolis ad Istrum (2000); Colin Haselgrove’s Aisne valley survey in Picardy (Haselgrove and Scull, 1995); and a major, ongoing project based on Italy’s Tiber valley (Patterson and Millett, 1998). In many instances, notably the San Vincenzo project, extensive historical research has informed the landscape analyses, often in fact pinpointing early medieval sites which are either buried beneath later settlement or which cannot easily be located archaeologically (that is, by conventional fieldwalking methods) (Wickham, 1995; Hodges, 1997: 176–200; cf. Leggio and Moreland, 1986 for Farfa, also central Italy). The last two decades in particular, however, have seen a major national take-up of landscape archaeology across Europe and, accordingly, valuable syntheses are emerging on a regular basis (for Italy see, for example, contributions in Christie, ed., 1995; for Gaul, key are van Ossel, 1992, Les Campagnes, 1994, and van Ossel and Ouzoulias, 2000; for Spain, papers in Díaz-Andreu and Keay, 1996).

Chronologies

Chronologies are a key problem. Literary texts, whether charters, sale documents, wills and transfers, which inform us of the landscape and of towns and their inhabitants, tend to surface in usable numbers only from the ninth century onwards. But these are territorially patchy; not every monastic archive survives, and not many towns have early records. In Italy and France, levels of documentation are better than in Spain, but Spain is better provided for than Britain. Documents do not help by telling us foundation dates, population numbers and the employments of those people; rarely do they say much about the types of housing or farming, but they may tell us of the presence of vineyards, orchards, mills, woodland, boundaries, chapels and the like. What they usually show is that when documentation begins to re-emerge as an active form of recording and enacting from the ninth century, the landscape is relatively full: people farm, hunt and fish, villages and farms exist, places of rest and worship are known, and complex patterns of ownership, rental and sale prevail. The picture displayed in the Domesday Book for England reveals a full late Saxon-derived system of towns, manors, villages and hamlets; estate charters and placenames help further piece together the Saxon landscape, while sources such as the Burghal Hidage and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle present the rudiments for deciphering a planning of defensive townships or burhs from the later eighth and ninth centuries (see, for example, papers in Hooke, 1988, and her own volume, 1998).

At the other end of the timeframe under investigation, the late Roman, early Christian and late antique periods provide variable literary survivals and supports: narratives focus heavily on urban centres as these were the main points of military and political as well as religious attention; their fortunes obviously affected those of the countrysides attached to the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Landscapes of Change in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Themes, Directions and Problems
• 2 Elites, Exhibitionism and the Society of the Late Roman Villa
• 3 Interpreting the Transformation of Late Roman Villas: The Case of Hispania
• 4 From Vicus to Village: Italian Landscapes, AD 400–1000
• 5 Vandal, Byzantine and Arab Rural Landscapes in North Africa
• 6 Problems in Interpreting Rural and Urban Settlement in Southern Greece, AD 365–700
• 7 Balkan Ghosts? Nationalism and the Question of Rural Continuity in Albania
• 8 Cataclysm on the Lower Danube: The Destruction of a Complex Roman Landscape
• 9 The Origin of the Village in Early Medieval Gaul
• 10 The Late Antique Landscape of Britain, AD 300–700
• 11 The Archaeology of Early Anglo-Saxon Settlements: Past, Present and Future
• Index