This volume presents almost 100 papers deriving from the 6th International Conference on Late Roman Coarse Wares, Cooking Wares and Amphorae in the Mediterranean. Themes comprise sea and land routes, workshops and production centres, and regional contexts (western Mediterranean, eastern Mediterranean, Sicily and the Mediterranean islands).
Change and Resilience offers a view of the main Mediterranean islands from West to East in Late Antiquity because Mediterranean islands can contribute in fundamental ways to our understanding not only of earlier colonizations but also later periods. The volume explores specifically the time frame from the fall of the Roman empire to the Medieval period. A first group of papers covers islands and island groups in the Central and Western Mediterranean, including the Balearic Islands, Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, and the Adriatic islands. Together, these five papers highlight several common themes across the region: local or indigenous sites were often reoccupied in Late Antiquity, the rural countryside typically played a significant role in the contributions of islands to wider Mediterranean economic networks, and islands – big and small – often played significant roles in shifting political and religious power. The second group focuses on the Eastern Mediterranean. Three papers cover a range of islands, including Crete, the Cyclades, and Cyprus. Together they emphasize the impacts external shifts in political power and economic ties in the Eastern Mediterranean had on island landscapes, as well as the connected relationship between sacred space and territorial occupation across many of these islands. The final group of papers pivots on changing perceptions of island landscapes in Late Antiquity—or “island mindscapes.” Three papers focus on how communities adapted as they underwent Christianization in island contexts, emphasizing the diverse and varied ways that island landscapes became “Christianized,” as well as how other political and economic factors shaped the dynamics of change.
Over the past decades, archaeological field surveys and excavations have greatly enriched our knowledge of the Roman countryside Drawing on such new data, the volume The Economic Integration of Roman Italy, edited by Tymon de Haas and Gijs Tol, presents a series of papers that explore the changes Rome’s territorial and economic expansion brought about in the countryside of the Italian peninsula. By drawing on a variety of source materials (e.g. pottery, settlement patterns, environmental data), they shed light on the complexity of rural settlement and economies on the local, regional and supra-regional scales. As such, the volume contributes to a re-assessment of Roman economic history in light of concepts such as globalisation, integration, economic performance and growth.
A new account of the Mediterranean economy in the 10th to 12th centuries, forcing readers to entirely rethink the underlying logic to medieval economic systems. Chris Wickham re-examines documentary and archaeological sources to give a detailed account of both individual economies, and their relationships with each other. Chris Wickham offers a new account of the Mediterranean economy in the tenth to twelfth centuries, based on a completely new look at the sources, documentary and archaeological. Our knowledge of the Mediterranean economy is based on syntheses which are between 50 and 150 years old; they are based on outdated assumptions and restricted data sets, and were written before there was any usable archaeology; and Wickham contends that they have to be properly rethought. This is the first book ever to give a fully detailed comparative account of the regions of the Mediterranean in this period, in their internal economies and in their relationships with each other. It focusses on Egypt, Tunisia, Sicily, the Byzantine empire, Islamic Spain and Portugal, and north-central Italy, and gives the first comprehensive account of the changing economies of each; only Byzantium has a good prior synthesis. It aims to force our rethinking of how economies worked in the medieval Mediterranean. It also offers a rethinking of how we should understand the underlying logic of the medieval economy in general.
That seafaring was fundamental to Roman prosperity in the eastern Mediterranean is beyond doubt, but a tendency by scholars to focus on the grandest long-distance movements between major cities has obscured the finer and varied contours of maritime interaction. This book offers a nuanced archaeological analysis of maritime economy and connectivity in the Roman east. Drawing together maritime landscape studies and network analysis, Roman Seas takes a bottom-up view of the diverse socioeconomic conditions and seafaring logistics that generated multiple structures and scales of interaction. The material record of shipwrecks and ports along a vital corridor from the southeast Aegean across the northeast Mediterranean provides a case study of regional exchange and communication based on routine sails between simple coastal harbors. Rather than a single well-integrated and persistent Mediterranean network, multiple discrete and evolving regional and interregional systems emerge. This analysis sheds light on the cadence of economic life along the coast, the development of market institutions, and the regional continuities that underpinned integration-despite imperial fragmentation-between the second century BCE and the seventh century CE. Roman Seas advances a new approach to the synthesis of shipwreck and other maritime archaeological and historical economic data, as well as a path through the stark dichotomies-either big commercial voyages or small-scale cabotage-that inform most paradigms of Roman connectivity and trade. The result is a unique perspective on ancient Mediterranean trade, seafaring, cultural interaction, and coastal life.
This study presents a new regional history of the middle Tiber valley as a lens through which to view the emergence and transformation of the city of Rome from 1000 BC to AD 1000. Setting the ancient city within the context of its immediate territory, the authors reveal the diverse and enduring links between the metropolis and its hinterland.
The recycling and reuse of materials and objects were extensive in the past, but have rarely been embedded into models of the economy: this volume is the first to explore these practices in the Roman economy, drawing on a variety of methodological approaches and new scientific developments in a wide-ranging interdisciplinary study.
The Byzantine Dark Ages explores current debates about the sudden transformation of the Byzantine Empire in the wake of environmental, social and political changes. Those studying the Byzantine Empire, the successor to the Roman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean, have long recognized that the mid-7th century CE ushered in sweeping variations in the way of life of many inhabitants of the Mediterranean world, with evidence of the decline of the size and economic prosperity of cities, a sharp fall in expressions of literary culture, the collapse in trade networks, and economic and political instability. Michael J. Decker looks at the material evidence for the 7th to 9th centuries, lays out the current academic discourse about its interpretation, and suggests new ways of thinking about this crucial era. Important to readers interested in understanding how and why complex societies and imperial systems undergo and adapt to stresses, this clearly written, accessible work will also challenge students of archaeology and history to think in new ways when comprehending the construction of the past.
In the last twenty years scholarship on late antique and early medieval Ravenna has resulted in a certain number of publications mainly focused on the fields of architecture, mosaics and archaeology. On the contrary, much less attention has been paid on labour – both manual and intellectual – as well as the structure of production and objects derived from manufacturing activities, despite the fact that Ravenna is the place which preserves the highest number of historical evidence among all centres of the late Roman Mediterranean. Its cultural heritage is vast and composite, ranging from papyri to inscriptions, from ivories to marbles, as well as luxury objects, pottery, and coins. Starting from concrete typologies of hand-manufactured goods existing in the Ravennate milieu, the book aims at exploring the multifaceted traditions of late antique and early Byzantine handicraft from the fourth to the eighth century AD. Its perspective is to pay attention more on patronage, social taste, acculturation, workers and the economic industry of production which supported the demand, circulation and distribution of artefacts, than on the artistic evaluation of the objects themselves.
The Roman economy was operated significantly above subsistence level, with production being stimulated by both taxation and trade. Some regions became wealthy on the basis of exporting low-value agricultural products across the Mediterranean. In contrast, it has usually been assumed that the high costs of land transport kept inland regions relatively poor. This volume challenges these assumptions by presenting new research on production and exchange within inland regions. The papers, supported by detailed bibliographic essays, range from Britain to Jordan. They reveal robust agricultural economies in many interior regions. Here, some wealth did come from high value products, which could defy transport costs. However, ceramics also indicate local exchange systems, capable of generating wealth without being integrated into inter-regional trading networks. The role of the State in generating production and exchange is visible, but often co-existed with local market systems. Contributors are Alyssa A. Bandow, Fanny Bessard, Michel Bonifay, Kim Bowes, Stefano Costa, Jeremy Evans, Elizabeth Fentress, Piroska Hárshegyi, Adam Izdebski, Luke Lavan, Tamara Lewit, Phil Mills, Katalin Ottományi, Peter Sarris, Emanuele Vaccaro, Agnès Vokaer, Mark Whittow and Andrea Zerbini.
