19. This refuse pit is not yet published—my information derives from a serious (but ephemeral) booklet, produced with some slides of the site and formerly on sale in Millau: L. Balsan and A. Vernhet, Une Industrie gallo-romaine: La Céramique sigillée de la Graufesenque (Rodez, n.d.), 16. For the deliberate breaking of seconds, see also G. B. Dannell, ‘Law and Practice: Further Thoughts on the Organization of the Potteries at la Graufesenque’, in M. Genin and A. Vernhet (eds.), Céramiques de la Graufesenque et autres productions d’époque romaine: Nouvelles recherches (Montagnac, 2002), 218.
20. Peacock, Pottery in the Roman World, 103–13.
21. Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, 372; using the pioneering work of synthesis of A. J. Parker, Ancient Shipwrecks of the Mediterranean and the Roman Provinces (BAR International Series; Oxford, 1992).
22. Life of John the Almsgiver, ch. 10, as translated by E. Dawes and N. H. Baynes, Three Byzantine Saints (Oxford, 1948).
23. See Peacock, Pottery in the Roman World, 167–9, for the impact (detectable in the archaeological record) of the different transport costs by water and by land, and of competition from a contemporary rival (the ‘New Forest ware’ potteries). On this general issue, see also Ward-Perkins, ‘Specialized Production and Exchange’, 377–9.
24. For the fabricae: O. Seeck (ed.), Notitia Dignitatum (Berlin, 1876), 145, ‘Occidentis IX’; summarized by K. Randsborg, The First Millennium A.D. in Europe and the Mediterranean: An Archaeological Essay (Cambridge, 1991), 94–102. See Fig. 3.3 at p. 36, for some of their products.
25. For an excellent general discussion of the role of the state in late Roman trade: M. McCormick, ‘Bateaux de vie, bateaux de mort: Maladie, commerce, transports annonaires et le passage économique du bas-empire au moyen âge’, Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, 45 (1998) 35–122. For the bricks: R. Tomber, ‘Evidence for Long-Distance Commerce: Imported Bricks and Tiles at Carthage’, Rei Cretariae Romanae Fautorum Acta, 25/26 (1987), 161–74.
26. A. K. Bowman, Life and Letters on the Roman Frontier: Vindolanda and its People (London, 1994), 68–72, and, for the two letters cited, 131–2, 139–40.
27. I am heavily dependent in this section on the excellent recent synthesis by Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages (Oxford, 2005), ch. xi. The following are particularly useful regional surveys. For Britain: M. Fulford, ‘Pottery Production and Trade at the End of Roman Britain: The Case against Continuity’, in P. J. Casey (ed.), The End of Roman Britain, (BAR British Series, 71; Oxford, 1979), 120–32; and K. R. Dark, ‘Pottery and Local Production at the End of Roman Britain’, in Dark (ed.), External Contacts and the Economy of Late Roman and Post-Roman Britain (Wood-bridge, 1996), 53–65. For Spain and northern Gaul: the papers by Gutiérrez Lloret and by Lebecq in The Sixth Century: Production, Distribution and Demand, ed. R. Hodges and W. Bowden (Leiden, Boston, and Cologne, 1998). For Italy: several of the papers in Ceramica in Italia VI–VII secolo, ed. L. Saguì, 2 vols. (Florence, 1998); and P. Arthur and H. Patterson, ‘Ceramics and Early Medieval Central and Southern Italy: “A Potted History”’, in La Storia dell’Alto Medioevo italiano (VI–X secolo) alla luce dell’archaeologia, ed. R. Francovich and G. Noyé (Florence, 1994), 409–41.
28. For declining quantities in Italy: E. Fentress and P. Perkins, ‘Counting African Red Slip Ware’, in A. Mastino (ed.), L’Africa romana: Atti del V convegno di studi, Sassari 11–13 dicembre 1987 (Sassari, 1988), 205–14.
29. This find is discussed by L. Saguì, in Ceramica in Italia, at 305–33; and by the same author in ‘Indagini archeologiche a Roma: Nuovi dati sul VII secolo’, in P. Delogu (ed.), Roma medievale: Aggiornamenti (Florence, 1998), 63–78.
30. For the capacity of a ship of the period: Economy and Exchange, 55.
31. T. W. Potter, The Changing Landscape of South Etruria (London, 1979), 143, fig. 41.
32. Bede, Lives of the Abbots, ch. 5, in Venerabilis Beda, Opera Historica, ed. C. Plummer (Oxford, 1896) (translation in J. F. Webb and D. H. Farmer, The Age of Bede (2nd edn., Harmondsworth, 1983), 185–208.
33. See the papers in Edilizia residenziale tra Ve VIII Secolo, ed. G. P. Brogiolo (Mantova, 1994); and the discussion of towns in B. Ward-Perkins, ‘Continuit-ists, Catastrophists and the Towns of Northern Italy’, Papers of the British School at Rome, 65 (1997), 157–76.
34. There is, admittedly, a massive debate about the precise significance of the use of marble spolia, which I cannot go into here. For the (limited) new carving of the period, see the various volumes of the Corpus della Scultura Altomedievale (Spoleto 1961–).
35. Edilizia residenziale, 8, 30–2.
36. Bradley Hill coins: R. Leech, ‘The Excavation of the Romano-British Farmstead and Cemetery on Bradley Hill, Somerton, Somerset’, Britannia, 12 (1981), 205–10. Roman coins in general, and evidence for their use: C. Howgego, ‘The Supply and Use of Money in the Roman World’, Journal of Roman Studies, 82 (1992), 16–22; F. Millar, ‘The World of the Golden Ass’, Journal of Roman Studies, 71 (1981), 72–3; L. de Ligt, ‘Demand, Supply, Distribution: The Roman Peasantry between Town and Countryside: Rural Monetization and Peasant Demand’, Münstersche Beiträge zur antiken Handelsgeschichte, IX.1 (1990), 33–43; R. Reece, Roman Coins from 140 Sites in Britain (Dorchester, 1991).
37. Tintagel has produced one small hoard of late fourth-century coins—but this may have been deposited in the fourth century, and hoards are anyway much less revealing of regular coin use than scattered finds. The coin evidence for post-Roman Britain is collected and discussed (though with a different conclusion) in K. R. Dark, Britain and the End of the Roman Empire (Stroud, 2000), 143–4 and K. R. Dark, Civitas to Kingdom: British Political Continuity 300–800 (Leicester, 1994), 200–6.
38. For the coinages of the various Germanic kingdoms: P. Grierson and M. Blackburn, Medieval European Coinage, i. The Early Middle Ages (5th–10th Centuries) (Cambridge, 1986) 17–54, 74–80 (for the copper coinage of Italy: 31–3). For broad surveys of coin use in Italy: A. Rovelli, ‘Some Considerations on the Coinage of Lombard and Carolingian Italy’, in The Long Eighth Century: Production, Distribution and Demand, ed. I. L. Hansen and C. Wickham (Leiden, Boston, and Cologue, 2000), 194–223; E. A. Arslan, ‘La circolazione monetaria (secoli V–VIII)’, in La Storia dell’Alto Medioevo italiano alla luce dell’archeologia, 497–519. For the Visigothic copper coins: M. Crusafont i Sabater, El sistema monetario visigodo: Cobre y oro (Barcelona and Madrid, 1994); D. M. Metcalf, ‘Visigothic Monetary History: The Facts, What Facts?’, in A. Ferreiro (ed.), The Visigoths: Studies in Culture and Society (Leiden, 1999), 201–17, at 202–4. For the copper coins of Marseille: C. Brenot, ‘Monnaies en cuivre du VIe siècle frappées à Marseille’, in P. Bastien et al. (eds.), Mélanges de numismatique, d’archéologie et d’histoire offerts à Jean Lafaurie (Paris, 1980), 181–8.
39. For the seventh-century Byzantine coinage of Italy and Sicily: P. Grierson, Byzantine Coins (London, 1982), 129–44; C. Morrisson, ‘La Sicile byzantine: Une lueur dans les siècles obscurs’, Numismatica e antichità classiche, 27 (1998), 307–34. For the large number of seventh- and eighth-century coins found at Rome’s Crypta Balbi: A. Rovelli, ‘La circolazione monetaria a Roma nei secoli VII e VIII. Nuovi dati per la storia economica di Roma nell’alto medioevo’, in P. Delogu (ed.), Roma medievale. Aggiornamenti (Florence, 1998), 79–91.
40. For coins in the sixth- and seventh-century Byzantine East: C. Morrisson, ‘Byzance au VIIe siècle: Le Témoignage de la numismatique’, in Byzantium: Tribute to Andreas Stratos (Athens, 1986), i. 149–63. For the Arab Levant: C. Foss, ‘The Coinage of Syria in the Seventh Century: The Evidence of Excavations’, Israel Numismatic Journal, 13 (1994–9), 119–32.
41. Grierson and Blackburn, Medieval European Coinage, i. 65.
42. There are good introductory pages on barter in C. Humphrey and S. Hugh-Jones, Barter, Exchange and Value: An Anthropological Approach (Cambridge, 1992), 1–20.
43. For periods of ‘abate
ment’ and ‘intensification’: Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, passim (for their discussion of the post-Roman period specifically: 153–72).
44. R. Bruce-Mitford, The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial, 3 vols. (London, 1975–83) (for the pottery bottle, vol. 3.2. 597–610). For some of the remarkable expertise behind the native jewellery: E. Coatsworth and M. Pinder, The Art of the Anglo-Saxon Goldsmith (Woodbridge, 2002) (e.g. at 132, 141–2, 147, 151–2); and N. D. Meeks and R. Holmes, ‘The Sutton Hoo Garnet Jewellery: An Examination of Some Gold Backing Foils and a Study of their Possible Manufacturing Techniques’, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History, 4 (1985), 143–57.
45. For an impression of the iron-age economy: B. Cunliffe, Iron Age Communities in Britain (2nd edn., London, 1978), 157–9, 299–300, 337–42.
46. R. Hodges, The Anglo-Saxon Achievement (London, 1989), 69–114.
Chapter VI. Why the Demise of Comfort?
1. I would certainly not want to go to the stake over the precise positioning at a particular moment of any of the regions. For example, my placing of Britain in around AD 300 is not a confident statement that it was exactly half as complex as contemporary North Africa (whatever that might mean!); and setting Africa over central and northern Italy at the same date is nothing more than a guess, which also ignores local differences within both regions.
2. For Britain, with differences of interpretation: Esmonde Cleary, The Ending of Roman Britain; Dark, Civitas to Kingdom; Faulkner, The Decline and Fall of Roman Britain; N. Faulkner ‘The Debate about the End: A Review of Evidence and Methods’, Archaeological Journal, 159 (2002), 59–76.
3. There are no general surveys of conditions in Italy and Africa. I present some of the evidence in Ward-Perkins, ‘Specialized Production and Exchange’, 354–8.
4. For the wealth and complexity of the late antique East: M. Whittow, The Making of Orthodox Byzantium 600–1025, (Basingstoke, 1996) 59–68 (with further references); C. Foss, ‘The Near Eastern Countryside in Late Antiquity: A Review Article’, The Roman and Byzantine Near East: Some Recent Archaeological Research (Journal of Roman Archaeology, Supplementary Series, 14; Ann Arbor, 1995), 213–34; and the papers in Hommes et richesses, and in Economy and Exchange.
5. It is possible, but disputed, that eastern prosperity dipped in the second half of the sixth century—contrast H. Kennedy, ‘The Last Century of Byzantine Syria’, Byzantinische Forschungen, 10 (1985), 141–83, with M. Whittow, ‘Ruling the Late Roman and Early Byzantine City’, Past and Present, 129 (1990), 3–29, and M. Whittow, ‘Recent Research on the Late–Antique City in Asia Minor; The Second Half of the Sixth Century Revisited’, in L. Lavan (ed.), Recent Research in Late Antique Urbanism (Portsmouth, RI: 2001), 137–53.
6. C. Foss, Ephesus after Antiquity: A Late Antique, Byzantine and Turkish City (Cambridge, 1979), 103–15; R. R. R. Smith, ‘Late Antique Portraits in a Public Context: Honorific Statuary at Aphrodisias in Caria, A.D. 300–600’, Journal of Roman Studies, 89 (1999), 155–89 (for the statues of Aphrodisias, abandoned in situ, until they fell from their pedestals).
7. Whittow, The Making of Orthodox Byzantium, 89–95; C. Morrisson, ‘Byzance au VIIe siècle: Le Témoignage de la numismatique’, in Byzantium: Tribute to Andreas Stratos (Athens, 1986), i. 149–63; J. W. Hayes, ‘Pottery of the 6th and 7th Centuries’, in N. Cambi and E. Marin (eds.), L’Époque de Justinien et les problèmes des VIet VIIe siècles (Vatican City, 1998), 541–50; Foss, Ephesus after Antiquity, 103–15. Pottery in Greece: J. Vroom, After Antiquity: Ceramics and Society in the Aegean from the 7th to the 20th Century A.C. (Leiden, 2003), 49–58.
8. General on Constantinople: C. Mango, Le Développement urbain de Constantinople (IVe–VIIe siècles) (Paris, 1985), 51–62. For coins and pottery in the seventh-century city: M. F. Hendy, ‘The Coins’, in R. M. Harrison, Excavations at Saraçhane in Istanbul 1 (Princeton, 1986), 278–373; J. W. Hayes, Excavations at Saraçhane in Istanbul, 2 The Pottery (Princeton, 1992); J. W. Hayes, ‘A Seventh-Century Pottery Group’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 21 (1968), 203–16.
9. For a general account of the Arab Levant (with full further references): A. Walmsley, ‘Production, Exchange and Regional Trade in the Islamic East Mediterranean: Old Structures, New Systems?’, in The Long Eighth Century, 265–343. For the finds at Déhès, and at Baysān: J.-P. Sodini et al., ‘Déhès (Syrie du Nord): Campagnes I–III (1976–1978). Recherches sur l’habitat rural’, Syria, 57 (1980), 1–304; E. Khamis, ‘Two Wall Mosaic Inscriptions from the Umayyad Market Place in Bet Shean/Baysān’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 64 (2001), 159–76. It is beyond the scope of this book, and of my knowledge, to consider the important question of when Levantine sophistication disappeared.
10. For the argument that radical change began in the fourth century: N. Faulkner, The Decline and Fall of Roman Britain (Stroud, 2000), 121–80.
11. Dramatic economic decline and military failure were first clearly linked by Clive Foss, ‘The Persians in Asia Minor and the End of Antiquity’, English Historical Review, 90 (1975), 721–47. He may have been mistaken in attributing change to a single period of destruction (that by the Persians between 615 and 626), but his general conclusions about the seventh century have not been seriously challenged.
12. P. Lemerle, Les plus anciens recueils des miracles de Saint Démétrius, 2 vols. (Paris, 1979–81).
13. The prolonged Gothic War (535–54) and Lombard wars (from 568) are often (and perhaps rightly) seen as very damaging to Italy—the archaeological evidence does not contradict a link; but it is not yet precisely datable enough to prove it. For the Berbers in Africa: Y. Modéran, Les Maures et et l’Afrique romaine (IVe–VIIe siècle) (Rome, 2003).
14. Procopius, Wars, V.9.3–6.
15. Matthews, Western Aristocracies, 25–30.
16. P. Laurence, Gérontius: La Vie latine de Sainte Mélanie (Jerusalem, 2002), XXI.4, XXII.1.
17. Panella, ‘Merci e scambi’. For the seventh-century trade, see Ch. V n. 29.
18. For tax as a potentially positive force economically: K. Hopkins, ‘Taxes and Trade in the Roman Empire (200 B.C.–A.D. 400)’, Journal of Roman Studies, 70 (1980), 101–25.
19. The negative evidence is admittedly problematic, because the entire habit of erecting secular inscriptions ended during the fifth and sixth centuries.
20. Evagrius, IV.29 (M. Whitby (trans.), The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius Scholasticus (Translated Texts for Historians, 33; Liverpool, 2000), 231).
21. See the papers by Farquharson and Koder, in P. Allen and E. Jeffreys (eds.), The Sixth Century: End or Beginning? (Brisbane, 1996).
22. For a useful and full discussion of this issue: Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, 298–328, 338–41.
23. Eugippius, Life of Severinus, ch. 22 (local market), and ch. 28 (distribution of oil): ‘quam speciem in illis locis difficillima negotiatorum tantum deferebat evectio.’
24. Ibid., ch. 20.
25. A connection between complexity and collapse is a well-known argument in discussion of the disappearance of early ‘civilizations’: the classic article is C. Renfrew, ‘Systems Collapse as Social Transformation: Catastrophe and Anastrophe in Early State Societies’, in C. Renfrew and K. L. Cooke (eds.), Transformations: Mathematical Approaches to Culture Change (New York, San Francisco, and London, 1979), 481–506. Renfrew depicts collapse as an inevitable result of complexity—the Roman case, as set out above, however, suggests a particular crisis was also needed before a complex system would disintegrate. K. R. Dark, ‘Proto-Industrialisation and the End of the Roman Economy’, in Dark (ed.), External Contacts, 1–21, argues (in the case of Roman Britain) along very similar lines to me.
Chapter VII. The Death of a Civilization?
1. Some surveys in the area of the lower Rhône have discovered more sites of the fifth and sixth centuries than of the third and fourth, but these are very unusual results: F. Trémont, ‘Habitat et peuplement en Provence à la fin de l’Antiquité’, in P. Ou
zoulias et al. (eds.), Les Campagnes de la Gaule à la fin de l’Antiquité (Antibes, 2001), 275–301.
2. R. Leech, ‘The Excavation of the Romano-British Farmstead and Cemetery on Bradley Hill, Somerton, Somerset’, Britannia, 12 (1981), 177–252; B. Hope-Taylor, Yeavering, an Anglo-British Centre of Early Northumbria (London, 1977).
3. See the overview article: Foss, ‘The Near Eastern Countryside’.
4. C. Delano Smith et al., ‘Luni and the Ager Lunensis’, Papers of the British School at Rome, 54 (1986), 142–3.
5. M. Decker, ‘Tilling the Hateful Earth’: Agrarian Life and Economy in the Late Antique Levant (Oxford, forthcoming).
6. There is an excellent recent summary, with a good bibliography, of the animal-bone evidence and its implications: G. Kron, ‘Archaeozoological Evidence for the Productivity of Roman Livestock Farming’, Münstersche Beiträge zur antiken Handelsgeschichte, 21.2 (2002), 53–73. I must emphasize that the sizes given in Fig. 7.3 are very approximate. I achieved them by averaging the average sizes on different sites presented by Kron, which is not a statistically accurate procedure.
The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization Page 23