This book offers a new and surprising perspective on the evolution of cities across the Roman Empire in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages (third to ninth centuries AD). It suggests that the ...tenacious persistence of leading cities across most of the Roman world is due, far more than previously thought, to the persistent inclination of kings, emperors, caliphs, bishops, and their leading subordinates to manifest the glory of their offices on an urban stage, before crowds of city dwellers. Long after the dissolution of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, these communal leaders continued to maintain and embellish monumental architectural corridors established in late antiquity, the narrow but grandiose urban itineraries, essentially processional ways, in which their parades and solemn public appearances consistently unfolded. Hendrik W. Dey's approach selectively integrates urban topography with the actors who unceasingly strove to animate it for many centuries.
This book explores the relationship between the city of Rome and the Aurelian Wall during the six centuries following its construction in the 270s AD, a period when the city changed and contracted ...almost beyond recognition, as it evolved from imperial capital into the spiritual center of Western Christendom. The Wall became the single most prominent feature in the urban landscape, a dominating presence which came bodily to incarnate the political, legal, administrative, and religious boundaries of urbs Roma, even as it reshaped both the physical contours of the city as a whole and the mental geographies of 'Rome' that prevailed at home and throughout the known world. With the passage of time, the circuit took on a life of its own as the embodiment of Rome's past greatness, a cultural and architectural legacy that dwarfed the quotidian realities of the post-imperial city as much as it shaped them.
Fifty Early Medieval Thingsintroduces readers to the material culture of late antique and early medieval Europe, north Africa, and western Asia. Ranging from Iran to Ireland and from Sweden to ...Tunisia, Deborah Deliyannis, Hendrik Dey, and Paolo Squatriti present fifty objects-artifacts, structures, and archaeological features-created between the fourth and eleventh centuries, an ostensibly "Dark Age" whose cultural richness and complexity is often underappreciated. Each thing introduces important themes in the social, political, cultural, religious, and economic history of the postclassical era.
Some of the things, like a simple ard (plow) unearthed in Germany, illustrate changing cultural and technological horizons in the immediate aftermath of Rome's collapse; others, like the Arabic coin found in a Viking burial mound, indicate the interconnectedness of cultures in this period. Objects such as the Book of Kells and the palace-city of Anjar in present-day Jordan represent significant artistic and cultural achievements; more quotidian items (a bone comb, an oil lamp, a handful of chestnuts) belong to the material culture of everyday life. In their thing-by-thing descriptions, the authors connect each object to both specific local conditions and to the broader influences that shaped the first millennium AD, and also explore their use in modern scholarly interpretations, with suggestions for further reading. Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written,Fifty Early Medieval Thingsdemonstrates how to read objects in ways that make the distant past understandable and approachable.
An 8th century CE earthquake severely damaged inland cities across the southern-central Levant, but reported evidence of this earthquake along the coastline is scarce. In Caesarea Maritima, ...archaeologists have found contemporaneous anomalous sand and shelly layers within nearshore structures and interpreted them as construction fill, aeolian accumulation, or abandonment debris. Recently, similar sand deposits were exposed in a Roman-to-Islamic harbor-side warehouse. This presented the first opportunity to directly sample and systematically analyze in situ, undisturbed deposits in order to determine their origin and taphonomic (source and transport) history. Two sediment cores from the deposit as well as comparative reference samples from defined contexts were analyzed for grain size distribution, foraminifera (abundance/taphonomy), and relative age (POSL, archaeochronology). The results support the interpretation that the deposit was formed from the transport of offshore marine sediments during a high-energy inundation event, most likely a tsunami associated with the 749 CE earthquake.
The first section of this article examines the various types of charitable institutions operative in Rome between the seventh and the ninth centuries, in the light of what available textual and ...comparative evidence reveals about their respective functions. It is then suggested that these centres of assistance were staffed by resident monastic communities, an arrangement which accounts well for their many apparent similarities; which may help to explain the disappearance of the most commonly attested types (xenodochia and diaconiae) over the course of the ninth century; and which opens a window onto an alternative conception of monastic practice hitherto under‐represented in the scholarly tradition.
Determining the position of Liman Tepe's (ancient `Clazomenae') archaeological features relative to the coastline is important for understanding their intended function and reconstructing the ...character of Aegean maritime activities and sea‐based trade. Previous attempts at reconstructing harbour locations at Liman Tepe relied on extrapolating paleoenvironments based on modern surface topography. In light of this, samples from a sediment coring survey and terrestrial and underwater archaeological excavations were analysed using multi‐proxy geoarchaeological methods to determine paleoenvironmental facies. Micropaleontological (foraminifera), sedimentological (grain‐size analysis) and geochemical (δ13C/δ18O) analyses resulted in the reconstruction of the coastal paleogeomorphology, including the presence and absence of ancient harbouring areas. Neither of the previous coastal reconstructions was supported by the new results. Instead, two separate harbouring areas were recognized, one coincident with the Early Bronze Age (4800–3900 years bp) and a second during the archaic and classical periods (c. 2800–2400 years bp). These results emphasize the necessity for multi‐proxy geoarchaeological studies when approaching coastal archaeological sites as a means to reconstruct paleocoastal geomorphology and understand ancient maritime development better.
The second part of this study is animated by the central question, hitherto almost untouched, of what the Aurelian Wall “did” to Rome. In part, I want to consider the effects of the Wall on the ...fabric of the city, on the way it looked and the way it functioned, and thus on the activities of people living within and around it, whose lives it touched in a variety of ways. But I am equally concerned with the Wall's impact on the concept of Rome in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, and its place in the cognitive landscapes of Romans and outsiders, which in turn conditioned the representations of “Rome” exported abroad and vaunted at home. In what follows, we will consider some of the more salient results of the immuring of Rome, first in terms of topography and infrastructure, and then in the following chapter in relation to prevailing conceptions of urban space and the limits thereof, before turning in the final chapter to the place the Wall had come to occupy after a half-millennium spent seeping into the spirit and fabric of the city, when as the pre-eminent embodiment of “Rome” – as reality and as ideal – it became instrumental in the creation of a new papal capital that was simultaneously the regional hub of a nascent ecclesiastical state, and the quasi-mythical focal point of an immeasurably vaster spiritual empire.
Sacred geography, interrupted Dey, Hendrik W.
The Aurelian Wall and the Refashioning of Imperial Rome, AD 271-855,
04/2011
Book Chapter
From the moment of its construction, the Aurelian Wall began markedly to affect the manner in which Romans lived and worked and moved, and thus to alter the physical contours of the city, as the ...previous chapter has, I hope, shown. It remains to be seen how the new fortifications came to affect the less tangible aspects of Rome's urban identity: the characterization and classification of urban space, and the body of convention, civic and religious – the two are effectively inseparable – that had long distinguished a city center which in reality transitioned quite imperceptibly into its surroundings. The following, then, is an attempt to explore how the Wall first altered and ultimately (re)created prevailing notions of urban boundaries, beginning under the last pagan emperors and continuing into the age of papal supremacy.Along with these changed boundaries came new and different prescriptions for the use of territory on both sides of the line, above all in matters of sacred cult, which evolved beyond recognition in the first centuries of the Wall's existence. But for all that pagans and Christians took conspicuously different approaches to the distinction between urban and suburban space, and the activities appropriate to each sphere, they were nearly unanimous in their choice of the enceinte as the intervening threshold. As the clear and enduring separator between these “inner” and “outer” zones, the Wall gave physical form and context to a sequence of shifting religious and cultural paradigms that redefined the relationship between interior and exterior space, each of which was in turn privileged over the other.
The preceding look at the immense logistical hurdles inherent in the construction and maintenance of the Aurelian Wall raises another query as yet insufficiently explored, for all (or perhaps because ...of) its apparent obviousness: why was the thing built in the first place, and subsequently so laboriously rebuilt and renovated? As it turns out, the question of what the Wall was supposed to do is rather less straightforward than it might seem; and “defense,” the preferred response to date, provides only a partial explanation. Although the political and strategic military dynamics of the late empire cannot be overlooked, they are perhaps more usefully seen as the foundation for the “what for?” inquiry, rather than the final word. The same can be said for the treatment of the Wall in its broader context, as part of a widespread spate of wall-building during the later third, fourth, and fifth centuries that culminated in an empire-wide revamping of classical urban paradigms. While the Wall's place in this process requires further assessment, both to elucidate the rationale for its construction, and to better establish the nature of its influence upon the development and subsequent proliferation of urban fortifications in late antiquity, the truly exceptional nature of both the monument and the city of Rome itself cannot be overstated. The fortification of the caput mundi was, in both practical and conceptual terms, an unparalleled endeavor.
PDF
