[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
The archaeological study of the late antique and medieval Mediterranean has grown rapidly in the last few decades. Having long since moved beyond the diligent recording by classical archaeologists of what many considered merely ‘pesky overburden’, the field has blossomed into a discipline that has become firmly established in Europe and is making significant headway in the North American academy too. This collection of useful synopses of recent work and targeted case studies seeks to build on this momentum, situating itself into the broader diachronic framework of an archaeology ‘of the Mediterranean.’[1] Born out of a 2019 AIA/SCS colloquium on the ‘Afterlife of Ancient Urbanscapes and Rural Landscapes in the Post-Classical Mediterranean (400-1300),’ the papers gathered together in this volume address themes ranging from changes in urban and rural dynamics and settlement patterns to trade networks and cross-cultural interaction in the post-classical Mediterranean. The book is divided into two sections, Greece (Chapters 1-5) and the Central Mediterranean (Chapters 6-13). Given these regional foci there is also a particular, although not exclusive, engagement with island transformations. The ‘afterlife’ of classical (and earlier) remains also figures highly.
This edited volume is meant to act as a ‘companion’ to recently published work, and in this it is largely successful. The syntheses in Natalia Poulou’s Chapter 1 and Scott Gallimore’s Chapter 2 are of particular use to the early medieval archaeologist, especially given the attention paid to ceramic material culture and trade networks. In this the authors are filling a key gap in the scholarship; the flurry of recent work can be difficult to navigate, and both chapters do an excellent job in tying this material together into a grand, and less opaque, narrative. The remaining three chapters of the first section deal with the late antique cityscape in southern Greece, and transformations in the rural landscape and inter-cultural interaction in Greece during the high Middle Ages. These contributions build on recent work, pushing into innovative territory to question established narratives of decline and to make use of methodologies and theories that have seen little application in the study of late antiquity and the high Middle Ages. This is exactly what one would hope to see in a period and region that have seen a fair amount of recent, on-the-ground, work.
The following section, on the central Mediterranean, contains chapters on Corsica, Sicily, Malta, and a final contribution on the southern Italian peninsula. Here the syntheses largely give way to more targeted case studies, although valiant efforts are made to fit this evidence into what amounts to a largely fragmentary picture of rural life in late antiquity through the high Middle Ages. This is hardly surprising, given the relatively smaller amount of archaeological work dedicated to these periods in the central Mediterranean in recent years when compared with Greece. This also likely reflects the relative career position of the various authors included in this second section, the majority early career scholars, specialists, or state archaeological officers, rather than the more established contributors of several of the more broadly focused pieces in the first section. These case studies are in most instances of considerable use to specialists in the period, featuring exhaustive combinations of textual and archaeological work (Corsica), innovative techniques like terrestrial 3D laser scanning (Cozzo del Pantano, Sicily), and groundbreaking new perspectives (examining Muslim Malta). The more traditional archaeological case studies are definitive in their attempts to fit in-depth excavation evidence into broader narratives about villas, tomb reuse, and rural life in Sicily and Malta.
Rather than focus on each individual contribution, I will here offer a few thoughts on some of the highlights of the volume. First, the contribution of Effie Athanassopoulos (Chapter 4), stands out as an excellent application of archaeological survey in the framework of landscape archaeology and larger questions surrounding changes to settlement patterns. Here, the Nemea Valley Archaeological Project (NVAP) acts as the lens through which to test hypotheses about these changes in the high medieval transition to a Frankish dominated Greek countryside. Moving first from the eleventh to the twelfth century, Athanassopoulos uses texts and other surveys to discuss what we think we know about the Greek landscape prior to the Fourth Crusade, then compares this with finds from NVAP. The process is repeated for the Frankish thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, with a particular eye throughout to the pottery, including an in-depth discussion focusing on changes to the corpus in Corinth during these centuries. The move to nucleated or fortified settlements at the end of the thirteenth century is discussed in detail and cited with examples from NVAP and elsewhere, although the incastellamento of the Peloponnese is put down simply to increasing insecurity without further exploration. The chapter closes, however, with a superb castigation of landscape archaeology and the uses of survey data. Athanassopoulos derides the continued processual focus of much of landscape studies in archaeology, with the economic often taking pride of place over any discussion of cultural meaning, of a preference for space over place. This discussion of the need to move beyond environmental functionalist interpretations is a worthwhile read for any landscape archaeologist.
In Chapter 8 Matt King breaks new ground in considering the epigraphic evidence for the Muslim period on medieval Malta. Drawing on material from a cemetery in Rabat, King performs an analysis of a series of 39 tombstone fragments ranging from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries that had initially been excavated in the 1920s, and clearly paid little attention in the intervening years. Stylistic similarities with Sicily and North Africa are identified, as well as evidence for local innovation. This, in itself, would be grounds for taking note of this chapter, as the archaeological study of Muslim occupation on the insular and northern shores of the Mediterranean has received relatively little attention until quite recently. Yet King goes further in his analysis with an extensive contextualization for his stylistic analysis, using linguistic and textual evidence to build a greater picture of Muslim Malta. In addition to a consideration of changes in the settlement pattern from before the Muslim conquest until after the Christian reoccupation under the Normans, he devotes considerable space to the evidence for intercommunal tensions between Christians and Muslims, prior to the final, thirteenth-century expulsion from the island of the adherents of Islam. This chapter is a singular contribution.
Chapters 9 and 10, by Rosa Lanteri and Michael Decker, respectively, work well together and should be discussed as a pair. The first of these pulls together all that is known about the location and character of Roman and late antique villas in the greater region of Syracuse. This information, assembled from from surveys, excavations, and even incidental mentions in a variety of sources, is woven together into a grand tapestry to attempt to reconstruct the role of these villas within the regional economic and social system. Overall, thirty-one villas are discussed in both synchronic and diachronic terms, charting how they changed over time, the evidence for their reuse, restoration, and abandonment. Lanteri claims to be putting together a gazetteer, but ends up producing, on a small, regional scale, something that seems like a near-complete picture of the social and economic system of late antique Sicilian villas.
This picture is given greater life and resonance by the in-depth discussion of the Villa Casale at Piazza Armerina by Michael Decker. Drawing on decades of work at the site, the chapter fleshes out the various transformations that altered the physical, lived space of the villa over the centuries of late antiquity and into the early Middle Ages in considerable detail. The pottery, always appreciated by an archaeologist with an eye to wider connections and economic life, is not neglected, and additional evidence, in the form of palynological data, is included as well. There is some slight repetition between sections, but otherwise this is a meaty chapter into which a scholar of medieval Sicily can happily bite. Decker is known for his works on the broader picture of the early medieval Mediterranean, and this is also reflected in his discussion of the place of the Villa Casale, and nearby Philosophiana, in the broad sweep of changes across the centuries. The Arab-Norman period, frequently overlooked when discussing the afterlife of Roman villas in Sicily, is also included along with its attendant physical evidence. This type of solid archaeological interpretation is a hallmark of almost all the chapters in the volume.
A more problematic contribution is the final chapter of the book, by Santino Alessandro Cugno and Franco Dell’Aquila, on arched blind niches in rupestrian contexts in southern Italy. While the authors are not academic archaeologists, and can thus be understood as having different priorities and perspectives in their approach to physical remains, the chapter, in general, suffers from the lack of an overarching interpretive framework. After a list of various examples of arched blind niches and their potential uses, four rupestrian churches of the tenth to eleventh centuries are discussed in minute detail, with particular attention being paid to the uniformity of the height to base ratio of the blind niches, which, we are told, points to a professional workforce with “refined aesthetic taste.”[2] Noting the difficulty of dating rock cut features, the authors then proceed to declare the date of some of the phases of these churches without supporting evidence. There follows a suggestion of tentative numerological significance for the arches, as well as a connection with ninth- through eleventh-century Cappadocian examples, before closing with a discussion on appropriate terminology that would have been better placed towards the beginning of the chapter. While the argument here can be somewhat difficult to follow, it is worth noting, as the authors point out, that these architectural features have not previously been systematically studied. This, in itself, makes the chapter a valuable contribution. Moreover, the compendious list of comparanda contained in the endnotes to this chapter will, no doubt, serve to adequately compensate any scholar of the rupestrian churches of southern Italy for the somewhat disorganized presentation.
Overall, the volume is a valuable contribution to the archaeology of the late antique and medieval Mediterranean. Minus some minor copy-editing errors, the chapters are overwhelmingly of the highest quality in their presentation of archaeological data, their innovative approach, and their desire to fill key gaps in the scholarship. This collection will be of undoubted utility to any scholar of the period.
Authors and Titles
Introduction / Angelo Castrorao Barba, Davide Tanasi, and Roberto Micciché
Part I. Greece
- Digging in the Dark: The Islands of the Aegean and Crete from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, Late Sixth through Ninth Centuries CE / Natalia Poulou
- The Transformation of Crete in Late Antiquity, Sixth-Tenth Centuries CE / Scott Gallimore
- Reuse of the Ancient Urban Landscape in Late Antique Athens, Corinth, and Southern Greece / Amelia R. Brown
- Medieval Landscape Archaeology in Southern Greece: An Overview and Reassessment / Effie F. Athanassopoulos
- Segregation, Integration, and Colonization: Cross-Cultural Interactions in Medieval Greece in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries / Grant Schrama
Part II. The Central Mediterranean
- Late Antique and Early Christian Corsica: An Archaeological Overview / Philippe Pergola and Gabriele Castiglia
- Late Roman and Byzantine Malta: Tombs, Burial Customs, and Religion / David Cardona
- Muslims in Medieval Malta: Epigraphic Evidence from a Cemetery in Rabat / Matt King
- Roman Villas in the Territory of Syracuse: An Update / Rosa Lanteri
- Roman Villas and Their Afterlife in Sicily: The Case of Piazza Armerina / Michael J. Decker
- The Rural Settlement of Contrada Castro (Sicily) between Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages / Angelo Castrorao Barba, Roberto Micciché, Filippo Pisciotta, Claudia Speciale, Carla Aleo Nero, Pasquale Marino, and Giuseppe Bazan
- The Afterlife of a Sicilian Middle Bronze Age Cemetery: The Reuse of Cozzo del Pantano (Siracusa) / Davide Tanasi
- Arched Blind Niches in Medieval Rupestrian Architecture in Southern Italy / Santino Alessandro Cugno and Franco Dell’Aquila.
Notes
[1] Braudel, F. (1972) The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World at the time of Philip II, 2 vols, London: Collins; Horden, P. and Purcell, W. (2000) The Corrupting Sea: A Study in Mediterranean History. Oxford: Blackwell.
[2] p. 307