Archaeology Magazine - September/October 1998 - 62

as we know it today,
Age archaeology,
owes much to the transformation of Europe itDark self following the war. The rebuilding of wartorn towns provided an unparalleled opportunity to investigate medieval sites previously sealed by modern buildings.
By the 1970s, it was clear that archaeology might well illuminate the crucial centuries between the fall of the Roman
Empire and the making of medieval nations.
Academic attitudes toward the Dark Ages changed as a
number of large-scale excavations revealed the extraordinary ability of the people of this period to forge new identities. A few of the many major research excavations became
benchmarks, convincing historians that the written sources
needed réévaluation. Among the most notable were the
work of W.A. van Es at the Rhine-mouth emporium of
Dorestad, the first systematic excavations by Mogens Bencard of the early Danish town at Ribe, Brian Hope-Taylors
study of a seventh-century Northumbrian palace at Yeavering, the painstaking excavations at Romes Cripta Balbi (a
block of the ancient city), and my own investigations at the
ninth-century Carolingian monastery at San Vincenzo al
Volturno in southern Italy (see Archaeology, May/June
1989, pp. 42-46). These are not glamorous Pompeiis, but
sites characterized by post-holes, rudimentary walls, beaten
earth floors, and rubbish pits. Yet the archaeology of these
places invariably fleshes out the skeletal written record. Together with countless studies of ceramics, glassware, and
other objects, as well as systematic field surveys of regions
as diverse as western Brittany and the Libyan desert, it has
produced a body of information that, in some respects, is
now more revealing than any historical account.
Historical texts ascribe the end of the Roman Empire to
invasions and migrations of central European tribal peoples
like the Angles, Goths, Huns, and Lombards. Edward Gibbon's eighteenth-century Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire reinforced such a history, which has its supporters
to this day. What really happened was far more complex.
Recent studies of the collapse of cities as diverse as Athens,
Carthage, and Rome, examined as part of economic and
social changes throughout
have
the Mediterranean,
s
to
be
Gibbon
saga
proved
more a literary than a historical masterpiece. The economic crisis of the Roman
Empire in the third century- an age typified by steep
inflation, civil unrest, and political instability - was a
stimulus to investing in the
eastern empire, focused on
Constantinople, and created
problems for the Germanic
62

tribes beyond the frontiers. These peoples had long depended on stable relations with the well-run Roman
provinces. Danish archaeologist Klavs Randsborgs 1991
study The First Millennium documents how civil unrest and
economic tension in the western provinces affected these
so-called barbarians. Hoarding practices beyond the Roman
frontier, for example, invariably correlated with economic or
social upheaval within the frontier, an example being the
Franks' crossing of the Rhine in the second half of the
fourth century. Under pressure to survive, these people
sometimes forced their way into the provinces to benefit, as
best they could, from dwindling opportunities, such as
gaining entitlement to land through conquest or by occupying deserted estates. In fact, the archaeology of the fourth
to seventh centuries in much of Europe points to the synthesis of two very different cultures, Roman and Germanic.
Van Es' excavations of the border village of Wijster in the
Rhine Delta, for example, indicated how a Frankish community established a foothold on the edge of the imperial
Roman world. Likewise, excavations by Henry Hurst at
Carthage have traced the port's limited revival under a Vandal government.
The pattern of colonization, the steady deterioration of
imperial standards of civic life, and the rhythms of Mediterranean and pan-European trade conjure up a picture of decline and fall that bears comparison with the collapse of the
Soviet Union into a mosaic of impoverished states. But
those living on the frontiers of the old Roman Empire were
far from primitive. Take fifth-century Denmark. Excavations have yielded evidence of prosperous emporia such as
Lundenborg on Funen, an expansionist agrarian economy,
and Baltic-wide trade connections. Its people were hardly
destitute tribesmen seeking greener pastures elsewhere. In
fact, the Jutes, who quit western Denmark and sailed to
sub-Roman Britain, discovered primitive conditions by their
standards: a ruinous countryside, deserted and ravaged
towns, and a political system that had devolved into a
patchwork of tribes. Archaeology has shown that the Roman population in Britain
declined dramatically, from 3
to 6 million in A.D.300 to no
more than half a million in
a.D. 600. Many scholars have
attributed this to plagues,
but that may be only half the
story; long-term social and
economic stagnation were
certainly factors. The abandoned fields and farmsteads
Iz and deserted cities, it would
seem, were part of a wide]
I spread demographic decline,
equally evident in Gaul, Italy,
o and Spain.
U
Archaeology

Archaeology Magazine - September/October 1998

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Archaeology Magazine - September/October 1998