Recent Research on the Late Antique Countryside

Recent Research on the Late Antique Countryside PDF

Author: William Bowden

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 624

ISBN-13: 900413607X

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A complex picture of differing regional trajectories emerges, whilst cultural change is everywhere apparent, in phenomena such as Christianisation, settlement nucleation and fortification."--BOOK JACKET.

Recent Research on the Late Antique Countryside

Recent Research on the Late Antique Countryside PDF

Author: William Bowden

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2004-01-01

Total Pages: 623

ISBN-13: 9047413423

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This volume explores the late antique countryside, looking at social and political life, landscape change, villas, monasteries, pilgrimage sites and the fate of rural temples. A section is devoted to recent survey work in Turkey and a comprehensive bibliographic essay frames the work. With contributions by Alexandra Chavarría, Tamara Lewit, Peter Sarris, Frank R. Trombley, Beatrice Caseau, John Mitchell, Marcus Rautman, Douglas Baird, Hannelore Vanhaverbeke, Femke Martens, Marc Waelkens, Jeroen Poblome, Joanita Vroom, Carla Sfameni, Lynda Mulvin, Joseph Patrich, Beat Brenk, Etienne Louis, Fabio Saggioro and Archie Dunn.

Landscapes of Change

Landscapes of Change PDF

Author: Neil Christie

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1351923471

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Only in recent years has archaeology begun to examine in a coherent manner the transformation of the landscape from classical through to medieval times. In Landscapes of Change, leading scholars in the archaeology of the late antique and early medieval periods address the key results and directions of Roman rural fieldwork. In so doing, they highlight problems of analysis and interpretation whilst also identifying the variety of transformations that rural Europe experienced during and following the decline of Roman hegemony. Whilst documents and standing buildings predominate in the urban context to provide a coherent and tangible guide to the evolving urban form and its society since Roman times, the countryside in many ages remains rather shadowy - a context for the cultivation, gathering and movement of food and other resources, inhabited by farmers, villagers and miners. Whilst the Roman period is adequately served through occasional extant remains and through the survey and excavation of villas and farmsteads, as well as the writings of agronomists, the medieval one is generally well marked by the presence of still extant villages across Europe, often dependent on castles and manors which symbolise the so-called 'feudal' centuries. But the intervening period, the fourth to tenth centuries, is that with the least documentation and with the fewest survivals. What happened to the settlement units that made up the Roman rural world? When and why do new settlement forms emerge? Landscapes of Change is essential reading for anyone wanting an up-to-date summary of the results of archaeological and historical investigations into the changing countryside of the late Roman, late antique and early medieval world, between the fourth and tenth centuries AD. It questions numerous aspects of change and continuity, assessing the levels of impact of military and economic decay, the spread and influence of Christianity, and the role of Germanic, Slav and Arab settlements in disrupting and redefining the ancient rural landscapes.

Urban Centers and Rural Contexts in Late Antiquity

Urban Centers and Rural Contexts in Late Antiquity PDF

Author: Thomas S. Burns

Publisher: MSU Press

Published: 2012-01-01

Total Pages: 454

ISBN-13: 0870138987

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Recent publications on urbanism and the rural environment in Late Antiquity, most of which explore a single region or narrow chronological niche, have emphasized either textual or archeological evidence. None has attempted the more ambitious task of bringing together the full range of such evidence within a multiregional perspective and around common themes. Urban Centers and Rural Contexts seeks to redress this omission. While ancient literature and the physical remains of cities attest to the power that urban values held over the lives of their inhabitants, the rural areas in which the majority of imperial citizens lived have not been well served by the historical record. Only recently have archeological excavations and integrated field surveys sufficiently enhanced our knowledge of the rural contexts to demonstrate the continuing interdependence of urban centers and rural communities in Late Antiquity. These new data call into question the conventional view that this interdependence progressively declined as a result of governmental crises, invasions, economic dislocation, and the success of Christianization. The essays in this volume require us to abandon the search for a single model of urban and rural change; to reevaluate the cities and towns of the Empire as centers of habitation, rather than archeological museums; and to reconsider the evidence of continuous and pervasive cultural change across the countryside. Deploying a wide range of material as well as literary evidence, the authors provide access not only into the world of élites, but also to the scarcely known lives of those without a voice in the literature, those men and women who worked in the shops, labored in the fields, and humbled themselves before their gods. They bring us closer to the complexity of life in late ancient communities and, in consequence, closer to both urban and rural citizens.

The Monastic Landscape of Late Antique Egypt

The Monastic Landscape of Late Antique Egypt PDF

Author: Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-11-23

Total Pages: 455

ISBN-13: 1107161819

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This book traces changing perceptions of Egypt's monastic landscape through an analysis of archaeological and documentary evidence from late antiquity.

Constructing Communities in the Late Roman Countryside

Constructing Communities in the Late Roman Countryside PDF

Author: Cam Grey

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-08-25

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1139501623

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This book is the first comprehensive treatment of the 'small politics' of rural communities in the Late Roman world. It places the diverse fates of those communities within a generalized model for exploring rural social systems. Fundamentally, social interactions in rural contexts in the period revolved around the desire of individual households to insure themselves against catastrophic subsistence failure and the need of the communities in which they lived to manage the attendant social tensions, inequalities and conflicts. A focus upon the politics of reputation in those communities provides a striking contrast to the picture painted by the legislation and the writings of Rome's literate elite: when viewed from the point of view of the peasantry, issues such as the Christianization of the countryside, the emergence of new types of patronage relations, and the effects of the new system of taxation upon rural social structures take on a different aspect.

Cities and the Meanings of Late Antiquity

Cities and the Meanings of Late Antiquity PDF

Author: Mark Humphries

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2019-11-04

Total Pages: 118

ISBN-13: 9004422617

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This study examines how cities have become an area of significant historical debate about late antiquity, challenging accepted notions that it is a period of dynamic change and reasserting views of the era as one of decline and fall.

The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity

The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity PDF

Author: Averil Cameron

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-04-29

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 1136673059

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This thoroughly revised and expanded edition of The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, now covering the period 395-700 AD, provides both a detailed introduction to late antiquity and a direct challenge to conventional views of the end of the Roman empire. Leading scholar Averil Cameron focuses on the changes and continuities in Mediterranean society as a whole before the Arab conquests. Two new chapters survey the situation in the east after the death of Justinian and cover the Byzantine wars with Persia, religious developments in the eastern Mediterranean during the life of Muhammad, the reign of Heraclius, the Arab conquests and the establishment of the Umayyad caliphate. Using the latest in-depth archaeological evidence, this all-round historical and thematic study of the west and the eastern empire has become the standard work on the period. The new edition takes account of recent research on topics such as the barbarian ‘invasions’, periodization, and questions of decline or continuity, as well as the current interest in church councils, orthodoxy and heresy and the separation of the miaphysite church in the sixth-century east. It contains a new introductory survey of recent scholarship on the fourth century AD, and has a full bibliography and extensive notes with suggestions for further reading. The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity 395-700 AD continues to be the benchmark for publications on the history of Late Antiquity and is indispensible to anyone studying the period.

Authority and Control in the Countryside

Authority and Control in the Countryside PDF

Author: Alain Delattre

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-11-26

Total Pages: 612

ISBN-13: 9004386548

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Authority and Control in the Countryside looks at the economic, religious, political and cultural instruments that local and regional powers in the late antique to early medieval Mediterranean and Near East used to manage their rural hinterlands.