Trade and Industry in Byzantine Anatolia: The Evidence from Amorium

Abstract

IN A recently published book, Bryan Ward-Perkins has drawn a graphic picture of the in material culture that marked the end of the Roman Empire between the early fifth and the seventh centuries. He points out, example, that produc tion of wheel-made pottery ceased in Britain during this period, and that the skill was not reintroduced for almost three hundred years.1 study also draws attention to the fact that not only were some manufacturing and construction techniques lost or abandoned in much of the western empire, but that the sophisticated mechanisms that allowed mass production and distribution also broke down. It is further argued that the eastern half of the empire suffered a sim ilar collapse in living standards during the seventh century, largely as a result of Persian and Arab invasions. In other words, the Dark Ages saw not merely a transformation in Byzantine geopolitical, military, and economic conditions but a real decline in the cultural, social, and physical aspects of Byzantine life. According to Ward Perkins, Around ad 600 the sophistication of the late-antique Aegean world evaporated, and By ad 700 there was only one area of the former Roman world that had not experienced overwhelm ing economic decline?the provinces of the Levant, and neighboring Egypt, conquered by the Arabs in the 630s and 640s.2 There is a great deal of truth in this view of the Mediterranean world at the end of antiquity. However, in the present paper I attempt to redress the balance a little with regard to the surviving eastern half of the Roman Empire, concentrating on the evidence provided by the excavations at a major Byzantine city in central Anatolia. This site, where excavations have been continuing since 1988, has already produced a wealth of new material relating to the seventh through eleventh centuries. Here, at least, there was no apparent contraction in the size of the urban settlement, which retained its impressive circuit of fortifications and buildings that served the spiritual and physical needs of its inhabitants. To date, the excavations have uncovered near the center of the Lower City a large, aisled basilica church and a bathhouse, both of which appear to have functioned until the mid-ninth century.3 Lower City walls, too, may have been abandoned only after the capture of the city by the Arabs in 838, and the Upper City was subsequently refortified in the middle Byzantine period (ioth-nth centuries).4 Since 1998 work has also focused on a central area of the Lower City not far i B. Ward-Perkins, Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford, 2005), esp. 117. 2 Ibid., 129 and 126. 3 For the most recent report on the bathhouse, see C. S. Lightfoot, Y. Arbel, B. Bohlendorf-Arslan, J. A. Roberts, and J. Witte-Orr, The Amorium Project: Excavation and Research in 2001, DOP 58 (2004): 356-63. 4 See C. S. Lightfoot, The Survival of Cities in Byzantine Anatolia, the Case of Amorium, Byza ntion 68 (1998): 60-64; E. A. Ivison, Urban Renewal and Imperial Revival in Byzantium (730-1025), ByzF 26 (2000): 14-18.

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