ArticlePDF Available

The First Millennium A. D. in Europe and the Mediterranean

Authors:
The First Millennium A. D. in Europe and the Mediterranean by Klavs Randsborg
Review by: Mark Hall
American Journal of Archaeology,
Vol. 98, No. 2 (Apr., 1994), p. 382
Published by: Archaeological Institute of America
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/506666 .
Accessed: 31/05/2013 16:12
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
.
Archaeological Institute of America is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
American Journal of Archaeology.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 158.68.66.254 on Fri, 31 May 2013 16:12:11 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
382 BOOK REVIEWS [AJA 98
nated mass effort scarcely less than that of the original
builders of the aqueduct. In presentation
the work is first-
rate. There are 18 color plates
and a profusion
of 246 black-
and-white photographs and line drawings, of the highest
quality,
ensuring full and adequate illustration.
Nowadays
many books economize by printing their photographs in
with the text, on ordinary
paper instead
of as glossy
plates,
a result
that,
despite publishers'
assurances,
is seldom
wholly
satisfactory.
But here there is no problem. All pages are
glossy, even text, and reproduction is outstanding. Each
chapter has its own bibliography,
and there is an annotated
general one (112 entries)
at the end of the book;
regrettably
Norman
Smith's
challenging
article
in the Transactions
of the
Newcomen
Society
62 (1990-1991) 53-80 evidently
came out
too late for inclusion.
There follows a series
of 17 large-scale
full-color
topographical
maps (one foldout).
Finally,
at the very end, comes the greatest
surprise
of all.
There is no index. And the lack of one, in a book of this
sort, which will be used for reference, not continuous
read-
ing, is a deficiency
as serious as it is infuriating.
Otherwise
the book is first-rate
for the material
that it covers, within
the limits
that
it sets
itself,
and is recommended
to all libraries
and scholarly specialists.
A. TREVOR
HODGE
DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS
CARLETON UNIVERSITY
OTTAWA, ONTARIO
KIS 5B6 CANADA
THE FIRST MILLENNIUM A.D. IN EUROPE AND THE
MEDITERRANEAN, by Klavs Randsborg. Pp. xviii
+ 230, figs. 83, pls. 9, with 4 appendices. Cam-
bridge University Press, Cambridge 1991. $54.95
(cloth) and $18.95 (paper). ISBN 0-521-38401-
X (cloth) and ISBN 0-521-38787-6 (paper).
In recent years the writings
of the earlier
generations
of
the Annales School have been discovered and utilized by
archaeologists.
Annalist
authors such as Bloch, Braudel,
Le
Roy Ladurie,
and Wallerstein,
with their stress on regional
studies, the "longue
dur&e,"
and the "common
man,"
have
provided useful intellectual
models for archaeologists.
The latest book
by Klavs
Randsborg
incorporates
many
of
the approaches
and ideas from the Annales School. As the
title proclaims,
this book is a review and synthesis of the
archaeology
of Western Europe and the Eastern Mediter-
ranean in the first millennium
A.D. Randsborg's
ambitious
purpose is to provide the reader with an account of the
socioeconomic
development
of these two regions.
This book has its flaws (see below), but I do recommend
it for several reasons.
First,
for anyone working
in either the
archaeology
or history of the first millennium
A.D., it is a
veritable
gold mine of information.
The bibliography
is 32
pages long. It contains
summaries on climatic
trends, coin-
age, population estimates, settlement patterns, subsistence
trends, and trade for a variety of sites in the region of study.
The data are drawn from a wide range of site reports pub-
lished in Danish,
English,
French,
or German.
Second, this book provides a sobering and thought-pro-
voking perspective
on European
and Near Eastern
cultural
development in the first millennium. Randsborg
demon-
strates that while the historical record is full of conquests,
invasions,
and migrations
in the fifth century A.D., the ar-
chaeological record shows that change is fairly gradual
throughout the first millennium. Rural settlement
patterns
are complex, but most areas of the Mediterranean
and the
Near East were densely settled until the Early Byzantine
period (600-900). The villa
system
was in decline
in Western
Europe from A.D. 200 onward,
except in southern Britain.
A similar pattern is noted for towns and urban centers.
Towns continued to flourish
in the East
through
the seventh
century A.D., but in the West they contracted in size or
ceased to be inhabited
in the third through fifth centuries.
With the rise of states
and an increase
in long-distance
trade
in the last quarter
of the first millennium,
towns once again
began to flourish in the West.
Trade and exchange
are seen by Randsborg
as also
under-
going gradual
change. He asserts that commerce,
exchange,
and production
were not well developed in the early Roman
period; the main goal was to keep the army supplied with
food and weapons and the elites supplied with prestige
goods. The political
collapse
of the Western Roman
Empire
is seen as affecting trade and exchange only minimally;
instead,
Randsborg argues that the initial Muslim
conquests
of North Africa and the Levant
had a far more devastating
impact
on trade. The decline of the Western Roman
Empire
in late antiquity
is seen as coinciding with the rise of pro-
duction
centers,
emporia,
and strong
chiefdoms
in Germanic
Europe.
While some of these ideas are not new, Randsborg's
ap-
proach to them is. His arguments
and viewpoints
are based
primarily
on archaeological
evidence and not the written
record.
This book does have its faults. One of them is the heavy
emphasis on the archaeology
of Scandinavia.
In part this
reflects
Randsborg's
field of specialization,
but one has to be
aware that the Vikings
did not become a major
force in the
history of Europe and the Mediterranean
until the ninth
century
A.D. More attention should have been spent on the
archaeology
of the Byzantine
Empire,
the Carolingians,
and
the Merovingians.
An introduction
in which
Randsborg
sets out his research
questions
and hypotheses
is also missing
from this
book. The
brief introduction
only describes the nature of the archaeo-
logical record and problems
with it. Fortunately,
the final
chapter
does contain
a useful summary
and synthesis
of the
information
in the preceding chapters.
MARK HALL
ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH FACILITY
KROEBER HALL
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 94720
INTERNET HALL@QAL.BERKELEY.EDU
This content downloaded from 158.68.66.254 on Fri, 31 May 2013 16:12:11 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
... Such work is necessary to determine the nature of the climate during these events and the effect this may have caused on a series of societal unrest and humanitarian crises in both the western and eastern zones of Eurasia ( Büntgen et al., 2011, 2016). Additionally, both the LALIA and DACP overlap with the Migration Period, the years AD 400600 being regarded as one the 'hinges' of human history ( Randsborg, 1991). The role of climatic perturbations in these multifaceted societal events remains, however, largely undiscussed ( Haldon, 2016). ...
Article
Several late Quaternary studies have recorded cold and disturbed climates centred during the mid-first millennium AD and discussed these conditions under the term ‘Dark Ages Cold Period’ (DACP). A review of 114 palaeoclimate papers indicated that cold climates were common in the Northern Hemisphere between AD 400 and 765. There are also suggestions that some regions may have been relatively wet during the DACP, while those around the Mediterranean and the China/Tibetan Plateau indicate coinciding droughts. A set of environmental responses, however, indicate a delayed DACP interval (AD 509–865) postdating the actual climate signal. Previously, the DACP has been linked with the North Atlantic ice-rafting event at about 1400 years ago, while some evidence suggests an involvement of the North Atlantic Oscillation and/or El Niño–Southern Oscillation. More recently, another proposed phase of widespread cooling, the ‘Late Antique Little Ice Age’ (LALIA), overlaps with the DACP and has been tentatively linked with volcanic aerosol and solar irradiance variations reinforcing the climatic downturn since AD 536. Importantly, a higher number of proxy records extending over the first millennium AD is required for more rigorous assessments of climate variability and the forcing during these centuries and to disentangle the DACP and LALIA fingerprints in the proxy data, particularly to determine whether the DACP and the LALIA are distinct features. Also a richer network of both climate and environmental proxies is needed to evaluate the human–environment interactions, during the historical Migration Period, and thus through the DACP.
... By the late 1970s, however, as the richness of archaeological evidence expanded, the Michigan group and its students focused increasingly on social processes. The second generation of processual archaeologists relied rather eclectically on ecological and political theories, some more Marxist than others (Bradley, 1984;Brumfiel, 1980;Drennan, 1976;Earle, 1978;Gilman, 1981;Kohl, 1981;Kowalewski, 1990;Kristiansen, 1982Kristiansen, , 1984Price and Feinman, 1995;Randsborg, 1974Randsborg, , 1991. Most focused on the development of complex societies, using ethnographic cases as analogs to make sense of their archaeologies (e.g., Renfrew, 1973). ...
... This ambiguity may result partly from the north-south temporal cline in the emergence of the states of medieval Europe. Different elements of the Viking Age were adopted earlier in some places than in others, perhaps reflecting the distinction between cores and peripheries (Randsborg 1989(Randsborg , 1991. This 'worldsystems' model provides part of the answer, but it is not a completely satisfying solution. ...
Article
The Viking Age was an important watershed in European history, characterized by the centralization of authority, the adoption of Christian ideology, the growth of market trade, the intensification of production and the development of urbanism. Together, these phenomena mark the beginning of Scandinavian state formation. However, the dates at which each occurred - and the unequal rates at which different state attributes were adopted in 'cores' and 'peripheries' - remain to be fully explored and explained. These issues can be illuminated by world-systems theory and brought into focus by studying the date at which key aspects of the Viking Age were adopted in a Scandinavian periphery - the Norse Earldom of Orkney and Caithness, northern Scotland. The present study questions not only why peripheries change, but why they do not change, or change more slowly than neighbouring cores.
Article
A spate of archaeological, historical and scientific publications have recently argued that the dust veil from a volcanic eruption (or series of eruptions) caused climatic change, which ‘forced’ significant historical transformations in the middle of the sixth century AD. In this paper, I situate this phenomenon within a more general return to environmental determinism in archaeological explanation, a return which itself needs to be understood in the context both of contemporary fears about the devastation to be unleashed by the climatic change we have made, and of the rise of precise measurement in environmental and archaeological science. I do not doubt the reality of the climatic change reconstructed for AD536/546 but, given the coarseness of the dating of the historical transformations, I do question the causal connections drawn between the former and the latter. I suggest that for many archaeologists, the AD536 event (and similar phenomena) functions much as written texts once did – as both the framework for analysis and as the explanation of historical process.
Article
Full-text available
The large volcanic eruptions of AD 536 and 540 led to climate cooling and contributed to hardships of Late Antiquity societies throughout Eurasia, and triggered a major environmental event in the historical Roman Empire. Our set of stable carbon isotope records from subfossil tree rings demonstrates a strong negative excursion in AD 536 and 541-544. Modern data from these sites show that carbon isotope variations are driven by solar radiation. A model based on sixth century isotopes reconstruct an irradiance anomaly for AD 536 and 541-544 of nearly three standard deviations below the mean value based on modern data. This anomaly can be explained by a volcanic dust veil reducing solar radiation and thus primary production threatening food security over a multitude of years. We offer a hypothesis that persistently low irradiance contributed to remarkably simultaneous outbreaks of famine and Justinianic plague in the eastern Roman Empire with adverse effects on crop production and photosynthesis of the vitamin D in human skin and thus, collectively, human health. Our results provide a hitherto unstudied proxy for exploring the mechanisms of 'volcanic summers' to demonstrate the post-eruption deficiencies in sunlight and to explain the human consequences during such calamity years.
Chapter
Relatively little can be known about the dress of the working class and poor of the Byzantine Empire: their portraits were not painted, their outfits were not described by historians of the day, and the surviving Byzantine textiles in museum collections today were surely beyond their means. However, anonymous farmers, soldiers, beggars, and fishermen do appear in manuscript illuminations standing as a backdrop to more important figures and sometimes these figures adorn common pieces of pottery. Masses of people color the background of rebellion scenes, parades, and other subjects of historical importance. Byzantine writers occasionally describe the poor if only to point out the charity of an emperor or saintly figure, and we read brief descriptions of foot soldiers’ simple armor in the stories of the emperor’s brave acts. These representations and textual references allow us to reconstruct the Byzantine perception of the poor and working class while providing sketchy information on how they actually dressed.
Chapter
Well-dressed citizens were found throughout the empire and not confined to Constantinople. The aristocracy of the provinces, who portrayed themselves in dedicatory images in regions such as Cappadocia and Kastoria, had the means to buy expensive clothes and to show themselves off in those clothes. Unlike the prescribed dress of courtiers, the Byzantine upper classes participated in fashion by desiring certain types of clothing and thereby driving the taste for those clothes. Dedicatory portraits, which comprise the majority of our evidence for the dress of the elite outside of the capital, present two paradigms of Middle Byzantine dress. First, these portraits found in borderland regions reflect the bordering culture rather than the Byzantine capital. Cappadocians had Georgian, Armenian, and Islamic neighbors. Kastoria bordered a large population of Armenian and Georgian refugees in Thrace; Bulgaria ruled Kastoria from the mid-ninth century until the early eleventh centuries; the Normans briefly occupied Kastoria beginning in 1083 and stayed long after Alexius’s reconquest in 1093.1 While some of these aristocratic citizens had ties to Constantinople and even held official titles, their dress demonstrates their participation in the borderland cultures in which they lived. Local fashions, and not those of the capital, dictated their clothing choices. This situation leads to a second paradigm for Middle Byzantine dress: taste for these borderland fashions often spread to the capital city from the outskirts, moving in the opposite direction from what modern fashion theorists are accustomed.2
Article
Full-text available
A importância do mar na história romana não tem merecido a atenção que lhe é devida. Todavia, o desenvolvimento, a expansão e a manutenção do Império apoiaram-se abertamente no domínio do mar, inicialmente centrado no Mare Nostrum para depois se alargar a outras áreas, como o Atlântico e o Mar Vermelho, reflectindo características de Império Universal, naturalmente dependente do controlo das rotas marítimas. Neste processo, cuja amplitude se pode apreender perante testemunhos dispersos entre a Escócia e a Índia, afirma-se uma invulgar capacidade de integrar o estranho, provincial ou não, revelando um dos aspectos mais interessantes da romanidade, do ponto de vista tecnológico, político e social.
Chapter
Our thesis has been articulated in several articles and was outlined in our book, The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand? (Frank and Gills, 1993). Its main theoretical premises are as follows: (1) The existence and development of the world system that stretches back not just for 500 years but for 5,000 years; (2) The (political) world economy is a world system; (3) The process of capital accumulation is the motor force of (world-system) history; (4) The center-periphery structure is one of the characteristics of the world (system); (5) The world system is depicted by hegemony and rivalry of political power although system wide hegemony has been rare or nonexistent; (6) Long economic cycles of alternating, ascending phases and descending phases underlie economic growth of the world system.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.