This notable book sets out to study exclusively the archaeology of the Roman west between the years 200 and 500 a.d. The introduction explains that this periodisation was chosen for two reasons: it works as a coherent moyenne durée span that is significantly distinct from what came before and after, and it is different from the typical chronologies of late-antique studies. This time frame in fact works well by allowing the slow developments in the material culture of the late Roman west to be traced without being unnecessarily distracted by either the prosperity of the Antonine empire or the calamities of the sixth century. The study's geographic range, however, is somewhat more questionable. E.C. covers from Gibraltar to the Rhine, with the occasional addition of Britain, but crucially ignores Italy and Africa. This somewhat limited view of the ‘west’ sets this book apart from other recent works on the same subject, notably N. Christie's The Fall of the Western Roman Empire. An Archaeological and Historical Perspective (2011). E.C. recognises the danger in telling a truncated story, but notes that the exclusion of these regions was due to more pragmatic issues of scope and length rather than an ideological stance.
A brief introduction lays out the bounds and highlights some of the major themes of the study. The first chapter, a ‘prologue’, surveys the third-century crisis, first from a historiographical and then an archaeological perspective. Here E.C. usefully lays out one of the major questions of his book: to what degree the third-century crisis – with its external threats, internal political volatility and economic calamity – is visible in the archaeology of the west once the straitjacket of catastrophe-focused histories is fully abandoned.
Chapter 2 focuses on the military aspects of the impact of the third-century crisis and how they changed the culture and society in northern Gaul and the Rhineland. E.C. seeks to demonstrate a growing militarisation of these regions from the third century onwards by looking at the evidence for military installations and new styles in military dress, weapons and armour along with changes in the cities, hilltop fortifications and burial depositions. Chapter 3 expands this discussion to look at the changes to cities in southern Gaul and Spain, considering the archaeological evidence for public monuments, urban fortifications and housing. E.C. rightly concludes that there were significant changes to the fabric of Roman cities from the third century onwards, but that these changes are hyper-local and are best studied on a case-by-case basis, rather than painted with broad, regional or supra-regional brushstrokes.
Chapter 4 turns to Christianity, first surveying the urban aspects of the religion – architecture (churches, double churches and baptisteries) and burials – before turning to the archaeological evidence for rural Christian sites. The chapter ends with a very brief section on the ‘traditional religions’. E.C. justifies this brevity by noting a lack of systematic evidence for temples, both urban and rural, in this period, which is largely true, but misses some recent inroads on the topic (cf. Lavan and Mulryan [edd.], The Archaeology of Late Antique ‘Paganism’ [2011]). Overall, much of this chapter is quite thin, only establishing very broad outlines of the Christianisation of western Europe, with relatively few in-depth examples. Chapter 5, in contrast, is stronger. It turns to elites and their material goods, specifically looking at imperial residences and the architecture and decoration of aristocratic villas in Spain, southern Gaul and Britain. E.C. uses this material to argue for changing cultural norms in elite display.
Chapters 6 and 7 are explicitly linked, with the former exploring rural settlements and their relation to the larger agrarian economy, and the latter the archaeological representations of the structure and scale of the late Roman economy. Together they introduce a model to explain the rise and fall of agricultural fortunes, where the various cultural and economic factors that accompanied imperial integration of the western provinces led to a short period of above-average production of agricultural goods. This unsustainable level of exploitation was eventually checked by physical and economic realities, which led to a realignment (i.e. a decline in production) that happened around the third century and which is reflected in widespread patterns of elite consumption. E.C. concludes that despite these important third-century changes to the rural economy, the larger imperial-based system remained largely in place until the fifth century.
Chapters 8 and 9 are also linked thematically and end the study chronologically by focusing on the fifth century. Chapter 8 examines the archaeological evidence for the breakdown of the political system of the empire in the fifth century and the presence of non-Roman peoples within its boundaries. It explores the burial remains of the various Germanic peoples across southern Gaul and Spain, but also, quite beneficially, the meagre evidence for architecture specifically built under the successor kingdoms. E.C. is careful to acknowledge the performative aspects of identity and ethnicity, as well as the limitations of the archaeological record in determining these. Chapter 9, which is tellingly labelled ‘fifth-century disintegration of empire’, argues that by the end of the fifth century a ‘threshold of change’ was reached where the archaeology of the west – reflected in activities like the reoccupation of buildings, burials and church-building – was distinct enough from that of the second century to be considered a different period, more closely aligned with the Middle Ages.
E.C. expands this conclusion in Chapter 10. He argues, from the quite broad archaeological data pulled together for this study, that there was a distinct change in material culture around the beginning of the third century, with a similar disruption at the beginning of the sixth century. Therefore, while the period 200–500 was characterised by a number of pronounced (and occasionally rapid) changes, E.C. contends that it is reasonably coherent and should be rightly described as ‘Late Roman’. In this model, the third-century crisis just happened to occur at the same time that other trends were coming to fruition or starting anew, which together made it a disruptive time for the economy, urbanism, etc. This is something of a challenge to a well-accepted ‘late antique’ framework, which sees transitions rather than discontinuity in this period and beyond (cf. B. Ward-Perkins, ‘Continuitists, Catastrophists, and the Towns of Post-Roman Northern Italy’, PBSR 65 [1997], 157–76).
This study is principally a survey of the efforts of many archaeologists working over a large expanse, with E.C. filling in the gaps and making connections to form a narrative for the period 200–500. E.C. is generally very cautious in dealing with evidence, preferring the most restrained interpretation of facts – a well-suited approach for the often murky archaeology of this period. This book is an extremely useful combination of a large quantity of the most current data and bibliography, and a generally balanced, nuanced and cautious history. Still, there are some aspects that fall short. Some of the positions that E.C. takes pains to argue against are quite old and already superseded, like Blanchet's ideas on the third-century crisis. Some of the illustrations of archaeological sites in this book are superfluous, while some maps are noticeably lacking, since many of the sites discussed are quite small and not immediately recognised. Finally, attempts at substantive quantifications of the data presented, as opposed to a more anecdotal narrative approach, are unfortunately rare.
These few issues, however, do little to detract from the overall effort. This work has taken a broad range of evidence (even if the geographical scope was not as extensive as one might hope) and marshalled it in a way that is very revealing of significant trends and developments. As an outline of currently-available archaeological evidence which largely eschews the traditional historical frameworks, it is undoubtedly useful. There may well be disagreements about E.C.'s conclusions concerning the time frames of changes to the archaeology in the late Roman west, but these will only serve to underline the significance of the data assembled and trends identified in this important work.
