Some Perspectives on the Archaeology of the Byzantine Countryside

Later this week, I head east to the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library to a meeting on the state of Byzantine archaeology. This is second such meeting; the first occurred in 2010 in the spring (and Kostis Kourelis provided a useful chronicle of it here and here.)  I was invited in 2010, but unfortunate was not able to attend.

This year, however, I’ll be able to make it to Washington and the organizers of the meeting have asked me to talk about the archaeology of the Byzantine countryside. I have to admit that I’m not entirely sure about the format of the meeting or the expectations people may have with regard to my contribution. I know that I have only 10 minutes to present some kind of perspectives on the archaeology of the Byzantine countryside in a panel that looks at the archaeology of the rural and the urban. After that, I suppose, we just contribute to the conversation as required.

Here’s my brief contribution. I’ve tried to avoid being too specific in the text with the feeling that with relatively little time, painting with broad brushstrokes would be more useful than a detailed – but inevitably incomplete – historiography.

Any advice on its content and tone would be greatly appreciated.

Perspectives on the Archaeology of the Byzantine Countryside

It is difficult to emphasize how much we do not know about the Byzantine countryside. While recent work has produced an increasingly complex picture of small sections of the rural Byzantine world and textual sources have offered some perspectives on the economic and social relationships that structured rural society, there remains remarkably little data on everyday life outside the urban centers of the Byzantine world.

Archaeologists, however, have some tools at their disposal to redress this.  At this point, I should confess my methodological commitment to low or lower impact kinds of archaeological work which emphasize the study of surface material, remote sensing practices, and the publication or re-study of excavated assemblages to address new scholarly concerns.

From a methodological perspective, low impact archaeology has found particular favor among those interested in documenting the countryside. It has generally allowed archaeologists to sample larger areas at less expense, time, and overhead associated with storage and processing of artifacts. In Greece and Cyprus – they two regions where I am most familiar – work of Tim Gregory, Archie Dunn, Effie Athanasopoulos, Joanita Vroom, Marcus Rautman, Nick Kardulias, and others has begun to slowly populate the countryside with rural sites from all periods including the Byzantine.  This work has begun to investigate critically categories of sites that occur faintly in our textual sources including farmsteads, hamlets, and villages. The hope has been, of course, that by documenting artifacts on the ground, often at a regional scale, we can begin to fill in the blank areas on the map between known sites in Byzantine rural areas (typically churches, monasteries, and fortifications) and urban centers.

There is also hope that we can begin to describe more effectively the kinds of activities that took place in the countryside and the degree to which rural areas were integrated with urban centers or larger economic systems.  In particular, survey archaeologists have begun to explore the complexities of the interstitial spaces which formed the fabric of the Byzantine world. Fortified by concepts like  “connectivity” and the autonomy of micro-regions, made famous in Horden and Purcell’s monumental work on the Mediterranean, scholar have begun to consider how the economic networks that integrate urban and rural, in fact, produce Byzantine society.

If this undertaking was as simple as declaring the countryside to be the key to new perspectives on the Byzantine society, there would be very little debate surrounding the priorities for Byzantine archaeology.

But, of course, it is not that simple.

There is only the most superficial consensus on the difficult issue of how we define the function of rural sites and calls for genuinely siteless intensive survey methods have largely failed to sidestep the complex issue of relating past activities to specific space.

Issues related to the chronology of surface assemblages have remained every bit as vexing. Even when we can identify, broadly speaking, fine wares with a fairly decent degree of consistency, coarse, cooking, and other utility wares remain difficult to recognize. Local wares, in particular, remain poorly known and coarse wares without obvious fabrics or surface treatments remain challenging to date without comparanda from local, secure stratigraphic context.

Finally, there remains a host of issues related to how we sample the countryside. On a macro scale these issues relate to definitions of the region and sampling strategies that work efficiently and accurately enough to produce substantive generalizations.  On a micro scale, there persist issues related to sampling artifact-rich environments in a way that represents chronology and function while at the same time preserves the advantages in efficiency of intensive survey. The general trend in survey archaeology – and some of this is the product of more restrictive attitudes toward survey from host countries – has been toward smaller areas and more intensive methods. These debates contribute directly to our ability to compare survey data across regions (or, even, in some highly surveyed areas like Boeotia or the Corinthia within the same region) to create a synthetic perspective on a singular Byzantine countryside.

The work in intensive pedestrian survey often contributes explicitly to the growing interest in landscape as a synthetic term for considering the countryside. Landscape perspectives draw inspiration from a range of disciplines and partake of the so-called “spatial turn” in the humanities. From the perspective of the Byzantine countryside the study of landscapes presents a wide, if unfocused, stage for the critical interplay of texts and material culture.

If survey archaeology has reduced the countryside to a set of quantifiable variables, landscape approaches have sought to emphasize the range of experiences crucial to articulating meaning within rural space. For example, elusive media like memory and ritual – preserved in hagiography, architecture, art, and epigraphy – grounded Byzantine spirituality in the real countryside and produced recoverable religious landscapes.  Landscape perspectives tempt scholars to expand discussions of land tenure, taxation, and production to considerations of kinship, administration, resistance, and control.  Economic relationships become roads, paths, and travel through the countryside, and offer human-scaled alternatives to our cartographic perspective of regions, places, and Byzantine rural space. This kind of work has just begun to expand how we see countryside from being largely in economic terms, to being a space where religion, economy, politics, kinship, and connectivity all interact. As one scholar has recently observed, the Byzantine countryside is ripe for reconceptualization as a kind of “third space” that challenges the traditional assumptions about the urban – rural dichotomy, relationships grounded in modern conceptions of production, and cartographic perspectives of the countryside that occlude the complexities of the countryside as lived space.

From my perspective, landscape approaches and the methods associated with intensive pedestrian survey offer tools that will allow us to gently decenter the urban focus of Byzantine culture. At present, however, these techniques for interrogating and documenting the countryside have remained on the margins of Byzantine studies. Recent synthetic and survey works have spent little time considering rural life in Byzantine, in general, and periodicals that focus on the Byzantine period rarely feature articles related to this kind of fieldwork. Moreover, with a few prominent exceptions, Byzantine archaeologists have remained on the sidelines during the theoretical and methodological discussions central to these new methods.  The skills central to survey and landscape approaches – facility in relational databases, Geographic Information Systems, remote sensing technologies – remain comparatively rare among Byzantine archaeologists who tend not to be as fluent in methodologies and debates grounded in world archaeology, archaeological sciences, and a more diachronic approach to Mediterranean fieldwork. The resulting absence of a sustained interest in the methods and results of archaeology in the countryside in synthetic works on Byzantine history and the relative detachment of Byzantine archaeology from larger methodological and theoretical debates has made it more difficult for Byzantine archaeologists to secure resources necessary within our discipline or from outside our discipline to design large scale projects or to gain leadership in regional scale projects.  If these methods and approaches do have something to offer the archaeology of the countryside, Byzantine archaeology remains on the outside looking in.