Two For Tuesday: Byzantine Archaeology

A long cold weekend was a nice chance to get caught up on some reading. I enjoyed two articles on Byzantine archaeology that continued a trend toward considering how recent currents in the field have changed the questions, interests, and of Byzantine archaeology. As Kostis Kourelis, Dar Brooks, and I once quipped, the field has gone beyond icons (and religious architecture) in the last half century (which itself was a rather unfair generalization!).

Luca Zavagno’s recent survey of the last 50 years of Byzantine archaeology in Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies will be appealing to students and scholars looking to understand some of the key movement in the field. Zavagno’s overarching observation is that not only have archaeologists and historians worked more closely together to overturn traditional narratives (e.g. the decline of the Roman world), but Byzantine archaeology has slowly carved out its own place in the large discipline of “Byzantine Studies.” Not only does this involve a growing focus on provincial cities and rural areas, but also on everyday life in these landscapes whether involved in agrarian practices or the daily routines in a Byzantine urban neighborhood. This additional scrutiny has created a more nuanced sense of Byzantine settlement which is going beyond the urban/rural divide to include a wider range of settlements and a more complex fabric of economic, social, and even political relationships.

The erosion of the traditional conceptual divides which organized Byzantine archaeology extends between urban/rural, elite/non-elite, to include the very limits of the empire itself. Byzantine archaeology has shared the growing interest in the field in the movement of groups through territories and the tendrils of state and non-state relationships that characterize frontiers and borders. On Cyprus, for example, this involves considering how the island remained connected to both the Aegean and the Near East during the complexities of the century after the Arab Raids as the Byzantine and Arab States sought to benefit from the island. In Greece, the study of handmade and slow-wheel Slavic ceramics has likewise allowed us to consider the migration of people as well as the change of technologies, diet, and broader life ways in the 8th and 9th centuries. My mentor Guy Sanders will be heartened to read the Zavagno does not neglect numismatics, but perhaps not with the subtlety that Guy has shown in his work. 

The other article that I read this weekend is related. Hellen Gittos has reconsidered some of the opulent tombs associated with the site of Sutton Hoo in southeastern England in her “Sutton Hoo and Syria: The Anglo-Saxons Who Served in the Byzantine Army?” published in the English Historical Review. Her argument is that that some of the treasure present in these wealthy elite graves did not arrive in Britain through trade with the Merovingians. Instead, she suggests that the soldiers buried at Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo and a burial at Prittlewell in the late 6th century had served as Foederati in the reorganized Byzantine army. Since the army was primarily engaged in campaigns in the east, it seemed possible that the soldiers buried in Britain acquired these objects while on campaign in the East. The chemical composition of the metal objects appear to confirm this as they all are Eastern Mediterranean in origin (which considering their form is unsurprising).

The significance of Gittos’s work is not so much for arguing these grave goods are Eastern in origin. This was pretty much known. Instead this article pushed us to appreciate that these Anglo-Saxon elites were not island-bound provincials, but part of a larger group of (broadly speaking) Germanic elite who contributed mounted soldiers to the Roman army. The movement of these elites not only moved objects around the Mediterranean as well as created aesthetic expectations that shaped British society. More than that, Gittos argued that the need for soldiers in the Roman army forged an abrupt connection between the Roman Empire and Western Europe. The appearances of these objects in British burials, then, doesn’t trace some gradual adoption of Roman indicators of status or prestige among an emerging Anglo-Saxon elite, but the direct contact between two elites groups.

By the way, this article is open access.