The University of Puget Sound Invites applications for the Lora Bryning Redford Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Archaeology starting in Fall 2026. Seeking a candidate with expertise in the archaeology of the Late Antique Mediterranean, c. 400 to c. 1000 CE.
https://www2.pugetsound.jobs/psc/HR92PRD/EMPLOYEE/HRMS/c/HRS_HRAM_FL.HRS_CG_SEARCH_FL.GBL?Page=HRS_APP_JBPST_FL&Action=U&FOCUS=Applicant&SiteId=3&JobOpeningId=8546&PostingSeq=1&
#Archaeology #LateAntique #PostDoc #Academia #Fellowship

The Key Question in the Fall of the Roman Empire

Trends in the height of men and women buried in what became, and then ceased to be, the western Roman empire. Heights are lowest in the time when Rome dominated the Mediterranean world, then as Roman power west of the Adriatic collapses heights rise farther than before. Until a 2022 blog post by Bret Devereaux, i had never encountered an ancient historian who had seen the evidence of human remains and denied that something went terribly wrong with human health in the Roman empire at the same time as humans acquired unprecedented amounts of stuff. For the technical details see W.M. Jongman, et al., “Health and wealth in the Roman Empire”, Econ. Hum. Biol. (2019), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ehb.2019.01.005 Image added 13 February 2022

A conversation with Nathan Ross inspired me to track down two essays by Steve Muhlberger on what I think is the key issue in the fall of the western Roman empire. (The debate “were foreign invasions or civil wars more destructive?” is a bit of a semantic issue, since soldiers tried to be as Germanic as possible and wealthy Germans in the Imperium tried to become as Roman as possible: its never going to be easy to define figures like Stilicho as either Roman or barbarian). It has long been obvious that the fifth century saw light beautiful pottery, stone houses, roofs with leak-proof terracotta tiles, and philosophers who could do original work vanish from Europe north of the Alps, but recently archaeologists have noticed that people buried in Post-Roman Europe seem to be living longer and eating better than their ancestors who bore the Roman yoke.

My second reflection is on the current debate about the fall of the Roman Empire (the fifth-century fall) between people who equate it with “the End of Civilization” (Bryan Ward-Perkins) and people who don’t think it was an ending of unprecedented significance (say, Peter Brown and Walter Goffart). I really think that the unresolved and maybe unresolvable debate is about what civilization is. Is it a situation where a leisured minority sit around in the palace library, enjoying bread made from Egyptian wheat and dipping it in Syrian olive oil or Spanish fish sauce, and debating the great ideas of the ages, while other people dig minerals from the earth in dirty, dangerous mines, or harvest cotton in the hot sun, and die young? If that’s it, then there was probably a lot less “civilization” in large parts of the formerly Roman world after AD 400 than there had been for some centuries, in that it was far more difficult to assemble a large variety of enviable luxuries in one spot through the routine operations of centralized imperial power. And there is more civilization now, because here I sit, not even close to being rich by Canadian standards, but able to read, think and then speak to a privileged minority around the world while hundreds of millions sweat profusely (and all too often, die young).

But it might be worth considering whether the height of luxury — whatever luxury you prefer — is the only measure of civilization.

I say, bring on those resilient decentralized networks and extend them as far as we can. The only alternative is slavery for somebody.

Steve Muhlberger, “Brave New War, The Upside of Down, and the fall of the Roman Empire,” 22 April 2007 https://smuhlberger.blogspot.com/2007/04/brave-new-war-upside-of-down-and-fall.htm

One of the strengths of the Late Republic and early Roman empire was civil engineering projects: roads, aqueducts, baths. Muhlberger has personal experience of how important those are.

For years now I have been taking part in a large medieval re-creation event in August. The event itself features mock medieval combat, archery, singing, dancing and partying, some of it not particularly medieval in inspiration. Most people who take part camp for a week or two at the site, and I have often found that situation inspires interesting thoughts. Living essentially outdoors for two weeks, with little communication with the outside world (though it is available if you need or like) is a fascinating and perspective-restoring exercise. Me, I’m basically illiterate for the whole period.

Since I and my friends camp together every year, we’ve acquired portable versions of what we consider necessities: a back-up water filter, a hot water heater scavenged from an old RV, a camp shower, and a kitchen sink with hot and cold taps. These are set up and taken down every summer.

Note that my necessities all come down to safe, easily available water? The year we got the shower setup my campmates were delirious with joy. I sure appreciated it, too, but the kitchen sink and taps meant more to me. The first time I turned on a kitchen tap and got good water I knew, instantly, that this was the difference between barbarism and civilization. Nice to have a shower. Far more important to be able to clean one’s hands any time, and to be sure that kitchen utensils and dishes were always clean.

That moment of insight was a decade or so ago, and its rightness has become clearer to me as time has passed. Clean water available to everyone in a community is civilization; it means the community has certain technical capabilities, and is devoting its resources to the common good in a basic way. Furthermore, the predators and parasites who in so many places and times have prevented that allocation of resources are not in control.

We human beings of planet Earth have the capability to be civilized now. There can be no doubt that we are smart enough and rich enough. But we have yet to attain civilization.

Steve Muhlberger, “The difference between barbarism and civilization,” 16 August 2007 https://smuhlberger.blogspot.com/2007/08/difference-between-barbarism-and.htm

About ten years after he wrote that, the Canadian federal government chose to spend about as much money as it would cost to deliver clean water to every First Nations community buying rights to build an oil pipeline just before its price collapsed.

Further Reading:

• Benjamin Isaacs, The Limits of Empire: The Roman Army in the East
• James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed
• Rob Wiseman, Benjamin Neil, and Francesca Mazzilli “Extreme Justice: Decapitations and Prone Burials in Three Late Roman Cemeteries at Knobb’s Farm, Cambridgeshire.” Britannia, Volume 52 (November 2021) pp. 119-173 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0068113X21000064 “To flesh out these national figures, we compiled a database of excavated Roman era burials in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, identifying 891 burials from 49 Roman era cemeteries … Approximately 5 per cent of local burials (five of 105 assessable skeletons) dating to the first and second centuries a.d. had been decapitated. This rose to nearly 10 per cent (!) (27 of 288) in cemeteries dating between the third and fifth centuries.“

On the evidence from human bones and teeth, compare papers by Geoffrey Kron and papers by Walter Scheidel such as:

• Geoffrey Kron, “Anthropometry, Physical Anthropology, and the Reconstruction of Ancient Health, Nutrition, and Living Standards,” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, Bd. 54, H. 1 (2005), pp. 68-83 {he thinks that small farms and classical civilization could deliver the good life as long as kings and aristocrats didn’t steal too much of it}
• Walter Scheidel, “Physical wellbeing in the Roman world,” Version 2.0 September 2010. Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics https://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/pdfs/scheidel/091001.pdf “A recent study of 1,021 skeletons from seventy-four sites in central Italy reveals that mean stature in the Roman period was lower than both before (during the Iron Age) and after (in the Middle Ages). In the same vein, an alternative survey of 2,609 skeletons from twenty-six Italian sites ranging from the Roman period to the late Middle Ages shows a strong increase in body height in the late Roman and early medieval periods. An unpublished survey of 1,867 skeletons from sixty-one sites in Britain likewise documents an increase in body height after the end of Roman rule.”
• Nicholas Koepke and Joerg Baten, “The biological standard of living in Europe during the last two millennia,” European Review of Economic History 9 (2005) pp. 61-95 “We find that heights stagnated in Central, Western and Southern Europe during the Roman imperial period, while astonishingly increasing in the fifth and sixth centuries. Noteworthy also is the similarity of height development in the three large regions of Europe.”

Edit 2019-07-06: Tip of the Scythian cap to Brad Delong: Willem Jongman, Jan Jacobs, and Geertje Goldewijk, “Health and wealth in the Roman Empire,” Economics and Human Biology (2019), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ehb.2019.01.005 “Almost all other indicators of standard of living that we have for the Roman world show the opposite pattern from the two health indicators of biological standard of living and life expectancy. … We conclude that Romans paid a health price for their material wealth.” In other words, as the amount and quality of durable goods which the average family had increased, stature and life expectancy decreased, and then as the complex economy which produced and distributed those goods collapsed, stature and health were increasing.

Edit 2020-01-23: And thanks to Alexiares for the response in Supposed Civilization (2019-12-02)

Edit 2022-02-12: fixed formatting broken when WordPress introduced the block editor

Edit 2022-02-13: added the chart from Jongman et al. after reading a blog post by Dr. Bret Devereaux who has a very different understanding of health in late antiquity than the scholars I have talked to. I am an Achaemenid historian not Kristina Killgrove so my authorities could be wrong or I could misunderstand them! Dug around in my folder of articles and found and added article by Koepke and Baten and article by Wiseman et al.

Edit 2022-03-29: See also Josho Brouwers, “Confronting ‘Collapse’: An Anarchist Perspective on the end of the Bronze Age,” Ancient World Magazine, 18 February 2021 https://www.ancientworldmagazine.com/articles/confronting-collapse/ (archived on archive.org/)

Edit 2023-07-12: see also Liana Brent’s review of Alexander Smith, Martyn Allen, Tom Brindle, Michael Fulford, Lisa Lodwick, New Visions of the Countryside of Roman Britain, Volume 3: Life and Death in the Countryside of Roman Britain. Britannia monography series, 31. London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 2018

Overall, the elevated frequency and variety of pathological lesions suggest that, compared to Iron Age populations, health declined in the countryside of Roman Britain. More surprisingly, Rohnbogner found that populations in the three study regions had higher rates of infections, metabolic disease, and joint degeneration than contemporary urban populations at Lankhills and Winchester.

https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2019/2019.08.43/

NB. that the reviewer expects to see health decline during the period of Roman rule in Britain because studies of bones, teeth, and feces show that again and again across the temperate European parts of the Roman empire.

#ancient #economicHistory #LateAntique #response #Roman #slavery #SteveMuhlberger

Romans and Barbarians

The tomb of Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths in Italy (died 526 CE). That roof is a single piece of stone, and he seems to have been buried in a porphyry bathtub. I once visited Ravenna for a few hours. Source: Wikimedia Commons

If you can bear not just Romans but Christian Romans, late antiquity is a fascinating time. The period from when the Roman empire fell into civil wars in the third century CE, and the remainder of the empire drew inwards under pressure from Arabs and Slavs and angry theologians was a time of rapid changes that we know just enough about to argue about. Some of the biggest questions are about how to think about interactions between Romans and barbarians. This has been discussed so intensively by very clever people with very similar backgrounds that debates sometimes get dogmatic and people have a hard time listening to new perspectives.

In his brief period of experimenting on posting on other people’s sites, Canadian historian and essayist Phil Paine had a discussion with medievalist Jonathan Jarett. For my post in October I would like to share his words, and the comparative evidence that he uses.

North America has many well-documented cases of tribal migrations within historic times, in which family groups of hundreds, and sometimes thousands, moved considerable distances with the specific intention of setting themselves up in a new locale. Sometimes this involved making war against existing occupants of a place. Sometimes they were compelled to do so by defeat at the hands of another tribe. At other times it involved deal-making or confederation. It is not known what prompted the entire Mandan Nation, for instance, to migrate a thousand miles from the Midwest to the Upper Missouri country, but they were joined there by the Hidatsa, who were migrating from the equally distant Gulf coast, and they established themselves as allied farmer-traders in a region that had known no agriculture. Some of the locals joined them, some among them split off to become plains warriors. Western Canada witnessed many large scale migrations of people that are traceable over a period of three centuries.

We cannot assume automatically that things worked the same way in the Europe of late antiquity, but drawing analogies from native North America seems to me a valid way of discussing what is likely, unlikely, possible, or impossible.

Many countries in Latin America, equipped with modern armies and technology, are unable to prevent tribal peoples from migrating to the edges of their cities and setting themselves up in favelas or bidonvilles, retaining their own languages and customs without much difficulty. Often this takes the form of “chain migration”, where small groups make a foothold, and then whole villages follow them. The national authorities often send in police, or even the army, to stop such incursions, only to find themselves faced with well-organized and effective opposition.

Despite the Roman Empire’s urbanization and fairly impressive technology, the various tribal peoples on the periphery of the empire could often put together fighting forces that had a good chance of defeating a legion. The difference in military technology was not great — it was money and large-scale co-ordination that kept them out. If that co-ordination and financing was absent, then what was to stop any enterprising, and reasonably aggressive group from simply walking in and carving out a little space for themselves? Especially if they found depopulated areas, or plantations farmed by slaves or aged coloni, or areas in which the local elite saw no percentage in defending the Empire? The fact that the Romans had aqueducts and hypocausts, and the invaders did not, doesn’t seem to weigh much in the equation. Nor does any greater degree of “social complexity” the Empire may have had. The invaders didn’t have to be complex, they just had to fight well. In such a situation, the invading “horde” need not be especially large to put it’s stamp on a region. A well-organized empire could rush disciplined troops to stop isolated incursions — but what about when there were twenty incursions occurring simultaneously, in different locations? The logistic problems pile up quickly. Whatever differences in social complexity existed might work as much in the barbarians favour as against it, just as the crude tribal organization of Afghanistan’s Pathans has proven to be militarily effective against British, Soviet, and American global empires.

The Rajputs of India were little more than a small military caste with an associated ethnic group, from the marginal lands of the Thar desert. Their associated peasantry migrated with them in some conquests, but not all. The states they attacked far surpassed them in organization, wealth, and technology. Yet Rajputs ruled more than four hundred of the estimated six hundred princely states at the time of India’s independence.

Phil Paine, comment to https://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/2009/02/23/two-seminars-two-cities-part-1-seminary-xl-with-peter-heather/

Roman historians developed a long theoretical and philological argument against barbarian migrations. They used a few historical models of the sort cited by Eric Hobsbawm to argue that what the Romans call “the Ostrogoths” was probably a multiethnic army that picked up soldiers, medics, and camp followers wherever it went, and was united at least as much by their shared hardships as shared language, customs, or ancestry. This works well in some places, in other places the new research on archaeogenetics has challenged some things. But I have never seen any of these historians cite parallels from Turtle Island north of Mexico. It seems generally agreed that the Mexica migrated to their current homeland from far in the north, because that was their tradition and their language is related to languages spoken far to the north but not languages near Mexico City.

Historians have trouble with comparative evidence because our methods require studying the unique evidence from a specific place and time, and there is just so much history. The case that comes to my mind is probably not one that you know. The structure of our departments also discourages breadth: you keep a job at a research university by publishing many things on a narrow specialty. Historians tend to be lone wolves who resist being told what or how to write, but if 100 historians write case studies of 100 societies, those studies are much more useful if they follow the same format. Informal chats about comparative evidence often break down because not everyone in the discussion is a trained scholar who knows every case well. Keepers of bookandswordblog lore will remember my chat with S.M. Stirling where I made some mistakes because I was going outside my specialty and working quickly without time to fact-check.

I admire projects like the World History Association where Roman historian Morgan Lemmer-Webber works, or the database of Religious History at UBC, or Robert Rollinger’s project on empires in world history. Broad comparative studies are hard to do well, and neither universities not the market reward them, but without them people can believe that something is a law when its just true some of the time, or believe that something about their favorite society is special when its actually typical.

Further Reading

Pereltsavig and Lewis’ book on the Indo-European controversy covers some similar issues

The rich world that produced the open web is dying, and a new poorer world is struggling to be born. I would like to keep blogging monthly as the lamps go out one by one. If you can, please support this site by sharing pages, donating, or talking about what you read at your next coffee with friends.

PS. I like Guy Halsall’s idea that the most organized Anglo-Saxons in Britain may have been soldiers from the hill zone that runs north-east to south-west through England who decided that if nobody was paying them any more, maybe they were not Romans either (Caesar’s soldiers had loved playing barbarian for centuries, and by the third century, some European barbarians had reorganized their egalitarian societies so they could support men a lot like Roman soldiers, both in the sense that they had steel swords and silver-plated helmets, and that they bossed around their neighbours and beat or stomped on anyone who was not humble enough).

(written summer to October 2025, scheduled 10 October 2025)

#ancient #comparativeEvidence #LateAntique #PhilPaine #worldHistory

Climate Change, Society, And Pandemic Disease In Roman Italy Between 200 BCE And 600 CE
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https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adk1033 <-- shared paper
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#GIS #spatial #mapping #romanempire #ancientrome #climatechange #spatialanalysis #rome #society #pandemic #diseases #plagues #socialstability #sampling #socialresponse #publichealth #publicsecurity #environment #spread #epidemiology #epidemic #paleoclimate #model #reconstruction #climate #temperature #precipipation #marine #sedment #sampling #climaterecord #RomanClimateOptimum #LateAntique #LittleIceAge #coldweather #coldtemperatures #extremeweather #climatextremes #coldphases #climatestress #social #biology #riskassessment #risk #hazard #Italy #spatiotemporal

The rarely seen 2021 #excavations of the first, #lateantique / early #medieval church of Santi Apostoli (buried in a later rebuilding) in #rome. The #mosaic made rome #recycled marble is from the 6th to 7th century. #medievalarchitecture #medievalart #archaeology #spolia #lateantiquity #ancientrome

#histodons #histodon #Augustin #patristics #LateAntique #patrology #latin #theology #antiquity #medievistodon #medieval #philosophy