Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

the general picture 355
In Italy, the large number of field-surveys that have been conducted in the
centre and south of the peninsula suggest that there was a gradual but fairly
steady decline in rural prosperity through the third, fourth, fifth and sixth
centuries, to a point where, in the seventh and eighth centuries, it is very
difficult from field-survey and even from excavation to find any trace of settlement
at all. 14 In chapter 12 (p. 325), I considered whether this apparent disappearance
of people from the landscape was ‘real’, and caused by dramatic
population decline, or ‘archaeological’, and caused by the disappearance of
the material objects by which settlements are normally found and dated. But,
even if the disappearance of the rural population is only archaeological, this
would still suggest that rural dwellers were very impoverished, since they
have not left the material remains that enable us to find them.
Specialized production and exchange certainly declined markedly. Latesixth-
and seventh-century sites in Italy have, in general, far fewer pots,
drawn from a far narrower geographical and typological range, than sites
of the earlier Roman period. But some specialized production and regional
exchange in low-value goods did persist – something that did not happen
in Britain. For example, different quarries and production centres in the
Alps seem to have produced vessels in a soft soapstone (pietra ollare)
throughout late antiquity and the early Middle Ages and to have traded
them widely in the Po plain. 15
There is other evidence to suggest that local and regional exchange was
far less important than in the contemporary Near East. Fig. 14 compares
the number of coins found on an urban site in northern Italy, ancient Luna,
with those found on a small rural site in the limestone massif of northern
Syria, Déhès. The comparison is made much more striking when we realize
that the Luna coins derive from the excavation of a massive area of the
town, much of it certainly still occupied into the sixth and seventh century,
while those from Déhès derive only from a small number of trenches
opened into a selection of houses. To form a real comparison, the Déhès
figures would have to take account of the far smaller sample area, and
would therefore need to be multiplied by a factor of at least one hundred.
Coins were clearly common in sixth- and seventh-century rural Syria, while
they had virtually disappeared even in an urban context at Luna.
Africa
To the south of the Mediterranean, in the central provinces of Roman
North Africa (modern Tunisia and Algeria), the high point of sophistication
14 Greene (1986) 103–9; Lewit (1991) especially 172–5 and 188–92.
15 La pietra ollare (1987); Brogiolo and Gelichi (1996).
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