Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

362 13. specialized production and exchange
reached the west of Britain. It was only long after the end of the Roman
period, in the seventh and, in particular, in the eighth century that economic
conditions in southern Britain again resemble those attained in the
pre-Roman Iron Age, with the first Anglo-Saxon coins, the first coastal
emporia, the first native pottery industries, and an evident growth of trade
with the continent. 25
The post-Roman economic regression is at its clearest and starkest in
Britain (except possibly in the Balkans, where there has been less archaeological
work to reveal it), but the same phenomenon can be seen widely,if in
a less extreme form, right across the former Roman world. Two closely connected
and striking features of early medieval people (whether in Turkey,
Greece, Africa, Italy, France, Spain or Britain) are the unimpressive nature of
their domestic material remains and the considerable difficulty archaeologists
have in finding traces of their settlement (unless they had the decency
to bury themselves with grave-goods or to leave good crop-marks). In the
past, problems in finding early medieval people have undoubtedly been exacerbated
by a lack of interest in their culture and a consequent ignorance
about the nature of their material remains. But the example of countries like
Britain and Italy, where a lot of sophisticated effort (much of it fruitless) has
now been put into looking for post-Roman remains, shows quite clearly that
the problem is no longer just the result of not knowing how to look.
Pre-Roman people in countries like Italy show up well in field-survey
and in excavation, with scatters of recognizable pottery; and in areas like
Greece and Asia Minor they of course left spectacular domestic and monumental
remains. Roman people all over the empire broadcast their presence
to the archaeologist with large quantities of pottery and, often, tile,
brick and mortar. It is only early medieval people who seem to have owned
so few material objects that they have often disappeared entirely from the
archaeological map. Even in Italy, which had been the very heart of the
empire, it is much easier to document local production, overseas trade,
flourishing urbanism and extensive exploitation of the land in the Etruscan
period than it is in the seventh century a.d.
iv. beyond the frontiers of the empire
The general picture of economic decline sketched out above – of a high
point of sophistication sometime in the Roman period sinking to a low
sometime between 400 and 700 – is based on work within the boundaries
of the former empire. Interestingly, if we step beyond the old frontiers,
things look rather different.
In Scandinavia, the first millennium a.d. is marked by steady exploitation
and very slow economic growth throughout the period, without the dramatic
25 Hodges (1989) 69–104.
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