Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

the distribution of goods and wealth 371
The fifth and sixth century are particularly interesting in any debate
about the relative importance of the state and of commerce in the distribution
of goods overseas. In this period, the eastern Mediterranean
remained under the control of a single political power (the Roman
empire centred on Constantinople), but the former western empire
broke up into entirely independent states and local aristocracies. The
pattern of exports within the west, before and after the collapse of
Roman power, should therefore tell us whether the existence of state
mechanisms of distribution were essential for the distribution of goods
over long distances.
The importance of the state in the distribution of goods does indeed
show up in a sharp fall, around the time of the Vandal conquest, in the
quantities of African red-slip ware reaching western sites (see Fig. 16). 43
Since red-slip ware may often have been carried ‘pick-a-back’ in grain ships
financed by the state (at least in the early stages of its travels), such a fall
could be expected with the ending of Rome’s African annona. But what is
also striking is that considerable amounts of African red-slip, as well as
large quantities of African oil amphorae, continued to reach sites all over
the western Mediterranean throughout the Vandal and early Byzantine
periods. Quantities did gradually decline, and the area served did become
more restricted. But this was a very slow change, which is more easily
explained in terms of slowly declining purchasing-power in the northwestern
provinces than in terms of any Vandal-imposed changes to
systems of production and distribution.
African amphorae and African red-slip ware, in the fifth and sixth
century, must have travelled for commercial reasons – as must also have
been the case for the eastern Mediterranean amphorae which appear on
western sites in large quanties in the same period. 44 The impressive scale of
this commerce and its persistence in the difficult times of the fifth and sixth
century suggest very strongly that commerce and the lure of financial gain
were important elements in the distribution of goods, not only in this
period, when they are exposed by the disappearance of the unified state,
but also in the earlier Roman period, when they were operating alongside,
and were perhaps partly masked by, state-operated mechanisms of distribution.
As in all centuries before the advent of the railway, proximity to navigable
waterways and, above all, to the sea were obviously essential for the
long-distance trading of bulk goods. However, the evidence also suggests
that ‘proximity’ needs to be understood quite widely, since it seems that the
import and export of goods might spread remarkably far inland. For
instance, the landlocked settlements of the Negev desert imported in this
43 Fentress and Perkins (1988), which is a pioneering work, since it attempts to show changes in
absolute quantities of imported pottery, rather than changing proportions of different imported wares.
44 Eastern amphorae: Reynolds (1995) 70–83.
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