Catherine Keane

Resilience and the economic role of the church in the Eastern Mediterranean

Catherine Keane

The sixth–ninth centuries in the eastern Mediterranean are traditionally presented as a time of crisis and transformation, through invasions, piracy, natural disasters, climatic shifts, and the Justinianic plague. Paleoclimatic and textual evidence reflects the “Dark Ages Cold Period:” Late Antique shifts toward unusual aridity, droughts, famines, and colder winters. Natural disasters like droughts, tsunamis, and earthquakes have been documented across the region. The fourth–sixth centuries were deemed to endure an unusually high frequency of earthquakes (in sites like Aphrodisias, Sagalassos, and Beirut) and have been designated the Early Byzantine Tectonic Paroxysm.[1] Persian and Arab invasions resulted in a loss of territory (in sites like Tarsos, Rhodes, and Amorium), and by the mid-eighth century, the border area between the Byzantine Empire and the Umayyad Caliphate spanned northeast across Anatolia. In regions affected by Persian and Arab invasions, that is, Syria, Palestine, and Cyprus, political and administrative power shifts created long-term consequences, like reductions in a city’s size or a change in agricultural products. Archaeological evidence of communities adapting is visible through the reuse of monumental spaces as industrial areas.

Various trends in terminology have been applied to these centuries, with words like transition, transformation, collapse, continuity, etc. A key problem is circular attribution between archaeological and textual records, for example, destruction levels being connected with natural disasters, like eighth-century earthquakes or mid-seventh century Arab invasions.[2] With carefully stratified excavations, a more precise chronology of Early Byzantine redevelopment emerges.[3] Such tools can address uncritical interpretations of sociocultural shifts as monocausal and generalizations of continuity-over-collapse. Traditional perceptions of decline/abandonment either reductively describe remaining material culture as “de facto refuse” (squatting/farmer’s quarters) or indicative of reorganization.[4] Communities displayed resilience to crises in many individual ways, demonstrating resourceful negotiations that manifested in economic installations, urban space transformations, and architectural / artistic blends.

My research focuses on the varying reactions of Early Byzantine societies to political upheavals, invasions, climate, natural disasters, and disease. During my doctoral focus on the multifunctional aspects of Late Antique churches, one category warrants further study: post-upheaval agricultural and economic facilities at churches. These installations can, in certain sites, be interpreted as reflections of resilience and continued economic vitality, rather than their previous labels of abandonment or low-quality, temporary occupation. As a brief example of this kind of post-upheaval adaptation, the episcopal basilica in Amathous in Cyprus demonstrates local choices in recovering from invasion damages in 649/650 CE. The late seventh century additions and alterations to the atrium appear to have been industrial (bread mills, grain storage, etc.) rather than residential in nature, so that the site was used simultaneously as a church (documented textually in a story of a late seventh century baptism) and a mill.[5] The decision to bring arable farming and workshops into urban environments can be understood as a deliberate endeavor to supervise production more closely.

It is important here to note the local decision-making evident in choosing to install a flour mill and bakery in the atrium, in the only route into and out of the church (apart from a probable independent harbor). This is indicative of what I see as small-scale agency, as compared to a historical approach of extrapolating from the regional capitals outward into rural settlements. My research in recent weeks addresses evidence from the region of Cilicia. The region’s placement at the frontier zone allowed for sites well-connected through trade networks across the Mediterranean but was also affected by earthquakes, the Justinianic plague, and a changing climate. Epigraphic records indicate the variety of agricultural and artisanal products (olives, wine, grain, pistachios, fruits, soap, herbs, wool, shoes) but also the dual nature of clerical secondary roles. At Korykos, funerary inscriptions name “a lector-wine-importer, a presbyter-potter, a presbyter-money-lender, a subdeacon-net-maker, and a subdeacon-cider-maker.”[6] Despite the documented socioeconomic decline in some larger cities in the later seventh and eighth centuries, there is a continued presence of bishops and churches in ruralized smaller villages but also at synods and councils.

My methodology throughout my time at ANAMED has consisted of traditional archaeological research of site reports, in-person architectural and landscape analysis, and combining new research in textual, environmental, pathogenic, and artifactual fields. The area of focus are coastal landscapes, with flexibility on what counts as “coastal” depending on the landscape—about 25–50 km inland, or those well-connected to the coast by rivers. With the church as my focal point, I analyze the renegotiations and adaptations of monumental buildings following crises like invasions, natural disasters, etc. I’m particularly interested in the church as a social structure, in terms of its changing meaning throughout these transformative centuries for its various occupants and phases of abandonment. Toward the end of the project in two or three years, my aim is to draw up new plans for some complexes, publish a book, establish the database online, apply network analysis, and publish an article on the methodological approaches to resilience. These months at ANAMED have allowed for research on the theoretical frameworks and the beginning of a database on Cilician sites. I address the following questions:

• How did eastern Mediterranean communities in the sixth–ninth centuries experience crisis and trauma, and what factors determined abandonment, recovery, and/or resilience?
• What is the relationship between political invasions, climatic changes, natural disasters, and human crises, and how can they be studied across regions?
• How did the church affect intra- and transregional trade?
• How does this change our understanding of society’s resilience, reorganization, and innovation, in contexts of multiple cataclysmic events?

Topics like the plague, resilience, and the environment have become timelier in recent years, but there still exists a gap in the field for gathering them all together across their disparate fields and for applying resilience theory to Late Antiquity across a large region or long time period. These three gaps in the field are addressed in my research:

• The archaeology of the Late Antique church’s agricultural production and role in trade
• The synthesis of new data in plague studies, climate studies, and political invasions
• The application of resilience theory to a long time period of at least three centuries and to Late Antiquity, aiming to provide new understandings of resilience theory over classical interpretations.

Resilience theory defines resilience “as the capacity of systems to absorb disturbance while retaining processes, structures, and functions,” not simply a capacity to maintain the same equilibrium without change or growth.[7] By modelling a figure-8 divided into four quarters, a cycle can be traced through phases of growth/exploitation, conservation, destructive event, and reorganizing.[8] This model has been expanded in recent years to allow for the complexity of scale in crises—local and empire-wide events can overlap, present as a short-term, repetitive, or longer-term process, and compound and exacerbate conditions as a result. Longer term climatic shifts, for example, can affect a settlement gradually to the point of abandonment, as compared to a single invasion with a rebuilding phase following directly after. It is within these overlapping scales that I am examining the continuous flow of people and goods across the coastal eastern Mediterranean, as well as artistic influence blending, new art and architectural styles, and refocusing and negotiating new economic infrastructure.

With frameworks like adaptive cycles, or sustainability vs. resilience, there are traditional interpretations, but this time period allows me to develop a new understanding of resilience theory, concerning overlapping cycles and scales of upheaval and how destabilizing they are. Coping strategies and risk mitigation can in some instances manifest as abandonment and dispersal into the countryside for new settlements. As Haldon explains, with more complexity, the system has a better capacity for resilience and therefore also maintaining cultural continuity and cohesion.[9]

It’s important for archaeology and history to keep contributing towards redefining prior understandings of the Dark Ages. Instead, the complexity and vitality demonstrated across archaeological contexts provides ample data for studying resilience theory but also for considering what can be considered, what can be asked, of the archaeological material (i.e. identifying plague through material culture).[10]

Bibliography

Böhlendorf-Arslan, Beate, and Robert Schick, eds. Transformations of City and Countryside in the Byzantine Period. Mainz: Verlag des Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseums, 2020.

Haldon, John, Annelise Binois-Roman, Merle Eisenberg, Adam Izdebski, Lee Mordechai, Timothy Newfield, Philip Slavin, Sam White, and Konrad Wnęk. “Between Resilience and Adaptation: A Historical Framework for Understanding Stability and Transformation of Societies to Shocks and Stress.” In COVID-19: Systemic Risk and Resilience, Risk, Systems and Decisions, edited by Igor Linkov, Jesse Keenan, and Benjamin Trump, 235–68. Cham: Springer, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71587-8_14.

Jackson, Mark. “Historiographical and Methodological Implications for Understanding Gaps: A Case Study in Preparing for the Apalirou Environs Project, Naxos.” HEROM Journal on Hellenistic and Roman Material Culture 9 (2020): 261–90.

Jacobs, Ine. Aesthetic Maintenance of Civic Space: the ‘Classical’ City from the 4th to the 7th c. AD. Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2013.

Keane, Catherine, “More than a Church: Late Antique Ecclesiastical Complexes in Cyprus.” PhD diss., Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, 2021.

Nelson, Margaret C. “Abandonment: Conceptualization, Representation, and Social Change.” In Social Theory in Archaeology, edited by Michael B. Schiffer, 52–62. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2000.

Pirazzoli, Paolo A. “The Early Byzantine Tectonic Paroxysm.” Zeitschrift für Geomorphologie, Supplementband 62 (1986): 31–49.

Redman, Charles. “Resilience Theory in Archaeology.” American Anthropologist 107 (2005): 70–77.

Sessa, Kristina. “The New Environmental Fall of Rome: A Methodological Consideration.” Journal of Late Antiquity 12 (2019): 211–55.

Trombley, Frank R. “Korykos in Cilicia Trachis: The Economy of a Small Coastal City in Late Antiquity (Saec. V–VI)—A Precis.” The Ancient History Bulletin 1.1 (1987): 16–23.

Walker, Brian, C. S. Holling, Stephen Carpenter, and Ann Kinzig. “Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social-ecological Systems.” Ecology and Society 9, no. 2 (2004): 5.

[1] Paolo A. Pirazzoli, “The Early Byzantine Tectonic Paroxysm,” Zeitschrift für Geomorphologie, Supplementband 62 (1986): 31–49.

[2] Mark Jackson, “Historiographical and Methodological Implications for Understanding Gaps: A Case Study in Preparing for the Apalirou Environs Project, Naxos,” HEROM Journal on Hellenistic and Roman Material Culture 9 (2020): 264.

[3] Beate Böhlendorf-Arslan and Robert Schick, eds., Transformations of City and Countryside in the Byzantine Period (Mainz: Verlag des Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseums, 2020); Ine Jacobs, Aesthetic Maintenance of Civic Space: the ‘Classical’ City from the 4th to the 7th c. AD (Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2013).

[4] Margaret C. Nelson, “Abandonment: Conceptualization, Representation, and Social Change,” in Social Theory in Archaeology, edited by Michael B. Schiffer (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2000), 52–62, esp. 55.

[5] Catherine Keane, “More than a Church: Late Antique Ecclesiastical Complexes in Cyprus” (PhD diss., Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, 2021).

[6] Frank R. Trombley, “Korykos in Cilicia Trachis: The Economy of a Small Coastal City in Late Antiquity (Saec. V–VI)—A Precis,” The Ancient History Bulletin 1.1 (1987): 16–23.

[7] Brian Walker, C. S. Holling, Stephen Carpenter, and Ann Kinzig, “Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social-ecological Systems.” Ecology and Society 9, no. 2 (2004): 5.

[8] Charles Redman, “Resilience Theory in Archaeology,” American Anthropologist 107 (2005): 70–77.

[9] John Haldon et al., “Between Resilience and Adaptation: A Historical Framework for Understanding Stability and Transformation of Societies to Shocks and Stress,” in COVID-19: Systemic Risk and Resilience, Risk, Systems and Decisions, edited by Igor Linkov, Jesse Keenan, and Benjamin Trump (Cham: Springer, 2021), 235–68.

[10] Kristina Sessa, “The New Environmental Fall of Rome: A Methodological Consideration,” Journal of Late Antiquity 12 (2019): 211–55.