scholarly journals Roads to recovery: an investigation of early medieval agrarian strategies in Byzantine Italy in and around the eighth century

Antiquity ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 86 (332) ◽  
pp. 444-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Arthur ◽  
Girolamo Fiorentino ◽  
Anna Maria Grasso

The cumulative power of botanical and chemical analysis is demonstrated here by our authors, who succeed in opening a window on Europe's most obscure period, in the south as in the north, the time after the Roman and then the Byzantine empire lost its hold. The emphasis here is on the rise in production and trade of cash crops in the eighth century as detected by survey, pollen, charcoal and residues. Taken together, the new data show a community well on the road to economic recovery after two centuries of recession and monetary failure.

1985 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 93-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Hill

The ruins at Yanıkhan form the remains of a Late Roman village in the interior of Rough Cilicia some 8 kilometres inland from the village of Limonlu on the road to Canbazlı (see Fig. 1). The site has not been frequently visited by scholars, and the first certain reference to its existence was made by the late Professor Michael Gough after his visit on 2 September 1959. Yanıkhan is now occupied only by the Yürüks who for years have wintered on the southern slopes of Sandal Dağ. The ancient settlement at Yanıkhan consisted of a village covering several acres. The remains are still extensive, and some, especially the North Basilica, are very well preserved, but there has been considerable disturbance in recent years as stone and rubble have been removed in order to create small arable clearings. The visible remains include many domestic buildings constructed both from polygonal masonry without mortar and from mortar and rubble with coursed smallstone facing. There are several underground cisterns and a range of olive presses. The countryside around the settlement has been terraced for agricultural purposes in antiquity, and is, like the settlement itself, densely covered with scrub oak and wild olive trees. The most impressive remains are those of the two basilical churches which are of little artistic pretension, but considerable architectural interest. The inscription which forms the substance of this article was found on the lintel block of the main west entrance of the South Basilica.


2016 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 128-133
Author(s):  
Annalisa Paradiso

Aristodemus, a Phigalian by birth, was tyrant of Megalopolis for around fifteen years in the first half of the third century b.c., possibly from the time of the Chremonidean War (267–262) until around 251, when he was murdered by two Megalopolitan exiled citizens, Megalophanes and Ecdelus, pupils of the Academic Arcesilaus. While giving an account of his violent death, Pausanias, none the less, draws a very positive portrait of him, also mentioning the nickname ‘the Good’ which he probably read on Aristodemus' grave. Pausanias also reports the foundation of two temples by the tyrant, both dedicated to Artemis. At 8.35.5 he locates one of the two temples at thirteen stades from Megalopolis on the road to Methydrion, so to the north. There, he says, is a place named Scias, where there are ruins of a sanctuary of Artemis Sciaditis. At 8.32.4, Pausanias briefly refers to the temple of Artemis Agrotera at Megalopolis. He says only that the sanctuary was on a hill in the south-east district of the polis, and adds that it was dedicated as an ἀνάθημα by the tyrant as well.


1927 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 438-464 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Thurlow Leeds

At the end of April of last year the Rev. Charles Overy drew my attention to the presence of broken animal bones, flints, and sherds of pottery in a gravel-pit on the south side of the road from Abingdon to Radley, about a mile out of Abingdon (fig. 1).The pit lies on the very boundary of the parish of Abingdon in a field at about 200 ft. O.D., just over half a mile north of the Thames and some 30 ft. above the river. On its eastern and southern sides it is bounded by the wide trenches which in the days of the splendour of Abingdon Abbey formed part of the Abbey's fish-ponds ; on the north is the road, and on the east the ground drops to a little brook.


Author(s):  
Mike Searle

My quest to figure out how the great mountain ranges of Asia, the Himalaya, Karakoram, and Tibetan Plateau were formed has thus far lasted over thirty years from my first glimpse of those wonderful snowy mountains of the Kulu Himalaya in India, peering out of that swaying Indian bus on the road to Manali. It has taken me on a journey from the Hindu Kush and Pamir Ranges along the North-West Frontier of Pakistan with Afghanistan through the Karakoram and along the Himalaya across India, Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan and, of course, the great high plateau of Tibet. During the latter decade I have extended these studies eastwards throughout South East Asia and followed the Indian plate boundary all the way east to the Andaman Islands, Sumatra, and Java in Indonesia. There were, of course, numerous geologists who had ventured into the great ranges over the previous hundred years or more and whose findings are scattered throughout the archives of the Survey of India. These were largely descriptive and provided invaluable ground-truth for the surge in models that were proposed to explain the Himalaya and Tibet. When I first started working in the Himalaya there were very few field constraints and only a handful of pioneering geologists had actually made any geological maps. The notable few included Rashid Khan Tahirkheli in Kohistan, D. N. Wadia in parts of the Indian Himalaya, Ardito Desio in the Karakoram, Augusto Gansser in India and Bhutan, Pierre Bordet in Makalu, Michel Colchen, Patrick LeFort, and Arnaud Pêcher in central Nepal. Maps are the starting point for any geological interpretation and mapping should always remain the most important building block for geology. I was extremely lucky that about the time I started working in the Himalaya enormous advances in almost all aspects of geology were happening at a rapid pace. It was the perfect time to start a large project trying to work out all the various geological processes that were in play in forming the great mountain ranges of Asia. Satellite technology suddenly opened up a whole new picture of the Earth from the early Landsat images to the new Google Earth images.


Author(s):  
Peter Thomson

The Barguzin River flows out of the Barguzin Mountains, through the town of Barguzin and then the coastal community of Ust-Barguzin before it finally loses itself in a broad cove of Baikal known as Barguzin Bay. The only way across the river for miles upstream from the lake is a ramshackle little wooden ferry with a tiny, corrugated steel shed with a wood stove in it and room on its deck for about half a dozen cars. The ferry slips noiselessly away from the end of the road on the south bank, and looking west toward the lake, two ghostly, rusting timber loading cranes loom on the horizon while the river spills over into a grassy marsh on its north bank. Turning back to the east, there’s a small motorboat laboring to get upstream—laboring because it’s attached to a tow rope, which is attached to the ferry. The ferry, it turns out, is just a hapless little barge, at the mercy of the river without the guidance of the motorboat pilot on the other end of the towline. Our crossing takes less than five minutes, and connected to it by nothing but that single strand, the pilot directs the barge into place perfectly on the far side. But the deckhand fails to secure it, the ferry swings wide in the current, spins ninety degrees, and slams butt-end into the dock. The pilot scowls as he turns the motorboat around and uses its blunt bow, covered in a tractor tire, to push the barge back into place, where the deckhand finally lashes it to the dock. The Barguzin is Baikal’s third largest tributary, after the Selenga to the south of here and the Upper Angara to the north. It carries about six percent of the water flowing into the lake, along with migratory fish like omul and sturgeon, born in the shallow gravel beds upriver before wandering downstream to spend most of their lives in the lake. And even though it flows through only two towns between its headwaters and the lake, the Barguzin carries a significant pollution load into Baikal, as well, especially organic chemicals from timber operations.


Mnemosyne ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-225
Author(s):  
Sarah Pothecary

A number of places that feature in Strabo’s description of the Asian peninsula were situated on the ancient road that ran between the Euphrates river and the city of Ephesus. It is likely that Strabo journeyed along the entire thousand-kilometre length of the road, even though he makes explicit reference to his presence in only a few locations. He most probably made the journey as a youth on his way to Roman Asia, in the south west of the peninsula, from Pontus in the north. Decades pass before Strabo, as an old man, writes the Geography and includes in it the memories of places he had visited. The outdated tone of some of his descriptions reflects this passage of time.


1910 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 62-71
Author(s):  
H. A. O.

The following paper, which completes the series of papers on the classical topography of Laconia, is an account of the hill-country on the eastern side of Taÿgetos, bounded on the north by the road from Sparta to Anavryté, on the south by Gytheion and Pánitsa. (Fig.1.)


Author(s):  
Viktor Savić ◽  
◽  

According to M. Pešikan, Fol. 10 from the Vukan Gospel (10a.8–10g.21) was almost entirely written by Scribe IV, one of the eight scribes involved in writing out the original book. The greatest part of the manuscript was written by the monk Simeon. Scribe IV was a follower of an ancient, non-calligraphic Cyrillic tradition, older than any other tradition identified in this manuscript. In terms of palaeographic and orthographic features, he was a predecessor of the "Bosnian" codices of the 13th–15th centuries. This confirms that there was a direct link between the Serbian literacy tradition in Bosnia and the earlier literacy tradition in Raška, namely one of its many lines. Further, in the past, this tradition can be traced back to the South Slavic literacy tradition developed in the Byzantine Empire, in the territory of present-day Macedonia. The concept of the "southern line", which has so far been used in explaining the origins of western Serbian, "Bosnian" literary monuments, acquires a different meaning in this light: a crucial hub in spreading literacy from the south to the north were Serbian scriptoria – from northern Macedonia, through Kosovo and Metohija, to Raška – where the Serbian recension was fist-shaped and then spread further to the west, to Bosnia.


Author(s):  
Richárd Szántó

Anonymous of Ravenna wrote the Cosmography at the beginning of the eighth century, but his creation of the work cannot be determined more precisely. The Cosmography contains descriptions of the entire world in five books, the fourth of which includes a narration of Provincia Valeria Media. In describing the province, Anonymous of Ravenna referred to several authors’ works, including the Tabula Peutingeriana, Marcomir and Jordanes’ works, and other sources of unknown origin. Anonymous noted that Provincia Valeria Media was located between the Pannonia Superior and Pannonia Inferior, covering the area of the ancient provinces of Valeria and Savia. Anonymous listed the toponyms in Provincia Valeria Media’s territory, which he took from an early copy or transcript of the Tabula Peutingeriana. In Cosmography, Carniola was the western neighbour of Provincia Valeria Media, and it was bounded on the south by Liburnia Tarsaticensis. Regarding the name of Carniola, this researcher can assume that it was a later addition to the text of the Cosmography. Scholars disputed whether Provincia Valeria Media existed in the fifth century or whether Anonymous took its name from historical sources. Recent research has suggested that Anonymous borrowed the name Valeria from Jordan and the name Media Provincia from the Tabula Peutingeriana. He merged the two terms into Provincia Valeria Media. The actual historical value of the Cosmography is not the creation of the name Provincia Valeria Media but the early medieval data that Anonymous recorded in his book.


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