Chronology and urban phasing in late antiquity: missing cities.

One of the big motivations behind a project like this is the concern that we have got our general impression of the late antique city completely wrong. It is easy to disparage late antiquity in a first visit to Ephesus, going down the main street, filled as it is by rubble walls or rough spolia colonnades. The same reaction is given by tourists in many other places with late antique remains. They see classical art upended and distorted in re-use which they imagine must have been the result of some great rupture with the past. But whatever we think of the aesthetics of some late antique buildings, we must be aware that late antiquity was a 300 or 400 year period and that its internal chronology is complex. In reality we are often looking at the very end of the late antique city or at a specific crisis, such as building after an earthquake which a city got over. We know from the total number of buildings recorded by both archaeology and texts that the late third to fourth century was a period of recovery and expansion, until the last quarter, when a reduction in building begun with a crash in the second quarter of the 5th c. We might tie the disastrous battle of Adrianople to this in 378, and then the impact of the invasion of the west by Vandals and others from 406, or the rampages of Alaric and later the Huns. Whatever the suggested cause, archaeology tells us that recovery did come Eastern public building from the last quarter of the 5th c. and lasted until the 4th quarter of the 6th when a slight decline began before 7th c. collapse.

What all this means for spolia and cities is that we need to be careful about what we are looking for. There may be non-spolia building in the 4th c. which we cannot see, having dismissed it as 2nd c., or there may be several phases within spolia construction that represent something more than ‘late antique renewal’. This is why we are paying such close attention to spolia building at Sagalassos. In the Lower Agora, surveyed in 2022, we see a portico re-built in spolia but then subsequently converted into a public building with a new type of reused block, before being converted into shops. Three different phases that fit within the 6th c. Different cities, different times, different stories. We see something even more complex on the colonnaded street where very small differences in paving style (in alignment, cutting of joints, mixed stone colours or the presence of redundant clamps allow us to hypothesize the existence of numerous phases of road repair, some clearly associated with the repair of water pipe systems. What we have to do now is not only describe and phase paving but ensure that sondages are planned to retrieve ceramic samples that might produce dating from ceramics. That, this year, will be the job of Francis Leung.