MED-FARWEST · Urban Centres and Landscapes in Transition. The Mediterranean FarWest in Late Antiquity

Urban Centres and Landscapes in Transition. The Mediterranean FarWest in Late Antiquity

We know much about the Roman world, about the cities and the monuments that mark the economic and political strength of the empire and the display and wealth of the elites. Also well known are the villas or rich country houses that oversaw key parts of the landscapes of Rome’s many provinces in the Mediterranean and European world. But none of these were constants and Rome’s vast empire, its infrastructures and modes of display and population control fell away from the 4th century AD, especially in the Western half of the Empire. This ‘decline and fall’ has long fascinated the public – and scholars – but our image remains only partial. My own specific MSCA project was titled: Urban Centres and Landscapes in Transition. The Mediterranean FarWest in Late Antiquity (MED-FARWEST). MED-FARWEST was designed to be a strongly innovative project that, focussing on territory located in the far west of the Roman Empire, namely the Iberian Peninsula, analysed two of the most interesting yet only partially understood phenomena of the crucial period of Late Antiquity (AD 300-700), namely: 1. the abandonment of some classical Roman cities and 2. the breakdown of the Roman rural world. When and how did these major changes occur and how did populations respond? Were these progressive or sudden changes and what factors were at play to explain variation? My MED-FARWEST project applied a comprehensive multidisciplinary approach to these important archaeologico-historical issues, exploiting techniques developed especially in the sub-discipline of Landscape Archaeology, in which rural and urban worlds are analysed as a single unit, and thus as part of a single reality in transformation. Hispania forms an ideal ‘test-bed’ for the study given the results of new fieldwork, an availability of relevant sites (urban/rural), and recent published outputs. My academic host, the University of Leicester, offered highly relevant support in terms of specialists, research, equipment and infrastructure to generate data and results for this project. The aim was also to generate results, approaches and models valid or to be tested elsewhere in the area of the former Roman Empire, thus enabling better academic dialogue with other scholars exploring the period of Late Antiquity and also of the Early Middle Ages. My project’s approach linked archaeological data to historical sources and geographic information in order to create a database for developing an innovative archaeological model based on Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) and digital techniques of image processing. Core to all this was working with both host and partner bodies to debate and develop techniques and to refine approaches, combined with new work in the field to explore relevant type-sites.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз