Journal of Late Antiquity

This volume brings together the proceedings of a conference held in 2016 and is published in the series Limina/Limites: Archaeologies, Histories, Islands and Borders in the Mediterranean (365– 1556), which is devoted to the exploration of borders and frontiers as they relate to Mediterranean connectivity over the course of more than a millennium. The editor, Barba, explains in his introduction that these case studies offer new frameworks for interpreting rural settlements in Italy during this crucial period of transition between the disintegration of the Roman empire and the emergence of medieval structures of power, landholding and ecclesiastical authority. All papers [End Page 171] are diachronic in scope and collectively cover much of the Italian peninsula from Lombardy and Liguria in the northwest, Friuli in the northeast, into Tuscany and Rome’s northern hinterland, and south to Basilicata, Calabria, and the Salento. This is a rich assortment of archaeological excavation and field survey projects from varied landscape types (mountainous, agricultural, coastal, etc.).

Each study contextualizes individual sites or local landscapes within broader local and/or regional dynamics, employing a range of methodological approaches to bring the diversity of archaeological data from excavation (including architectural, funerary, artistic) and field survey together. Three main themes are repeated in these cases studies, which, while not new to historical debates heretofore, are further enriched by these novel contexts: re-assessing “marginal” landscapes, the Christianization of landscapes, and landscape transformations after the fall of Rome, including the afterlife of Roman villas.

Ecclesiastical connections, whether from a centralized diocese or not, seem to have stitched together seemingly marginal landscapes into sub-regional networks. Roascio unifies spatial surveys of inscriptions, fibulae and shrines across the region to speak of fourth- to fifth-century militarization in linking the mountainous subregion of Carnia (Udine). He then contextualizes the excavations at San Paolo ad Ilegio, a modest fourth-century shrine that gives way to a more imposing church in the fifth to sixth century coordinated by the urban diocese of Zuglio (Aquileia). By the seventh to ninth centuries, with the previous building abandoned, the site remained active as a multi-ethnic cemetery, interpreted as evidence of a return to local control of the ecclesiastical plebs network. Dellù offers a compelling account of the L’Oltrepò, an in-between landscape at the boundary with Liguria, the Po Valley and Lombardy. Using field survey data for rural settlement, she tracks the curtes and then the castra, as well as monasteries, and demonstrates the emergence of a rather thick network of churches over the course of the eighth to tenth centuries, both managed locally and connected to the urban-based diocese of Bobbiano. Castiglia’s contribution re-assesses the quantity as well as quality of rural church construction in northern Tuscany, a “marginal” landscape in being ignored by modern scholarship until the early 2000s. While he notes that there were few rural churches in this zone from the fourth to seventh centuries, those built were of considerable size and scale, reflective of concentrated investment and centralization of church officials, even if not yet a “network.” Circumstances change in the eighth to ninth centuries, when an uptick in church numbers is interpreted as the formation of a pre-parochial network.

Zagari assesses early monasticism in southern Italy’s mountainous corners through close reading of architectural remains dated to between Justinian’s rule and the Byzantine reconquest. She defines the main architectural features of monastic churches: central templon, narthex plus parekklesia, and towers. These Italian complexes seem architecturally similar to those in Coptic Egypt and Syro-Palestine. Moreover, this eastern architectural influence spread via these monastic southern Italian pilgrims to Rome. Locally, the monastery’s influence spread further via monks who probably resided nearby in caves or in huts rather than in the church complex itself, as seen at the site of Santa Marina a Delianuova. [End Page 172] At Capo Don, in...