The Fall of the Western Roman Empire: An Archaeological and Historical Perspective by Neil Christie (review)

In 2005 Bryan Ward-Perkins published The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford), an unabashed polemic in what James J. O’Donnell has aptly termed the “Counter-Reformation in late antique studies” (Bryn Mawr Classical Review, July 2005, 69). This concise work, an extended essay rather than a monograph (183 pages of text, with works of modern scholarship cited in a bibliography held to five pages) had considerable resonance beyond the circles of late antique historians and archaeologists, winning the prestigious Hessell-Tiltmann Prize for works of historical nonfiction (other recent winners: Simon Schama, Paul Fussell, A.N. Wilson). Ward-Perkins’s argument in part 1, that Rome (i.e., the Western Empire) did indeed “fall” during the fifth century, relied chiefly on traditional sources focused on politics and military history; but part 2 drew principally on archaeology to make the case for a real decline in the material standards of everyday life (the “Demise of Comfort,” as a chapter heading puts it) that amounted to the “end of civilization.” As O’Donnell and other reviewers then pointed out, Ward-Perkins stressed economic decline in the West whereas scholars like Peter Brown (O’Donnell’s “Reformers”) had put the emphasis on evidence of religious and cultural creativity, notably in the East. Ward-Perkins discusses changes in the manufacture and distribution of pottery, roof tiles, and construction techniques, in evidence of widespread use of writing for business and other “ephemeral” purposes, and in the production and movement of such consumer goods as wine and olive oil in the context of a monetized economy in an urbanized world to make the case for the decline from “civilization” (defined as a sophisticated and complex society, though not a morally superior one) ca. 200 c.e. to a return to Iron Age conditions, at least in some parts of Western Europe such as Britain, three centuries later. As skillfully as it is argued, the Ward-Perkins case nonetheless relies to a significant degree on, as he himself put it, “a gross simplification of a mass of difficult, and sometimes disputed, archaeological evidence” (123).

Neil Christie’s intention to grapple precisely with that evidence (the word “Archaeological” is printed boldly in red on the book’s cover) in the western context is thus more than welcome. Christie is well known for his fieldwork in Britain and Italy as well as for his contributions as author and editor to a variety of publications on rural and urban archaeology in Late Antiquity; particularly relevant is his excellent survey From Constantine to Charlemagne: An Archaeology of Italy AD 300–800 (Ashgate, 2006). The scholarly underpinnings of The Fall of the Western Roman Empire reside in an extensive bibliography of works of modern archaeological scholarship (more than 40 pages) in the major European languages.

He begins with an historical overview subtitled “Contexts of Change, AD 200–500” and then devotes two chapters to “Defending the Late Roman West,” the first concerning “Armies, Commanders and Enemies” and the next “Frontiers, Forts and Towns.” Particularly in the latter chapter Christie shows how painstaking and precise archaeological evidence can be usefully correlated with reasonably reliable and detailed historical sources such as the Notitia Dignitatum or Ammianus Marcellinus to propose plausible reconstructions of the state of play in the late fourth and early fifth centuries along the mid-Danube limes or in Britain, along Hadrian’s Wall in the north, or the anti-Saxon coastal defenses developed down the North Sea coast and along the Channel.

His next two chapters draw upon a particularly rich body of new data stemming from recent excavations and specialist studies in order to discuss towns and urban society. His decision to focus, in chapter 4, on seven case studies of cities of various scale and importance in various provinces seems a sound strategy to provide a comparatist perspective without drowning the reader in...