The Roman West, AD 200–500: An Archaeological Study by Simon Esmonde Cleary (review)

This is an important and thought-provoking study. Given all that this book is, it may seem strange to begin a review by emphasizing what it is not, but recent historiography and the somewhat stark title may make some clarification helpful. First, it should be stressed at once that this is not a general, synthetic examination of “The end of the Western Roman Empire” (or “The Birth of Medieval Europe”), of the kind that has become so familiar over the last decade or two. The Roman West could be viewed in these terms, to be sure, and it is likely that it will be much read in coming years as an accessible introduction to the archaeology of a period better known for its textual narratives. Yet the greatest contribution of the book is to establish the distinctiveness of the later Roman period in its material culture, rather than to add to the clash of grand historiographical narratives. This is a study and celebration of what is distinctive about the period from 200 to 500 ce, of the triumph of new urban forms, the militarization of political life, the growth of the church, the creation of regional economic networks, and the articulation of new forms of aristocratic display. It is not a simple story of how the hypertrophic classicism of the high empire turned into the emerging regional polities of the early Middle Ages, of “decline” or of “transformation.”

The second caveat relates to the geographical focus of the book. This is a thoroughgoing discussion of the later Roman archaeology of the Rhineland, northern and south-western Gaul, and large sections of central and northern Spain—the areas in which the author has himself excavated and which he knows well. It makes occasional reference to sites and events in southern and south-eastern Gaul and (more rarely) to the archaeology of Britain. By contrast, there is very little here on North Africa, and nothing on Italy itself. This, then, is “The Roman West” in a very restricted sense. Were the book intended as a synthetic survey, of course, these would be serious omissions, but this focused discussion serves the author’s purpose well. After all, modern France and Spain do comprise a fairly significant chunk of the old Western Empire, and offer plenty of regional variation with which to work. Drawing his parameters in this way allows the author to examine the fate of the imperial frontiers, regions between provinces (particularly in liminal areas like the Pyrenees), and the radically different trajectories of the cultural and agricultural heartlands. France and Spain are also regions where the archaeological data are particularly rich, and where arguments about the social distinctiveness of the later Roman world can be developed with the greatest authority. Naturally, I would have been delighted to see more on the North African provinces, and a fuller discussion of the British archaeology would also have been welcome, but the region covered is certainly broad enough.

With these necessary observations made, we can return to the essential value of the study as a whole. The book presents the late Roman world in a striking new light, simply by virtue of drawing its chronological limits firmly and resisting the temptations of teleology. As a result, it repeatedly demands the reassessment of familiar topics that once seemed straightforward. This is well illustrated by the extended discussion of the urban fabric of the later Roman west—a subject on which Esmonde Cleary is a particular authority. The familiar bugbears of this topic are dismissed efficiently enough: on the issue of the decline of the cities from their supposed high-water mark under the Antonines, the author rightly notes that the explosion of civic euergetism in that period was scarcely sustainable, and was hardly the normal order of things in classical cities. Instead, the focus of chapters 2 and 3 (and to a certain...