Change and Resilience: The Occupation of Mediterranean Islands in Late Antiquity

by: Ontiveros, M.A.C. Florit, C.M.

Details
Change and Resilience offers a view of the main Mediterranean islands from West to East in Late Antiquity because Mediterranean islands can contribute in fundamental ways to our understanding not only of earlier colonizations but also later periods. The volume explores specifically the time frame from the fall of the Roman empire to the Medieval period. A first group of papers covers islands and island groups in the Central and Western Mediterranean, including the Balearic Islands, Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, and the Adriatic islands. Together, these five papers highlight several common themes across the region: local or indigenous sites were often reoccupied in Late Antiquity, the rural countryside typically played a significant role in the contributions of islands to wider Mediterranean economic networks, and islands – big and small – often played significant roles in shifting political and religious power. The second group focuses on the Eastern Mediterranean. Three papers cover a range of islands, including Crete, the Cyclades, and Cyprus. Together they emphasize the impacts external shifts in political power and economic ties in the Eastern Mediterranean had on island landscapes, as well as the connected relationship between sacred space and territorial occupation across many of these islands. The final group of papers pivots on changing perceptions of island landscapes in Late Antiquity—or “island mindscapes.” Three papers focus on how communities adapted as they underwent Christianization in island contexts, emphasizing the diverse and varied ways that island landscapes became “Christianized,” as well as how other political and economic factors shaped the dynamics of change.
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
Contributor Addresses
Foreword: Islands, Change and Late Antiquity
Catalina Mas Florit and Miguel Ángel Cau Ontiveros
1. The Occupation of Mallorca (Balearic Islands, Spain) in Late Antiquity: Tracing Change and Resilience
Catalina Mas Florit and Miguel Ángel Cau Ontiveros
2. Between Change and Resilience: Urban and Rural Settlement Patterns in Late Antique Corsica
Gabriele Castiglia and Philippe Pergola
3. Procopius? Barbarikinoi and Gregory the Great?s Barbaricini: Mauri and Sardinians in the sixth and seventh Centuries A.D.
Pier Giorgio Spanu
4. Sicily from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages: Resilience and Disruption
Alessandra Molinari
5. The Transformation of Adriatic Islands from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages
Miljenko Jurković
6. Macro-economy, Micro-ecology, and the Fate of Urbanized Landscape in Late Antique and Early Byzantine Crete
Enrico Zanini
7. Crete, a Border at the Sea: Defensive Works and Landscape – Mindscape Changes (Seventh–Eighth Centuries A.D.)
Christina Tsigonaki
8. Islands and Resilience: Christianization Processes in the Cyclades
Rebecca J. Sweetman
9. The Christianization of Island Landscapes in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: New Perspectives from Naxos in the Aegean
Sam Turner and Jim Crow
10. The Islands of the Southern Aegean from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages: The Archaeological Evidence
Natalia Poulou
11. Economic Landscapes and Transformed Mindscapes in Cyprus from Roman Times to the Early Middle Ages
Athanasios Vionis and Giorgos Papantoniou
12. Islands in Context, A.D. 400–1000
David Abulafia
Index

Change and Resilience: The Occupation of Mediterranean Islands in Late Antiquity

by: Ontiveros, M.A.C. Florit, C.M.

• ISBN-13: 9781789251807 / 978-1-78925-180-7
• ISBN-03: 178925180X / 1-78925-180-X
• Oxbow Books, Oxford, 2019