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Few experiences seem to bring us closer to people in the past than literally following in their footsteps on the streets of abandoned ancient cities, among the ruins of what they once called home. The effect can be dampened, though, when we reflect that these remains only exist because at some point the population left their houses, temples, palaces, and plazas for better or – more likely – worse. Seen this way, magnificent structures have only been left standing because the societies that raised them collapsed.
This is the uncanny amazement one can sense at, for example, the Roman provincial capital of Salona (Solin) in Croatia, which is one of many ruined Roman-era cities speckling the Dalmatian coast. There, around AD 300, the emperor Diocletian infamously presided over the gruesome executions of early Christian martyrs in an arena, before a mass of spectators. Yet only a few centuries later, all that remained of Salona’s population were a few hundred souls, and they had relocated to a monumental palace fortress commanding a neighbouring bay. Diocletian had originally constructed this complex for himself, but today it lies at the heart of the bustling tourist destination that is Split, a place now drawing even more visitors since the successful Games of Thrones series was partly shot within its walls.
By contrast, the demise of nearby Salona was effectively absolute. We know this because the medieval residents of Split left descriptions of their searches among Salona’s ruins for bones of the martyrs. The region’s former capital city, then, was already an archaeological site by the early Middle Ages. Variations on this fate have befallen many cities, both classical and otherwise.
Town and out
The decline and collapse of past urban societies is a dramatic and recurrent theme in archaeological studies around the world. Many Classic Maya cities in lowland Mesoamerica, for example, were abandoned between the 7th and 9th centuries AD. The Khmer capital Angkor Wat in Cambodia – which was probably the largest city in the medieval world – was deserted in the early 1400s. Scores of such episodes are narrated in Collapse, a book by Jared Diamond that presents what seems to be a gloomy prospect for humanity.
The subject appears to be perennial, and can involve an element of self-interest. After all, we see places in the modern world succumbing to disasters, so it is natural to be mindful that catastrophes can strike us and ponder their consequences. Even so, we remain obsessed with the histories of societies that came unstuck in earlier times – be they real or imaginary. Just think about the attention devoted to the demise of Pompeii, or even the fascination sparked by the legendary fate of Atlantis. Today, as we gaze down from a truly unprecedented – and, in the view of many commentators, unsustainable – pinnacle of global urbanisation, presenting the reality of past collapses can seem to be exactly the sort of pertinent message that archaeology should be serving up.
It is also a message, however, that easily slips from conjecture to factoid. Tracking how decline leads to collapse has been a central topic in scholarship for several decades. Books that have been written on the topic often open with a look at the development of cities, before turning to what is generally interpreted as the signature of their looming end: diminishing construction of impressive monuments and deteriorating upkeep of those that already exist.
The urban landscapes of the eastern Mediterranean lend themselves to such studies, not least because it is a subject that leads on naturally to another collapse that invariably attracts interest – that of the Roman Empire itself. Combining the ubiquitous ruined cities with accounts of military defeats, plagues, and climate change seems to paint a picture of inexorable societal collapse. So compelling are these grand narratives that the assumptions they are hung on can take on the guise of cast-iron explanations. The archaeology, though, seems to be increasingly pointing towards the need for caution. After all, artefact chronologies are often built using the dates assigned to new constructions, or other conspicuous changes in a cityscape, making quiet continuity hard to spot.
Quiet continuity
In recent years, a new trend has become detectable in ancient city studies. Numerous publications are now seeking to disentangle what took place in urban settings in the years after monumental complexes, sanctuaries, and public buildings ceased to be raised and maintained. The findings are striking. What was once interpreted as clear-cut decline – the reuse and recycling of building materials of all kinds, say – can now often be seen as a symptom of organised attempts to optimise the use of resources available to societies, typically after they have undergone profound changes. These new circumstances can arise from political or military challenges, or being on the receiving end of destabilising environmental shifts or natural disasters.
Fresh research on cities such as Gerasa (Jerash in Jordan), Aphrodisias and Sagalassos (both in modern Turkey), and Rome consistently points to the familiar narratives of decline and collapse having more nuance than we usually reckon with. Such evidence forces us to rethink our long-standing habit of viewing these events as a one-way evolutionary narrative. At Gerasa, for instance, evidence from the Late Antique period shows clearly enough that the great monumental complexes of urban life were no longer being used for the purposes that they were originally built for. This abandonment of the original intention, though, did not go hand in hand with an abandonment of the spaces themselves. This is neatly illustrated by the Sanctuary of Artemis, which found a new life as a production area.
Such insights can also require us to rethink the basic interpretation of finds from a site. Work on the recycling and trading of glass – both at Gerasa and in other cities – has, for example, shown that the way in which glass objects were carefully divided up for recycling is not merely an expression of reduced access to raw glass or new products. It reflects detailed knowledge as well about how to reuse glass, and in particular the need to prepare separate batches in order to achieve the best quality of second- or even third-generation vessels. Furthermore, studying the chemical composition of glass can sometimes reveal continuity, or at least a sporadic presence, in places where we would not expect it. This was the case at the recently investigated Roman fortlet of Khirbet al-Khalde in modern southern Jordan (see CWA 123) – while this small fort was thought to have been abandoned shortly after the 5th century AD, it has now revealed glass finds that are considerably later in date.
At the other end of the scale, Augustus, the first emperor of the Roman Empire, states in a document called the Res Gestae that he rebuilt numerous cities shattered by devastating earthquakes. In these cases, catastrophe was followed by setbacks and doubtless lost lives, but then relief came in the form of external support. This ensured that temporary decline did not lead seamlessly to the end of the cities in question.
As for those cases where the habit of building monumental stone structures did die out, or the use of easily datable pottery came to an end, we can be too quick to allow such developments to overshadow stories of continuity, albeit under changed circumstances. This is surely because we are often heavily influenced by our own experiences and perceptions of what to expect from urban landscapes today. As the archaeology shows, though, there is more than one form of city life.
So where does this leave us? Scientists point to many conditions in today’s world that pose threats to humanity. Meanwhile, archaeology offers occasional, if high-profile, examples of past societal decline and collapse. Rather than using the latter to inform the potential outcomes of the former, though, perhaps a more incisive insight is that past societies were rarely if ever confronted with changes comparable in style and scale to those we face today. Despite our best intentions, we may be deluding ourselves if we imagine that total collapses were a common ingredient of past experiences. After all, for most of the time ancient societies were continuously changing – and far too busy doing that to collapse.
Rubina Raja is professor of classical archaeology and art and director of the Centre for Urban Network Evolutions, Aarhus University, Denmark. Together with Søren, she is founding editor of the Journal of Urban Archaeology.
Søren M Sindbæk is professor of medieval archaeology at Aarhus University, Denmark, and co-director of the Centre for Urban Network Evolutions.
