Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ULP.PILAEMA (Urban Landscapes of Power in the Iberian Peninsula from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages)
Reporting period: 2018-09-01 to 2020-08-31
Debates around late antique societies have drawn renewed interest today from archaeological approaches, and the attention given to this period from the 5th to the 8th centuries is the result of a number of present-day issues closely related to urban landscape and long-term change in the human occupation of space. The aim of this proposal is to examine the interaction of new elites on urban life between the late Roman and early Middle Ages through the study of the main components of townscape. The project is articulated around a series of key case studies from Spain selected for their actual and potential contribution to offering a more secure image of architecture and topography throughout Late Antiquity (Barcelona, Toledo, Reccopolis, Idanha-a-Velha, Valencia, Oviedo). Taken together, the archaeological research presents a coherent and up-to-date perspective of how cities were transformed via new symbolic places. The goal is exploring the ways in which topographies of governance were configured and to identify urban patterns comparing with other representative examples in Europe. It is important to know that archaeology can discover and trace some social and urban processes similar to those that happens today. Transitional periods such as Late Antiquity are generally understood to be the result of serious crises induced by traumatic events (e.g. wars, invasions, natural disasters) or of gradual but intense adaptation to situations that lead to new social, urban and cultural contexts. The major migrations involving so-called barbarian societies and transformations that took place on the economic systems of post-Roman in Western Europe make it an attractive period to study. After the failure of the political and economic model established by the Roman Empire administration, various ideological and physical conflicts broke out in Mediterranean societies in order to re-establish a balance between resource exploitation, trade, territories and populations. The city’s architecture as representation of power has long been used intentionally to define relationships among individuals, groups, cities, and governments. Christianity also was one of the long-term phenomena involved in the transformation of Roman urban societies and their territories. Material expressions of governance were reflected in the landscape of several late antique Iberian cities through transformation and planning of new spaces, and nowadays recuperated by archaeological practice.The research strategy is to study the townscape and the main topographic phenomena such as the Christianization of society and the strengthening new (Visigoths) elites that have influenced the emergence of late antique and early medieval cities. Thus it is important to have an understanding of late Roman city since the earlier settlement will have heavily influenced to subsequence models.
The work carried out during the first-year project has focused on research activities in order to explain from archaeological approaches, which were the factors that really created new landscapes and topographies in the cases studied The project has started without lengthy preparatory work, because cities involved in this research have received precedent studies so that meaningful patterns of evolution can be better traced. My work has been centred in fieldwork developed, for instance, in cases studied 2, 4 and 5, performing data and conducting academic research in the UCL Institute of Archaeology (host institution), and exploitation of results via publications and dissemination in international conferences. The project is following carefully the planned Gantt Chart for the first 12 months. The project was designed to be flexible, so I am having the opportunity even to add new research examples that will achieve new results and new questions will be arisen. All that is possible because I had established connections with the local institutions to ensure permissions to survey works; I have a network established with other European research institutions, which I am collaborating, and I get the experience in methodology and the support of IoA’s staff in further training and monitoring. Thus, the main tasks of each work package, and their associated deliverables and impact activities, are being performed successfully. Further research is conducting on the proportions of high-status private buildings and for groups of official public buildings in the sample cities to obtain a meaningful and thorough description of the buildings features and traces of continuity or innovation of the architectonical models. The detailed analysis and comparisons from archaeological and built records proposed in this project are generating a significant scope for drawing a comprehensive picture of power in all these cities.
The view of Late Antiquity as one of complete urban dereliction with a selection subsequently re-settled from the 7th century onwards is out-dated, inaccurate, and overly simplistic as new evidence, along with new ways of interpretation, points to vastly altering and changing townscapes – and yet ones revealing a continuity of life within them. This model of historical developments been directly challenged by more recent scholarship, and this project is contributing to this a new breed emerge for the topics under study. Other major development of this archaeological research project that make quite possible an empirically far better grounded approach, capable of yielding a much more accurate picture is the use of quantitative technologies of the archaeological data of the whole townscape and the excavation of a crucial settlement associated to the most important Iberian late antique city. The ULP.PILAEMA project is also exploring the success and wealthy of the cities under study in the Late Antiquity beyond the concept of Christianization of the Roman townscape. The idea that the episcopal group was predominantly an urban phenomenon can be maintained, as concluded the 15th International Congress of Christian Archaeology. But late antique cities alongside their surroundings land estates were very also administrative, tax-collecting and military centres of the late Roman Empire in Britain, Gaul and the Iberian. Other role was to house the new urban leaders. Evidence of prestige housing, privileged burials, urban walls and overseas trade are some of the most important indicator of local elites activities and the characterisation of power places. The organization of new political powers has been also the focus of much scholarly reappraisal in the last few years, but not so enough to explain the realities of power from archaeological data and even for the whole and diversified territory of the Iberian Peninsula. This project explains this lack focusing in the fact that the disintegration of the older Roman urban model happened slowly in the Iberian Peninsula. The suburban area of Toledo expanded in the sixth century, the royal foundation of Reccopolis and the urban walls of Idanha demonstrate that no new paradigm of urban life replaced the former before the mid-6th century. The monumental Christianisation that Barcelona, Mérida and Valencia experimented in the ecclesiastical buildings can also confirm it. Oviedo, the Christian Asturian capital settled in northern Spain after the fall of Toledo in the 8th century, is understood in this research framework as the last, or the end, of a long Mediterranean transformation process.