The Actuality of Byzantine Italy

Paul Arthur of the University of Salento presents the findings of his collaborative research project, "Byzantine Heritage of Southern Italy: Settlement, Economy and Resilience in Changing Territorial Landscape Contexts", involving universities in Puglia, Calabria, Basilicata, and Sicily. After noting how nationalist and religious narratives in Italy long minimized five centuries of eastern imperial rule, he points to surviving Byzantine legacies in the south: the distribution of Griko dialects and Mediterranean anaemia, traditional foods, dances, and rural settlement networks.

Arthur divides the archaeological record between the sixth and late eleventh centuries into eight phases, from Justinian's Gothic War and a seventh-century recession marked by urban contraction and defensive castra to gradual rural recovery from the eighth century onward. Focusing on the Salento peninsula, he reviews evidence for fortifications such as the Limes dei Greci, the conversion of the Roman amphitheatre at Lecce into a fortified settlement, and newly recognized coarse cooking wares that have revealed numerous eighth- to tenth-century villages in field surveys. Pollen cores from the Alimini lakes and amphora kilns at Otranto indicate large-scale eighth-century olive oil production and overseas exchange tying southern Italy and Syracuse to Constantinople.

In the countryside, Arthur argues that stone menhirs and monasteries traditionally dated to the Norman period originated in the eighth century around emerging villages. Excavations at Supersano uncovered sunken-featured buildings and a waterlogged well containing wooden tools, grape pips of a Greek variety, and a rotary quern of Milos lava. He then traces Arab raids and the slave trade through finds such as an Umayyad coin, the Centopietre monument, and a gold ring of the Constantinopolitan eparch Basileios recovered off Porto Cesareo, before closing with the late ninth-century reconquest under Basil I and the discussion that follows.