20 Years at an Ancient Harbor on Cyprus

Today’s post is as much an advertisement as anything else and for that, as always, I apologize.

On Thursday evening, I’m giving a paper to the Friends of ASOR, which is a bit like the AIA lecture series. The paper will celebrate 20 years at the ancient harbor of Pyla-Koutsopetria on Cyprus and officially mark the transition from a project directed by myself, Scott Moore, and David Pettegrew, to one directed by Brandon Olson, Tom Landvatter, and Melanie Godsey. It also publicly marks the project’s transition from a focus on the Late Roman harbor town of Koutsopetria to the Hellenistic fortified site of Vigla. It loosely (cough) coincides with the completion of the second volume in the PKAP series which publishes the results of our excavations in 2008, 2009, and 2012. 

You can register for the event here for $13 which goes to help support ASOR. 

To keep the level of difficulty as high as possible, we’re dividing the talk into four sections: the first two will talk about the history of the site, the survey, and our study of Late Antiquity at the site; the second two will focus on past and ongoing excavations and the Hellenistic phase of the site. In other words, if you find my voice annoying and my ideas hackneyed, just wait a few minutes and someone else will be on your screen!

Here’s my little section of the talk and here’s a link to the powerpointer (as a PDF).

Twenty Years at an Ancient Harbor on Cyprus

 

The Survey, its Goals, and Results 

1. Goals

a. Develop the most representative sample of the ceramic signature Late Roman harbor town.

b. Determine whether some aspect of spatial patterning is discernible.

2. Slide 1: Scope and Method

a. 465 Units covering 99.5 ha

b. Most units on the coastal plain were 40 x 40 m

c. Slide 2: Surveyed at 10 m spacing

3. Slide 3: Artifacts

a. Total Artifacts: 37,883 total artifacts, which included 30,145 pottery sherds (80%), 6,924 tiles (18%), 109 lithic artifacts (.3%), and 705 other artifacts (1.9%): 902,875 kg (a US ton is 907185 g): a literal ton of pottery.

b. Distribution: artifact density of 2,960 artifacts/ha.

4. Slide 4: The vast majority of artifacts derived from the coastal zone and Vigla where artifact densities ranged from around 3,000 artifacts per ha to an insane 15,000 artifacts per ha. To put this in perspective, Sue Alcock once argued that 3000 artifacts per ha defined a site.

5. Much lower densities extending north from the coastal plain and in part of zone 2, which helped us define the likely ancient harbor.

6. Zone 3 extends to the north of the site atop the coastal heights. This area produced more pre-Roman material including an intriguing assemblage of Iron Age ceramics and fragments of figurines that hinted at the possible existence of an Iron Age sanctuary.

7. Slide 5: Vigla is largely Hellenistic-Roman, but there is a Roman signature as well. The site itself is almost entirely Hellenistic (as Brandon and Tom will discuss later).

8. Slide 6: Site of Kokkinokremos with its known Late Bronze Age site wasn’t an explicit focus of our work. While the vast majority of material from the site is contemporary with the known site there, there was a significant Roman signature that constituted 34% of the material including well known forms of ESA, ARS, CRS, LR1 amphora, and cooking wares. NOTE: excavations have not revealed traces of this R-LR assemblage.

9. Excavations, then, only tell part of the story…. what did survey tell us about the site of Koutsopetria.

 

Pre-Late Roman History of the Site

1. About 5% of the pottery from the survey area is post-prehistoric and pre-Late Roman (and most of it dates to the Hellenistic to Roman periods).

2. Slide 7: This suggests that the site began to emerge after the fall of the island’s independent city kingdoms.

3. Slide 8: For right now, we’re going to focus on the original research goals of the project and its focus on the Roman and late Roman.

 

 

The Late Antiquity Settlement

1. Slide 9: Around 40% of the material is Late Roman in date.

2. Slide 10: about 25% of this was Late Roman roof tiles

3. Slide 11/12: another 25% was likely Amphora or other utility ware sherds (and 5% of our total assemblage of Late Roman pottery was one particular type of amphora: Late Roman 1)

4. Slide 12/13: 10% of our pottery was fine or table ware much of it imported.

5. Slide 14: Olive Press fragments, fragments of brick masonry, gypsum thresholds, and abundant roof tiles suggests that the area was built up.

6. Confirmed our initial suspicious of this site a major Late Roman era site.

7. The abundance of LR1 amphoras which number in the thousands and a complex and massive assemblage of 6th and 7th century imported fine wares. This likely reveals our site as a regional emporium where agricultural produce from the area between the Roman cities of Kition and Salamis-Constantia made their way

 

 

A Church

1. Slide 16/17: Of course, we had our suspicions if for no other reason that Maria Hadjicosti and some of her colleagues from the Department of Antiquities has excavated parts of an early Christian basilica at the site over three short campaigns in the 1990s.

2. in 2008, we conducted additional excavations at the church in an effort to clarify its date and its history as well as to connect the building more closely to the surrounding site.

3. Slide 18: While today, the church is not much to look at — fragments of the apse and part of an annex room and hall way — even the small amount of it exposed through excavation tells us a tremendous amount about the site.

4. The fragments of the apse, however, reveal enough to let us know that church was most likely of a type common to the neighborhood of Salamis-Constantia suggesting that its ecclesiastical influence extended to the south coast of the island.

5. We were not able to date the construction of the church, but the design and the surrounding material make it obviously Late Roman in date.

6. Slide 19: Careful study of the architectural fragments from the church allows us to see that the church underwent several phases of refurbishment during its life. Windows were closed in and hallways were reconfigured.

7. Slide 20: We also found that the church remained in use at least until the 7th century when an almost complete ARS 105 plate was left on the floor of the annex.

8. Against the north wall of the annex room were the fragments of a Dhiorios cooking pot that might date as late as the 8th century. Maybe it was left behind by people stripping the church of its gypsum floor tiles.

 

Lessons from our work.

 

Slide 22: Our work is probably just the first word in the study of the Late Roman period at this site, but we like to think it is a substantial first word! It places our site on the map as a dynamic regional emporium that drew on drew agricultural production from region between Kition and Salamis. Once at the coast, the harbor likely served to move these goods to the Aegean region where they may have provisioned the army on the Danube. The existence of harbor facilities and surplus goods likely stimulated a market for imported fine ware ceramics which were found in such abundance at the site. These objects also help us tell the story of the church which likely served the local community and visiting merchants and mariners during what appears to have been an eventful life for the building and the site during Late Antiquity.

Two Book Tuesday: Roman Cyprus and The Rastafarians

I’m finally getting some reading done again and started to slowly churn my way through my “to read” pile. This weekend, I managed to read one book to prep myself for going to the ASOR annual meeting next week and one book for some vague future project that is distracting me.

Book the First

I read and enjoyed Ersin Hussein’s Revaluing Roman Cyprus: Local Identity on an Island in Antiquity (2021). This book had been rattling around my “to read” list for a couple years and I finally found a time to sit down and read it. It is one of those short, but useful books that anyone interested in Roman Cyprus should have in their library.

The book effectively does what it says on the cover: it explores local identity on Cyprus during the Roman period. Hussein does this largely through textual sources — both literary and epigraphic — although she is not averse to selective engagement with archaeological evidence. Her argument, in a nutshell, is that individuals remained attached to their cities even when they received Roman citizenship. This is because cities retained certain distinctive historical features that served to reinforce their distinctive identities well into the Roman period. Thus, the long period of Hellenistic and Roman rule on Cyprus which reduced the political authority of the former city kingdoms did not eliminate civic identities. This is consistent, it would seem, with highly urbanized areas elsewhere in the Roman East (especially Greece).

The notion of civic identity articulated in Hussein’s book offers a top down perspective. Her use of epigraphic and textual sources offered a perspective on elite identity. Over the past 20 years, my colleagues and I have been considering grittier evidence for the same question as we studied the distribution of Roman and Late Roman ceramics across the island. Our hypothesis is that ceramic assemblages, particularly of table ware, offer another window into how individuals in Roman Cyprus identified themselves. In fact, we have suggested that the distribution of Late Roman ceramics does not reflect access or the circulation of good alone and suggests that communities on Cyprus favored different styles, forms, and types of table ware. Whether this produced or reflected different identities is a murkier proposition, but the arguments advanced by Hussein’s book (and other work on identity in Cyprus during the Roman period) make it possibility.

Book the Second

I spent a slow Sunday recovering from a cold and reading Leonard E. Barrett’s classic book The Rastafarians. This book had a bit of an interesting publication history. It was originally published in 1977 in Jamaica (by a bookstore called Sangster’s) and by Beacon Books in Boston. It then went through a series of reprints culminating in a 20th anniversary edition in 1997 which was reprinted in 2018. Over that time, it’s title changed a bit from The Rastafarians: Sounds of Cultural Dissonance to The Rastafarians: The Dreadlocks of Jamaica to simply The Rastafarians. It’s all a bit confusing really.

I picked this book up to see how and whether the Rastafarian movement drew upon and contributed to mid-20th century Afrocentric views in the Americas. What I got from Barrett’s treatment was something a bit different. He located the emergence of Rastafarian beliefs and attitudes in the long tradition of colonial resistance in Jamaica. He located the emergence of Rastafarian communities at the intersection of Garveyite thought (particularly his views on African nationalism) and the rise of Ras Tafari (Haile Selassie I) of Ethiopia. Thus, Rastafarians adopted Afrocentric views, called for a return to Africa, and saw their current life in Jamaica as Babylon (with Africa or even Ethiopia as Zion). Distinctively, they recognized Haile Selassie I as divine.

Barrett’s work situates Rastafarian beliefs and communities in the same space as mid-century Black Muslim movements in the Americas. Both sets of beliefs anchored new forms of Black religious life in traditional narratives: Islam and, in the case of Rastafarian beliefs, Christianity. As a result, both of these movements sought to transform these narratives and the conventional historical contexts that produced them. This, in turn, involved a reimagining of the past and its redeployment in the name of decolonizing narratives.

At the same time, many members of the establishment regarded these new narratives and the life ways, beliefs, and practices that they produced as destabilizing and threatening. Barrett’s book considers the processes that led to the recognition of Rastafarian communities and their beliefs in Jamaica even after the death of Haile Selassie I and Bob Marley. Once again, set against the turbulent backdrop of Jamaica’s post-colonial politics, the institutionalization of the Rastafarian movement created not only a globally recognized art and music, but also the basis for domestic political action as well.

To my mind, this book offers a useful case study for how new historical narratives produce the foundations for new political, religious, and social expression. The authority of these narratives, however, is not independent from the contexts in which they arise. Arguments that Rastafarian views of the past are not grounded in “good history” misunderstands the basis for their authority, which as Barrett argues comes from the experience of Jamaican society during the colonial period. 

Thinking about Corinth (and starting to write)

As I am getting older and more “senior” in my field, I am trying to say “no” to fewer things and do a bit more to give back to the field, my institution, and my colleagues. Sometimes this works our really well and sometimes… well, not so much. In general, people don’t ask me to do too many things so the sample size remains too small to assess whether this is a good or bad practice.

Sometime during the long, dark, winter I agreed to write a short contribution on “Corinth: Periphery, urban environment, chora.” The topic remains a bit obscure to me, to be honest. I decided to write about the countryside of Corinth. The volume focuses on the 1st-4th century AD which the editors argue is the period before the construction of large scale churches in Corinth. My original thought was that writing this short contribution will help refresh my memory on things Corinthian and give me an excuse to re-read some recent (and classic) works on the region. This, in turn, should help me get my feet under me for some of my ongoing research at Isthmia.

My current plan is an essay that looks at sites (with a focus on Kenchreai, Lechaion, and Isthmia), routes (with attention smaller sites in the region), and landscapes (which will consider the results from survey archaeology). This offers some structure even if it doesn’t really offer an argument. My sense is for a piece like this any argument should be subordinate to a survey of scholarship on the region. That said, I think it is worth noting that recent research has shown the 3rd and 4th centuries as periods of greater stability than previously thought. In light of this, the growth of Christianity in the 5th and 6th centuries emerges not from an “age of anxiety” or in a landscape shaped by political, economic, and military disruption or decline, but general stability and gradual change.

So far, I have only a couple paragraphs written, but in the spirit of transparency, I’ll share them here:

The Corinthian periphery during the Roman period represents one of the most thoroughly investigated landscapes of the ancient Mediterranean world. For over a century archaeologists based at the sites of Ancient Corinth and later Isthmia conducted systematic investigations designed to explore the connections between both the city and its chora and also the Corinthia to the broader Mediterranean. As early as the first volume in the venerable Corinth excavation series, archaeologists explored the larger Corinthia retracing the footsteps of ancient travelers from Pausanias to Apuleius’s fictional Lucius and St. Paul. Excavations at the ancient harbors of Lechaion and Kenchreai (and the neighborhood of Koutsongilla) and at the Panhellenic sanctuary of Isthmia continue to add major nodes to the landscape. Extensive and intensive surveys, notably the work of James Wiseman, Timothy Gregory, and the scholars associated with the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey, have further contributed to our understanding of the Corinthian landscape during the Roman period. This work has populated the spaces between the sites with villas, farmsteads, roads, cemeteries, quarries, and religious sites. 

The following chapter will offer a survey of work on the Corinthian countryside. It will follow the definition provided by David Pettegrew in his recent monograph on the Corinthia. Pettegrew, recognizing that the territory under the political the city of Corinth varied over time, but also that the area most proximate to the city had the greatest immediate connection to the city itself, limited his treatment to the Isthmus of Corinth which he defined as bounded by the Geraneia mountains to the North and the line formed by Mt. Oneion and Acrocorinth to the south of the site. The harbor towns of Lechaion and Kenchreai form the western and eastern extent of city’s immediate chora respectively. This definition also largely coincided with the chora of the city during the Archaic and Classical period, which, of course, would have no longer been particularly relevant during the Roman period, but nevertheless offers a useful way to understand the countryside more regularly connected socially and economically to the urban core during the first four centuries of our era. 

The Church of St. Lazarus in Larnaka

It had been quite a few years since I had the chance to talk to student about the church of Ay. Lazarus in Larnaka on Cyprus. Yesterday, I chatted a bit about the church and its history with students from Reed College and Metro State University – Denver who were participating in the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project (Version 3).

This church is a pretty amazing building made only more amazing because it is pretty baffling architecturally and historically. That said, it is also prominent enough in the city of Larnaka and accessible enough to even the casual visitor to make it an appealing building with which to think. Since most of the students had only limited interest in the nitty-gritty of Medieval Cypriot architecture, it made sense to me to talk about the building in more big picture historical ways.

To do this, I decided to focus on how this building embodied a whole series of connections that characterized both the history and contemporary academic conversations about Ancient and Medieval Cyprus. The first connection I make is that the story of Lazarus of Bethany works along side the story of Paul and Barnabas to connect Cyprus (and in the case of Lazarus, Larnaka) to the Levant and Holy Land (which reminds us that ancient Kition was, for most of its history, oriented toward the East). 

Then I discuss the idea that St. Lazarus seemed to be particularly significant to Armenians and propose that the building reflects the connections between Cyprus and Cilician Armenia throughout the Middle Ages from long-standing economic connections between the region to the settlement of Armenians on the island under the Emperors Maurice and Heracleius and the reconquest of the island by Nikitas Chalkoutzes in 965.

I then discuss the how this church connects the city and the island to Constantinople. This connection, of course, works on two levels. First, historically there is evidence that the Emperor Leo VI translated the relics of Lazarus from Larnaka to Constantinople in the first decade of the 10th century. The relics suggest, of course, a church on the site, by the early 10th century, but it remains unclear whether it is the existing church. This matters to architectural historians who continue to ponder the character of Early Medieval Cypriot architecture. On the one hand, it may be that this church reflects trends characteristic of Constantinoplitan architecture, especially if one sees it as a series of cross-in-square churches aligned in sequence to form a basilica. This would tend to suggest an 11th or 12th century date for the building. On the other hand, it might reflect innovation in Cypriot architecture, particularly the long-tail of efforts to convert wood-roofed basilicas to barrel vaults or domes. 

Finally, I leverage a bit of Nassos Papalexandrou’s 2008 article in Journal of Modern Greek Studies to situate the relationship between the city of Larnaka and its salt lake. I concluded with the rival stories about the lake’s origins. According to post-Medieval sources, Barnabas cursed a woman who would not offer him water from a well and claimed it was brackish. He turned the well and the water from it brackish in response to her lie and thus the Larnaka salt lake was formed. Lazarus, in contrast, created the salt lakes as a gift to the city so that the community and the island would never be without salt.

I was fortunate yesterday that Tom Landvatter’s tour of other sites in Larnaka picked up on some stands of my rambling and discursive talk, expanded and clarified them, and used them to discuss the contemporary (and ancient) Cypriot (and Larnakan) identities.

The End of the Middle Roman III Period at Polis

I’ve long wanted to give a paper on our work on Cyprus which adapts the chronology and discourse of the Roman and Late Roman period to the conventions of the Cypriot and Aegean Bronze Age. Thus, instead of talking about the Roman or Late Roman period, we’d talk about things like the Middle Roman IIIC transition to the Late Roman I period or the Late Roman IIIC period and various sub-Late Roman periods.

I think it would help people take our period more seriously.

Most scholars are inclined to see the “MRIIIC seismic paroxysm” as the cause for the end of the MRIIIC period on Cyprus. The tangled events of this period form a backdrop to the appearance of new forms of pottery, new monumental architecture, and various aspects of social, political, and economic resilience that characterize the LRIA-LRIB period. The construction of monumental and impressive basilicas in the LRII and LRIII period is but one of the most obvious cultural changes that took place during this dynamic and very, very important time in the history of the island.

In many ways our work on the MRIIIC transition parallels our recent work on the murky transition from the LRIIIC period to the sub-Late Roman period on the island. This transition, like the end of the MRIIIC period, reflects architectural innovation (the vaulted- and domed-church builders), demographic change, new forms of material culture (including the possible arrival of groups associated with the so-called “Glazed Ceramic” forms of material culture alongside alongside the persistence of so-called “hand-made ware” peoples), and transformations that anticipate the organization of the modern Cypriot political landscape. Of course, I’m open to the interpretation that same sub-LRIIIC groups produced both the garish (by modern standards) glazed pottery as produced the more sophisticated hand-made and even red-slipped wheel made pottery of the earlier LCIIIC period. This remains, to me at least, a valuable new horizon for research.

Thank you, and I won’t be taking any questions are this time. 

Messene, Olympia, and the Greek Dark Ages

Last weekend, I had a chance to travel a bit and see a couple sites that I hadn’t seen for about a decade. We targeted sites and regions where there was some evidence for “Slavic” pottery and “late” urbanism (i.e. post 6th century).

We visited Messene which is perhaps best known for its imposing Hellenistic Walls. We were more interested, however, in the fourth-century Christian building, the sixth century basilica, the fifth to seventh century bath, the Early Byzantine water mill, and the beautiful views. To get a sense for why Late Roman and Early Byzantine Messene is so important, check out Nikos Tsivikis work at his Academia.edu page.

We then headed north to visit Olympia. While Olympia is best know for its important collection of Slavic Ware pottery, it was also the site of a relatively well preserved Early Christian basilica. Unfortunately, the weather was uncooperative and we barely avoided a massive thunderstorm and didn’t get much time on the site.

Fortunately, we had plenty of time to admire the “Slavic” pottery displayed in the final cases of the archaeological museum. The message is clear: all of the remarkable and far more famous objects, monuments, and stories associated with Olympia culminate in “Slavic” ceramics. The elegance, simplicity, and functional beauty of these pots humbles the rest of the museum by reducing the overwrought ornamentation of so-called “Classical” sanctuary to mere frippery. 

Baptisteries in Greece and Cyprus

For some reason baptistery projects take a long time to come out. This week, two baptistery related projects of mine somehow reached milestones. It’s a Christmas miracle.

The first is the MASSIVE Cambridge Guide to the Architecture of Christianity edited by Richard A. Etlin. I had only a tiny contribution to this gigantic and long simmering project: “Early Christian Baptisteries.” From what I can tell, I started working on this project in 2010 or so. In fact, this project took so long to come to pass that you have to go to my OLD blog to find a draft of the published manuscript: You can read that draft of it here. You can check out the table of content here. I’m particularly pleased to have slipped an image of the Lechaion baptistery into this article!

Yesterday, I completed a draft of another long simmering project on the Early Christian baptisteries of Cyprus. It is a companion piece to one that David Pettegrew and I wrote on the Early Christian baptisteries of Greece.  

If you’re into baptisteries and into Cyprus, I think this as good a place as any to start. Note the bibliography at the end for key additional reading and reference!

The Baptisteries of Cyprus

Scholars have long recognized Cyprus as a crossroads in the Eastern Mediterranean during the Late Roman period. This location of the island between the Levant, Asia Minor, and the Aegean and its wealth during the Roman and Late Roman period shaped its distinct ecclesiastical and Christian history. The island’s location made it a predictable stopover for St. Paul (Acts 9:27; 11:19-26). Its connection to the Levant inspired traditions of prominent early bishops on the island including Paul’s companion Barnabas and the resurrected Lazarus. By the fourth century, the island sent three bishops to the Council of Niceae including St. Spyridon and by the end of the century produced the charismatic St. Epiphanius whose status a heretic hunter drew him to Constantinople to participate, albeit briefly, in the machinations surrounding St. John Chrysostom’s condemnation at the Synod of the Oak in 403. The prominence of Cypriot bishops in the first half-millennium of Christianity is just one indicator of the political and religious significance of the island. Indeed, the sudden discovery of the relics of St. Barnabas in the 5th century, helped bolster the island’s case for ecclesiastical independence from the See of Antioch and reinforce the uniquely autocephalos relationship between the Metropolitan bishop of Cyprus at Salamis-Constantia and the Patriarch in Constantinople. The prominence of the church and its leaders also fostered the growing number of relics on the island and helped make the island a place for pilgrims to stop on their way to the Holy Land. Even in the 7th century, as the Late Roman Eastern Mediterranean started to dissolve under the pressures of religious and political schism, Cyprus remained a key node in Christendom. Displaced populations, such as thousands of Armenians captured during the Persian wars, and displaced bishops, such as Cypriot-born St. John the Almsgiver who fled Egypt in advance of the Persian attacks on Alexandria, found new homes on the island. Throughout the Early Christian period, the island’s location, economic and political prominence, and ecclesiastical stature ensured that its churches were both impressive and diverse in style and shape (see Gordon and Caraher 2018; Mecalf 2009; Zavagno 2017).

Considering its geographic, political, and ecclesiastical context, it is hardly surprising that Cypriot churches drew freely on the architecture of the Near East, Asia Minor, and the Aegean coasts. This diversity of church architecture on the island suggests the presence of different communities with different liturgical practices as well as different groups of builders with access to different material and techniques. Like many places in the Mediterranean, the paucity of clearly dated buildings also means that our chronology of these churches remains provisional. Only a handful of the over 100 Early Christian churches on Cyprus have dates established on the basis of published archaeological excavations (for the most recent catalogue of Cypriot churches see Maguire 2012). As a result, it is difficult to discern development over time or to link architectural trends to the ecclesiastical history of the island. This is particularly disappointing as Cyprus’s location, distinct ecclesiastical history, and remarkable continuity has make it a useful for understanding the dissemination and transformation of church architecture in the Early Byzantine period.

Despite the large number of churches excavated on Cyprus, there are only six well-preserved baptisteries. Three are in the neighborhood of Metropolitan See on the island, Salamis-Constantia: Ay. Epiphanios in the city itself, Ay. Triada and Ay. Philon on the Karpas Peninsula. The are also two well preserved baptisteries at the Episcopal Basilica at Kourion and the coastal site of Ay. Georgios-Peyias. Most recently, the Department of Antiquities excavated a baptistery at the site of Petounta in Larnaka district (Georgiou 2013). There are several poorly preserved or poorly published baptisteries that add to this meager corpus. At the site of Shyrvallos near Paphos, salvage excavations revealed a baptistery in the early 1960s (Metcalf 2009, 459 with citations). An unpublished baptistery stands to the west of the basilica excavated east of the harbor at Amathous. There is also evidence suggesting a baptismal installations at the Chrysopolitissa basilica at Paphos.

The small number of baptistries excavated on Cyprus appears to be partly an accident of discovery and partly a feature of the island’s distinctive ecclesiastical landscape. The best preserved examples of baptisteries suggest that there was a tradition of monumental and architecturally elaborate structures that often stood adjacent to, but separate from the main body of the church. As a result, these monumental baptisteries tend to appear most commonly at churches excavated extensively. Urban contexts for many of the churches on Cyprus and salvage excavation practices has meant that excavators only occasionally opened the kind of exposures necessary to reveal the presence of a baptistery complex. It is hardly surprising, then, that three of the six well-preserved baptisteries are associated with churches located amid large scale excavations (Ay. Epiphanios at Salamis, The Episcopal Basilica at Kourion, and the baptistery basilica at Ay. Georgios-Peyia). Conversely, the absence of monumental baptisteries at Paphos, for example, which was an important ecclesiastical city with Biblical associations and the absence of any substantial Early Christian remains from the city of Kition (modern Larnaka) almost certainly reflects accidents of discovery.

That said, there is also some evidence that Cypriots developed smaller and simpler alternatives to the large-scale baptisteries present at the basilicas identified by large-scale excavations. These alternatives may have included mobile fonts, the use of annex rooms common to the Cypriot churches, or even space in the aisles, atria, or narthex. The presence of the remains of a baptistery in the south apse of the Chrysopolitissa basilica at Paphos and may well indicate the use of moveable baptismal fonts. Stewart suggests that a gap in the opus sectile floor in the north apse of Amathus Acropolis basilica might represent the remains of a displaced baptismal font at this building that otherwise lacks a formal baptismal space (Stewart 2013, 292).

The monumental baptisteries present on the island suggest adult baptism which perhaps correlates with the large-scale conversion of the island over the course of the 5th century. The baptisteries at Kourion, Ay. Philon, and Ay. Epiphanios are on slightly different orientations from their associated churches which would seemingly suggest either earlier or later construction. The excavators at Kourion and Ay. Philon, however, saw the similarities in form between the baptisteries and the basilicas at these sites as evidence for their close contemporaneity. Megaw largely dated the church at Kourion on the basis of coins found in foundation trenches and argues for a fifth century date for the basilica and links it to the prominent bishop Zeno who attended the Council of Ephesus in 431 (Megaw 2007, 158). Ay. Philon appears to have a similar date on the basis of numismatic evidence and the perhaps tenuous attribution of this church to Ay. Philon, a descendent of Ay. Epiphanios (Megaw and du Plat Taylor 1981). The church at Ay. Epiphanios was famously dated on the basis of the Life of Ay. Epiphanios in which God tells the fourth-century Bishop Epiphanios to build a church. This dates the church to the late 4th century at earliest and considering the scale and opulence of the building, it is probably safer to date the church to the early 5th century with modifications continuing into the 6th century. The baptistery is likely associated with the first phase of the building. The similarities between the baptistery at Ay. Trias and that of the nearby Ay. Philon (as well as the baptistery at Kourion and Ay. Epiphanios) would seem to support a 5th century date for that structure and coincides with the date assigned by Papageorghiou at least partly on the basis of a coin of Honorius (395-425) (Papageorghiou 1964, 372-374). The baptistery and basilica at Peyia with its Aegean influences is an outlier in terms of design, but seems likely to date to the 6th century if it is contemporary with its associated church (Papageorghiou 1985, 316). The baptistery at the site of Mazotos-Petounta produced coins dating from between the 4th and 7th century (Georgiou 2013, 123). Without additional context for these finds, it remains difficult to assign to this building a narrower date, but its general form suggests a fifth or sixth century date. These centuries represents a period of aggressive church building perhaps linked as much to the growing Christian population on the island at to efforts by Cypriot bishops to assert their independence from Antiochene authority at the Council of Ephesus in 431 (Maguire 2012, 138).

Richard Maguire’s 2012 dissertation offers the most convenient, recent, and thoughtful survey of the churches on Cyprus. He argues that the design of the four baptisteries – Ay. Epiphanios, Ay. Trias, Ay. Philon, and Kourion – served to support a processional baptismal rite (Maguire 2012, 97-139). To this we can add, albeit tentatively, the baptistery at Mazotos-Petounta. The basilica associated with this baptistery was not excavated, but it nevertheless shares sufficient similarities with the four studied by Maguire to be added to that group. He proposes a rite involving four spaces linked by corridors. A large atrium space allowed the catechumens to gather prior to the start of the rite itself. The candidate then proceeded into an apodyterion where pre-baptismal rites took place and the individual undress before moving to the font itself. Cruciform fonts suggest at least partial immersion and complemented the role of movement associated with the processional rite. The candidate would have walked down into the font by means of a staircase on one of the font’s cross arms and ascended, newly baptized, by another. They would then continue to the chrismarion where the newly baptized Christian received anointing with oil. Presumably then the fully baptized member of the church would enter the basilica and experience the full liturgy. Maguire suggests a link to the baptismal rituals and architectural forms at Jerusalem, Sidé in Turkey, Gerash, and the pilgrimage church at Qalat Sem’an in Syria. Considering the close, if sometime fraught, connections between the church on Cyprus and the ecclesiastical landscape of the wider Levant, this seems plausible. Moreover, the character of Cypriot baptisteries do appear to emphasize processional movement through a series of discrete spaces that mediate the converts liturgical and physical entry into the church.

A mild outlier of this group is the baptistery at Peyia. Its circular font is unusual for Cyprus, with only the poorly preserved font at the site of Shyrvallos in Paphos sharing this shape. The location of the Peyia baptistery to the west of the atrium rather than connected to the main nave may hint at an alternative baptismal liturgy, the use of the atrium as the start of the baptismal processional route, or just constraints imposed by the neighboring buildings. A similar arrangement is apparently present at the still unpublished basilica near the harbor at Amathus which might have reflect the physical limits of the church’s situation near the coast (Keane 2021, 52).

The association of baptisteries with the seats of bishops has largely been a given on the island. The close association of the imposing church of Ay. Epiphanios with the bishops of Salamis-Constantia make it the obvious cathedral. The size, location, and opulence of the Kourion basilica, baptistery, and residential space makes it the cathedral of that city. The baptistery at Peyia likely seems to be associated with a cathedral as is evident in the presence of a synthronon at the church and the adjacent elite residence plausibly associated with the bishop. The later synthronon at the site of Ay. Philon and the elaborate annex rooms may well indicate that it was also a probable cathedral. At the same time, the presence of a baptistery some 20 km away from Ay. Philon at the site of Ay. Triada suggests that some non-cathedral churches may have been also equipped with baptisteries on the island. Metcalf suggests that the church and the baptistery at Ay. Triada predated the more elaborate cathedeal at Ay. Philon and the bishop moved his seat sometime in the fifth century (Metcalf 2009, 275). It is more difficult to explain within the limits of contemporary evidence why some cathedrals lacked obvious baptisteries. The scant evidence for architecturally distinct baptisteries at the massive basilicas at Paphos, including the largely unpublished Chrysopolitissa church, may suggest that in these contexts baptisms took place using moveable fonts or less substantial installations that stood within the liturgical space of the church itself. This would allow us to understand, for example, the Chrysopolitissa as the cathedral of the city despite its lack of a formal baptistery.

The handful of baptisteries on Cyprus reflect a certain amount of continuity of design, ritual and tradition likely centered on around the seat of the metropolitan bishop at Salamis-Constantia. There are, however, some indications for the perennial tension on the island between local practices and broader regional influences. The presence of an Aegean-style baptistery at Peyia on the western side of the island suggests that the influence of the church at Salamis may have had its limits. While this would be hardly surprising, the relative paucity of excavated baptisteries on Cyprus makes speculative any conclusion surrounding the traditions and practices broadly operating on the island. The likely use of moveable fonts which may have left only faint traces in the archaeological record, chronological ambiguities, and the limits to many excavations, further complicates our understanding of ancient practices on the island. The remains that do exist, however, suggest that Cypriot baptismal rituals centered on processional movements similar to those found elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean.

 

Bibliography

du Plat Taylor, J. and A.H.S. Megaw. 1981. Excavations at Ayios Philon, the Ancient Carpasia. Part II. The Early Christian Buildings. Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus, 209-250.

Georgiou, G. 2013. An Early Christian baptistery on the south coast of Cyprus. Cahiers du Centre d’Études Chypriotes 43: 117-126

Gordon, J. M., and W. R. Caraher. 2018. The Holy Island. In D. K. Pettegrew, W. R. Caraher, and T. Davis, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Archaeology. Oxford University Press. 475-494.

Keane. C. 2021. “More than a Church: Late Antique Ecclesiastical Complexes in Cyprus.” Ph.D. Diss. Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich.

Maguire, Richard. 2012. “Late Antique Basilicas on Cyprus sources, contexts, histories.” PhD diss., University of East Anglia.

Megaw, A. H.S. ed. 2007. Kourion: Excavations in the Episcopal Precinct. Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks.

Metcalf, M. 2009. Byzantine Cyprus 491-1191. Nicosia: Cyprus Research Centre.

Papageorghiou, A. 1964. Ἡ Παλαιοχριστιανικὴ καὶ Βυζαντινὴ Ἀρχαιολογία καὶ Τέχνη ἐν Κύπρῳ κατὰ τὸ 1963. Ἀπόστολος Βαρνάβας 25: 153-162, 209-216, 274-284, 349-353.

Papageorghiou, A. 1985. L’architecture paléochrétienne de Chypre. Corsi di Cultura sull’Arte Ravennate e Bizantina 32: 229-334.

Stewart, C. 2013. Military Architecture in Early Byzantine Cyprus. Cahiers du Centre d’Etudes Chypriotes 43: 287-306.

Zavagno, L. 2017. Cyprus between the Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (ca. 600-800): An Island in Transition. London: Routledge.

On the Edge of a Roman Port

I have to admit that today’s blog post is a bit of a hot take on the very recently published volume: On the Edge of a Roman Port: Excavations at Koutsongila, Kenchreai, 2007-2014 edited by Elena Korka and Joe Rife. I’m not going to come out and say that this is the perfect holiday read, but runs to 1376 pages (about 400 pages longer than the new Cambridge Centenary Ulysses for some casual perspective). Like Ulysses, it’s probably best to realize that this is not a book that one can read in a single sitting.  

That said, it is an interesting and, at least for those of us invested in the Corinthia, an important book. It describes three major campaigns of excavation at the coastal site of Koutsongila on the littoral of the Eastern Corinthia. Koutsongila stands just to the north of the site of Kenchreai and features not only the northern and eastern extent of the Roman settlement but also a per-urban graveyard. The site primarily saw activity from the first century BC to the 7th century AD and then again during World War II when the Germans fortified the Koutsongila ridge with gun emplacements and trenches. The project directors embraced a diachronic approach that understood the importance of later activity at the site both in its own right, but also as contributing to site formation processes and how they understood the earlier material.  

It is also a significant book for those of us invested in thinking about the future of archaeological publishing. My hot take will introduce this work and offer some thoughts after spending four or so hours with it yesterday afternoon. In other words, this is not a review or even a definitive “take” on the book, but a series of excited observations inspired by my first few hours with this volume.

Here goes:

1. Lavish. This book is almost absurdly lavish. The cover is spectacular, graphics are sharp and abundant, and the pages are glossy. The design draws on the familiar format of the journal Hesperia which makes sense since this is a volume in their supplement series. 

The book runs to two volumes which together must weigh close to 10 lbs. As a result, this is very much an office, library, sturdy end-table book as opposed to “a work room in Greece” or “toss it in your carry on to use in the field” book. This is a bit of a shame since the detailed catalogue would be nice to use on the pottery bench.

Fortunately, the book will appear at some point in digital form via Jstor. 

More fortunately, much of the finds data is available via Open Context including this sexy little piece of Slavic Ware, which can then be located in its trench and locus (or excavation unit). Unfortunately, I can’t seem to figure out whether the also recorded deposit numbers (that is stratigraphic units) as part of their published dataset. It wouldn’t be very hard, though, to create a concordance of deposits to loci to allow a user to access all the material defined by a particular depositional context.

I do wonder whether the digital version of the book will include hyperlinks to the online data. This could be  massively helpful (or even something that a clever user retrofits at a later date).

2. This Is the End. Over the last year or so, I’ve been chatting with a bunch of folks about the future of archaeological publishing. Hecks, Jennie Ebeling and I even wrote a little “Op-Ed” about it in Near Eastern Archaeology. Generally speaking, we’ve been talking about whether it is worth planning volumes as the final or definitive publication of an archaeological project or whether we should start to think in terms of a wider range of interrelated outputs.

The Koutsongila volumes are traditional archaeological publications in their most refined and “late” form. Even the impeccable design and layout sensitivities of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens publication office, however, fell short of making this a genuinely user-friendly publication. The brilliantly reproduced illustrations, for example, often were hard to connect to the text or appeared several pages before they were discussed.

This is not a criticism of the layout!

This is just the reality of a visually rich publication attempting to accommodate equally robust textual interpretation and analysis. In fact, the ASCSA publication office even included key artifact illustrations (for example) in two places — once near the description of their context and once in the catalogue — so that the reader doesn’t have to flip back and forth between two volumes. This is thoughtful, but also must have been very demanding on the design team. Even with this kind of thoughtful detail, however, my effort to coordinate the illustrations with the text was not instinctive or natural. 

My point here is that the codex — even at its apogee — is not always well suited to reproduce in an intuitive way the complexities of archaeological information and the densely interwoven threads of archaeological knowledge making. This may be as far as our ability to adapt the codex form to intended task can take us. 

3. The Octagon. My hot take did go beyond my critique of the book’s form and consider its substance. The excavations at Koutsongila revealed a fairly lavish octagonal building dating to the 5th and 6th centuries that the excavators quite plausibly associated with some kind of Christian ritual activity at the site. Its connection with the surrounding cemetery and its octagonal shape make it plausible to assume that the building has connections to a local elite family or individual or even perhaps a local martyr cult. From what I could gather, the octagonal building does not have anything that they could plausibly associated with liturgical furnishings. So it seems unlikely to be a church. At the same time, its visibility and its contemporary date with the construction of a basilica on the south mole at Kenchreai suggests that it contributed to the Christianization of the town’s landscape and almost certainly reflected the growing prestige of town’s Christian community. It is interesting to note that the baptistery at Corinth’s western port of Lechaion is also octagonal in shape and plausibly associated with the martyr cult of St. Leonidas. Closer to Corinth, remote sensing near the still unexcavated so-called amphitheater church showed evidence for an octagonal anomaly that might be a baptistery. It seems that the Corinthians have a thing for octagons and the reproduction of this form at Lechaion, near Kenchreai, and perhaps at Corinth would have contributed to the experience of a Christian landscape.

4. Resilience. The excavators at Koutsongila do a great job demonstrating the resilience of the community over the 700 years of ancient activity at the site. By tracing the long life of structures at the site, the excavators demonstrate how the community adapted them constantly to changing needs and situations. 

Their ability to offer these kinds of observations and arguments emerges from the incredible care that the excavators took to document the material at the site. This includes analyzing of 220,000 objects (which must form an important dataset for making arguments about the kinds and proportions of material present at the site over time) and excavating with a keen eye for the human (and natural!) depositional processes  that shaped the site. As a result of this care, they have demonstrated how much it is possible to say about the long history of the site on the edge of a Roman port.

5. Koutsongila in Context. One of the great things about having such a thorough and thoughtful publication from a site in the Eastern Corinthia is that it raises the bar for everyone working in this region. More than that, it also presents a corpus of buildings, material, and developments that will invariably create a backdrop for analysis of, say, the analysis of the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey, the ongoing work of the Michigan State Excavations at Isthmia, and the ongoing work at the Corinth Excavations itself (not to mention ongoing field and publication work at Nemea, at the Saronic Harbors Archaeological Research Project, at the Lechaion Harbor and Settlement Land Project, and projects elsewhere in the region).

Even as my “hot take” cools to more tepid temperatures, On the Edge of a Roman Port: Excavations at Koutsongila, Kenchreai, 2007-2014 will continue to provide the kinds of fundamental data that will fuel  hypotheses ready to be tested, challenged, and confirmed with material, histories, and buildings across the region. I’m looking forward to digging into more of the book over the holidays!

Teaching Thursday: Reimagining my Roman History Class

Next semester, I am going to teach Roman History for the first time since 2005 (I think). My Roman historian friends have assured me repeatedly that not much has changed. (I’m probably kidding here.) 

That said, I still need to teach the class and it is clear that the traditional lecture+discussion format of my original, early-21st century class, is no longer an acceptable (or even familiar) approach to teaching for most of our students. In other words, not only is my content woefully out of date, but so is my pedagogy when it comes to this class.

I told myself this fall that I need to have the basic organization of this class together by November 15th. It’s an artificial deadline, to be sure, but I needed something to motivate me to figure out whether I need to order some books and, as likely, read some things.

Here are my tentative learning goals for the class:

1. Become familiar broadly with Roman history and culture. 

2. Improve our capacity to read and analyze a range of unfamiliar primary and secondary sources. 

3. Continue to develop the ability to write about the past effectively.

These are sufficiently broad to allow me to approach Roman history is a wide range of ways. I have two other things on my agenda.

First, I want to be more deliberate about “workload management” in this class. As I’ve said any number of times on this blog, a 16-week semester is too damn long.

Secondly, I want the class to offer a wider range of assessments than my standard: midterm + book review + primary source paper. I’m considering, for example, a paper written collectively by the class (but perhaps turned in individually?), oral presentations on a particular source, and perhaps more creative assignments that involve engagement with news media, fiction, films, or video games. My goal is to have 5 assessments in the class, each worth 20% of the final grade. 

Finally, I want to build the class on five, five-week modules, each with a primary source, but I want the first module to introduce students to the “grand narrative” of Roman history which we will proceed to question, ignore, and subvert over the course of the rest of the class.

So here goes:

 

Module One

Class 1: The Roman Republic

Class 2: The Republic to Empire

Class 3: The Principate

Class 4: Late Roman World

Class 5-6: Livy, Book 1

Assessment: Rome, America, and Popular Culture: In a 1000 word essay discuss three examples of how Rome appears in popular culture and the media. Each example must be from a different medium (e.g. news, video game, feature film, television, fiction, music, and so on).

 

Module Two: The Fall of the Roman Republic

Class 7: The Gracchi

Class 8: Pompeii and Cicero

Class 9: Caesar and Civil War

Class 10: Octavian to Augustus

Class 11-12: Sallust, The Conspiracy of Catiline.

Optional Book: Ed Watts, The Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny. 2020.

Assessment: Write a critical book review of one of the four optional books.

 

Module Three: The Empire and its Discontents

Class 13: The High Empire

Class 14: The Provinces during the High Empire

Class 15: Roman Religion and the Second Sophistic

Class 16-17: Apuleius, Metamorphosis.

Class 18: Writing a Primary Source Paper 

Optional Book: Sarah Bond, Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professions in the Roman Mediterranean. 2016.

Assessment: Work together to produce a primary source paper. 

 

Module Four: The Fall of Rome?

Class 19: The Crisis of the Third Century

Class 20: The Rise of Christianity 

Class 21: The Age of Constantine

Class 22-23: Augustine, Confessions.

Class 24: Writing Day

Optional Book: Giusto Traina, 428 AD: An Ordinary Year at the End of the Roman Empire. 2009.

 

Module Five: Rome after Rome

Class 25: The World of Late Antiquity 

Class 26: The Age of Justinian

Class 27: Christology and Controversy

Class 28: The Seventh Century

Class 29-30: Corippus, In laudem lustini Augusti minoris.

Optional Book: John Haldon, The Empire that Would not Die: the Paradox of Eastern Roman Survival, 640-740. 2016.

 

As always, I’m open to suggestions, observations, or outright attacks on my character (hacks, somebody’s gotta put me in my place). 

Thinking Big About Late Antique Polis on Cyprus

One of the things that I’m trying to do as I find myself well and truly a “mid career” scholar is to focus on small things. Maybe it has to do with my interest in craft and even slow practices. Maybe it has to do with my distaste for senior (generally male) scholars producing BIG BOOKS about BIG TOPICS. Maybe it just has to do with embracing the parts of archaeological and scholarly practice that I enjoy. 

At the end of the month, I’ll be giving a paper at the University of Cyprus’s Archaeological Research Unit (ARU). My paper will introduce our decade of work at the site of Late Roman Arsinoe at Polis on Cyprus. The first part of my paper will indulge my inclination to “geek out” on some of the more archaeological aspects of our work. I love the fussy forensics of archaeological argumentation and analysis and my hope is that the ARU will be a receptive audience to some of the work we’re doing to untangle chronology at Polis.

I also know that there will be an expectation that I demonstrate something more significant than my ability to think about chronology, stratigraphy, and architectural history within the confines of the trenches at our site. The second half of my paper (which will be a generous 50 minutes!) will try to focus a bit on how Polis can contribute to BIG PICTURE issues associated with both the archaeology of Late Roman and Early Byzantine Cyprus as well as the archaeology of Late Roman Mediterranean more broadly. This isn’t the most comfortable space for me to operate, of course, but I suppose a lecture like this is a good opportunity to get a bit out of my comfort zone and indulge a bit of “speculatin’ about a hypothesis.”

My goal right now is to discuss four (or five?) things at the end of my paper. Because my paper will focus on the material from EF2 (that is the South Basilica) and from EF1 (which I’ve largely written up here), my evidence will represent only a very modest basis for any “speculatin’,” but I reckon that it will still contribute to some larger conversations. 

First, I think it’ll be useful to establish the relationship between the chronology of some of our “horizons” and assemblages and larger conversations about the dating of Late Roman ceramics. Getting the dates of our ceramic evidence right is important both because ceramics represent the most ubiquitous form of datable evidence from the ancient Mediterranean, and also because the chronology of this material is beginning to shift. This shift is mostly attributable to archaeologists relying less dogmatically on deposits associated with particular historical events (earthquakes, invasions, and the like) and on Cyprus, this involved a critical re-examination of chronologies established on the basis of the Arab Raids. I think that the excavations at Polis (as well as other nearby sites in Western Cyprus) have the real potential to establish new dates (at least relevant locally) for Late Roman and Early Byzantine ceramics. 

Second, establishing new ceramic chronologies also allows us to make some new observations on the economic (and even social) landscape of Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean.This means recognizing that there seems to be connections between production sites and markets that persist into the later 7th and even 8th century. This not only suggests that the political disruptions associated with the Arab Raids in the mid-7th century did not complete destroy the economic ties between the island and its neighbors to the west. The appearance of late forms of transport amphora, tables wares, and various cooking and utility seem to parallel the growing body of evidence from coins and seals to suggest that 7th and 8th century Cyprus remained an economic crossroad characterized as much by resilience as economic contraction and political isolation. 

Third, these conclusions have some significance for how we understand “Cypriot Archaeology” more broadly. On the one hand, Cypriot archaeology has long been associated with the study of the Iron Age kingdoms. With their demise of independent kingdoms and absorption of Cyprus into the Hellenistic and Roman world, scholars have argued that what made these communities “Cypriot” became subordinate to the political realities of new regional and transregional polities. Of course, any number of scholars have challenged this perspective and for the Late Roman period recognizing the regional variations in material culture across settlements and sites on Cyprus suggests that “Roman” material became a medium that supported the persistence of Cypriot identity rather than its erasure. This opens the door for us to expand what we consider as “Cypriot Archaeology” into periods that have traditionally stood outside its core concerns.

Fourth, Cypriot Archaeology has historically focused on the political, religious, and social life of the city kingdoms. Implicit in this work is a concern for urbanism on the island which resonates with an interest in the form of cities at the so-called “end of antiquity.” One of the interesting challenges of Princeton’s work at ancient Arsinoe is that most of our excavations took place outside the ancient city center, which remains under the modern village. That said, these sites do offer subtle proxies for certain aspects of urban life. The use of peri-urban areas first as monumental spaces for religious buildings, arches, well-appointed well-houses, and then as cemeteries in Late Antiquity suggests changing religious priorities that are visible elsewhere on the island as well. The rapid reconstruction of the buildings along the northern side of Polis suggest that these spaces remained not only significant for throughout the Late Roman and Early Byzantine period, but also demonstrated that resilience and perhaps even the persistence of the basic urban structure into the post-Antique period.

The presence of large fills at the site of South Basilica offer a window into the material culture of Polis. Recent work that considers the character of fills in relation to peri-urban dumps, however, offers a lens through which to complicated views of these assemblages. This is particularly significant when comparing the massive fill level associated with EF2 and the South Basilica with the smaller fills associated with the construction and destruction of EF1. 

Finally, the ongoing concern for drainage along the northern slope of the city offers an opaque window into issue of water management at Arsinoe. Efforts to manage the flow of water around the South Basilica might indicate that the situation associated with upstream drainage had changed suggesting, perhaps, that certain elements of civic infrastructure had either fallen into disrepair or underwent a kind of catastrophic failure which permanently disrupted their consistent operation. At the same time, it is possible to imagine a model of urban change that suggests the use of marginal areas of the town — including those susceptible to flooding came into use.

Depending on length and my energy level, I might also talk a little about digital publishing and digital methods as a key component of our work at Polis, but I might be better served staying in my lane and talking about some of the larger issues that shape the Late Roman history of the island.