THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYanthropology, according to which complex societies tend of themselves to
become ever more complex until fi nally they reach the point of collapse.
(^20)
At
fi rst sight this avoids the diffi culty of confusing explanations of change with
descriptions of it. But it is not clear whether it really succeeds, or how appro-
priate a theory it is when applied to the Roman empire. A further danger in
such generalizing explanations is that they may fail to take into account the
actual historical variables – while it may be useful to see the Roman empire in
comparison with other imperial systems, it was also a society sui generis, held
together by a unique balance of factors which historians are still in the proc-
ess of trying to understand. Similar issues arise in relation to comparisons
between empires, which depend heavily on the specifi c points of comparison
chosen. We must not lose sight of the particularity of late antiquity in the zeal
to explain away the ‘fall of the Roman empire’.
The present fl ow of research on the eastern provinces in late antiquity
is indeed striking, but stems from the same preoccupation with accultura-
tion and cultural change that lies behind comparable work on the west. The
fi eld is led by archaeology; archaeologists are giving more and more attention
to studying the interaction of cultural systems and especially the process of
acculturation. It is promising to see that an emphasis on ethnoarchaeology,
the study of subcultures, and an emphasis on survey, landscape and small set-
tlements lead them to take a longer and a broader view, and to turn less read-
ily than before to literary sources for ‘corroboration’ of detailed hypotheses.
Late antiquity – a period of cultural change and acculturation on a grand scale
- offers tremendous scope in this direction, with consequent changes in how
historians interpret the period and what questions they ask.
One such question is how far the infl uence of the state actually penetrated.
Despite the political shifts, when seen from the longer perspective it is argu-
able that neither the establishment of the barbarian kingdoms in the west nor
the Arab conquests brought the degree of change in the underlying social and
economic structures of Europe that can be seen from the eleventh century
onwards.^21 In northern Europe, one may point to a difference between the
agricultural methods and crops more suitable to the heavy northern soil and
colder climate of northern Germany and France and the wine- and oil-based
economy of the Mediterranean; yet the same northern provinces, with the
same ecology, had also been part of the Roman empire. In the east, both
archaeologists and historians are agreed that the seventh-century Arab con-
quests in Palestine and Syria brought little real break in continuity. Much too
much emphasis is still placed on the ‘collapse’ of the Roman empire and the
‘transformation’ of the classical world, and too little on the long-term conti-
nuities.
The search for the causes, in the traditional sense, of this ‘transformation’
also tends to obscure the particularity of individual experience in late antiquity,
the range and variety of which in fact gives the period its undoubted imagi-
native appeal to modern eyes. A time of rapid change, when local structures
were often more meaningful than the Roman state, when people could choose