URBAN CHANGE AND THE LATE ANTIQUE COUNTRYSIDEthe Great Palace mosaics.^13 Further excavation has taken place in and near the
Hippodrome and on the site of the great church of St Polyeuktos built by Ani-
cia Juliana in the early years of Justinian’s reign (Chapter 3); the city walls have
received attention and recent publications focus on specifi c neighbourhoods.
The spectacular excavation at Yenikapi of the late antique harbour attributed
to Theodosius, in the course of rescue archaeology connected with building a
new metro system for Istanbul, has so far revealed the well-preserved remains
of some forty Byzantine boats from the seventh century and later, and added
an extraordinary amount of evidence, some of which is already on display in
the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. An important study of the elaborate
installations which secured the water supply of Constantinople, using the evi-
dence of physical remains, literary sources, later historical and geographical
accounts and the study of Byzantine masons’ marks, has also added greatly
to our understanding of how the city could sustain such a large population
in the late antique and early Byzantine period.^14 Nevertheless, the fact that
so much work in the city has concentrated on individual churches indicates
another important factor operative in determining the nature of archaeologi-
cal research; namely, the motivation for selection of sites. This has often been
dictated by an intense interest shown in churches, their architecture and their
mosaic decoration. But like the recent work on the city’s water supply, an
important study of the dating evidence provided by brickstamps allows a dif-
ferent view of its urbanism to emerge.^15 Carthage, on the other hand, pro-
vides an example of an important late antique city where major excavation
was prompted in the 1970s by the threat of development and undertaken
on an international scale with the support of UNESCO. During the Islamic
period, the centre of settlement moved to nearby Tunis, and ancient Carthage
became part of a residential suburb. Systematic excavation over a large area
was therefore impossible, but teams from several different countries were
assigned specifi c areas within the ancient urban complex. Their interests and
priorities differed, and some of the sites chosen also yielded material rich in
one particular period and less so in others. But taken together, it would be
hard to overestimate the importance of these results (Chapter 4), not least in
providing a systematic and large body of well-recorded evidence which would
act as a benchmark for methodology and interpretation in other parts of the
late antique Mediterranean.
Since the development of late antique archaeology as a serious study, effec-
tively only from the 1970s, archaeological and epigraphic evidence has been a
fundamental aspect of all assessments of the period. A spectacular example of
what can be shown by such evidence is provided by the case of Aphrodisias
in Caria (south-west Turkey), a city only sparsely attested in literary sources,
which has yielded an astonishing amount of evidence from its abundant in-
scriptions and its excavated remains about urban development and city life in
late antiquity.^16 Since it was a major centre of sculpture production, drawing
on famous marble quarries, it has also turned up a mass of splendid fi nished
and half-fi nished late antique sculpture which is extremely important not only