THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYBurials within churches, which are common in the great basilicas of the
period, indicate changed religious attitudes rather than economic pressures
(Chapter 6); however, the presence of burials within central areas of the town,
and even on the sites of earlier fi ne housing or public buildings is another
common feature, seen vividly at Carthage and other North African sites in
this period and indicating a major shift in the use of urban space. It has been
tempting in the past to think in terms of economic necessity, ‘squatting’, and,
where there is some textual evidence to support the idea, as at Carthage, of
an infl ux of refugees from invasion in other areas. Local factors will also have
been important; for instance, at Luni near La Spezia on the west coast of
Italy, where the decline of the marble trade from nearby Carrara must have
affected the town, and where, though it survived into the seventh century, a
clear decline in material wealth can be seen from at least the sixth century.
Local conditions differed: some of the major cities of Asia Minor, Ephesus
and Sardis, for example, which had enjoyed a period of prosperity and expan-
sion in late antiquity, seem to have maintained late antique civic life until the
Persian invasions of the early seventh century.^37 Very little serious archaeo-
logical work has taken place on the Byzantine period in any of these sites, and
generalizations carry certain dangers, but the phenomena are so widespread,
even if the pace varies in different places, that it seems clear that a general
process of urban change was going on, and that this must be connected not
simply with causes such as plague or invasion, but with overall administrative
and economic factors, including the relation of provincial cities to the central
administrative organization.
Recent and ongoing archaeological work at sites in the western Mediter-
ranean including Classe, the port of Ravenna, the islands, and North Africa,
indicates a changing economy in these urban environments, with centres of
production (kilns, olive-presses and metal workshops, for instance) now es-
tablished within the former public areas, but also with new developments
such as warehouses, indicating new patterns in sea-borne trade. By the sev-
enth century new developments can be seen in coastal sites; for instance at
Naples.^38 A coastal city such as Marselles remained dynamic in the seventh
century, and benefi ted from the trade of Frankish Gaul as well as the Mediter-
ranean. Western shipwrecks suggest that while trade was on a reduced scale
and differently confi gured than previously, it was still lively. Mediterranean
trade certainly continued, and eastern amphorae continue to be found at
western sites in the seventh century, if not in the same numbers, while new
types start to appear. Although interpreting such evidence is heavily depend-
ent on the limited number of excavated sites, such excavations are increasing
in number and some of this work, still in its early stages, seems to be point-
ing in the direction of a break in the eighth, not the seventh century; it thus
serves as a corrective to the previously dominant resort to explanations of
change in terms of ‘decline’. It is important also to stress that seventh-century
Byzantium had not lost its western role, as can be seen in the 660s in the inter-
vention of the Emperor Constans II (641–68) in Italy against the Lombards,