Wars and Rumors of War: Archaeology, Violence, and the End of Roman Spain

Abstract

The fall of the Western Roman Empire has been a perennial historical problem. This dissertation seeks to add to our knowledge of this process in one region of the Western Empire: the diocese of the Spains, roughly modern Spain and Portugal. It does so by collecting, synthesizing, and analyzing the work of hundreds of archaeological projects to track the material changes that these provinces experienced in the period roughly 250-550 CE. It integrates this archaeological material with the written sources, especially accounts of plunder. It argues that the period under study was marked by rapid material transformation associated with, and possibly due to, the fear of plundering violence. This violence was a new feature of post-Roman life in Spain, and represents not an invasion with the goal of territorial conquest but rather the breakdown of order in a post-state world. The archaeological material collected in this dissertation was stored and analyzed in a database of almost 5,000 geolocated archaeological sites. The collected evidence shows that Roman Spain in the fourth century participated in a shared material culture of villas, cities, imported ceramics, dedicated bath houses, and facilities for the production and storage of liquid commodities, which were exported throughout the Roman world. This material culture was implicated in a particularly Roman style of life that had developed over the previous centuries. In the fifth century, however, each of the indicators of Roman material culture disappeared. By 500, most villas were abandoned. Few liquid commodities were still being produced in an archaeologically visible manner, and almost none were exported. Access to new Roman coinage disappeared, as did the culture of bathing in dedicated facilities. Ceramic imports ceased, first in the landlocked interior, and then, in the sixth century, at coastal sites as well. Over the span of two or three generations, therefore, a centuries-old way of life disappeared. Recent scholarship has tended to reject traditional views that these material changes were due to barbarian invasion. However, a close reading of the written sources reveals that the period in which these changes occurred was not one of territorial invasion, but was rather marked by a set of practices that the Romans called “plundering,” using verbs derived from the noun praeda, or war booty. Our best source for the plundering of the Spanish provinces is the bishop Hydatius, who describes the repeated impact of this plundering on the northwestern part of the peninsula, where he lived. I argue that this plundering, and the fear that it engendered, made life in the dispersed villas of Roman Spain untenable. The second half of the dissertation tracks the rise of certain material indicators of plundering and the fear of plunder: burn layers showing destruction by fire (not always due to arson) increase fourfold; caches of coins and other valuables, hidden and never recovered, peak in the years after 400 CE; and, finally, settlement patterns shift away from dispersed villas to fortified hilltop sites. These hillforts lacked many of the large, capital-intensive production and storage facilities that had been the backbone of Rome’s Iberian economy, and therefore the move from villa to hillfort was not just a socio-cultural change, but also an economic one. By the year 500, Roman Spain was no more.