Wednesday 2 December at 18:00 CET, prof. Arthur will give a lecture at the British School at Rome with the topic: “Searching for identity: Byzantine southern Italy”.
This event will take place via Zoom and requires advance registration. Please click here to reserve your place.
There is abundant literature on the Byzantine reconquest of Italy in the 6th century and on the transition from late antiquity to the Middle Ages. Paradoxically, despite various historical contributions on the long period of Byzantine domination in the South, from the 6th to the 11th century, there is a lack of archaeological studies that propose an integrated overview. This is unfortunate, as the centuries were formative in the definition of southern Italy, helping to make it what it is today. This can be seen in many aspects of the country, including settlement patterns and communication, food and language, culture and traditions and, apparently, genetic makeup and mentality.
With these problems in mind, I applied for a major funding to the Italian Ministry of Education, which was awarded for the project intitled “Byzantine Heritage of Southern Italy: settlement, economy and resilience in changing territorial landscape contexts”.
The aim of the project is therefore to provide a panorama of the Byzantine heritage and its role in the formation of society across southern Italy, proposing to make different sources (archaeological, documentary, climatic and environmental, anthropological, genetic) interact in a systemic way through a database linked to a GIS platform. Even if we may speak of this large territory as a political significant entity in Byzantine times, it was constantly changing in size and boundaries, and in social composition through politics and mobility. Thus, it was also somewhat of a palimpsest. The examination of the ‘Byzantine Heritage of Southern Italy’ is thus an examination of differences and contrasts, in which we will explore and characterize unity in disunity.