Euchaïta, a remote and unglamorous town in northern Anatolia, is a paradox. A new pilgrimage centre in Late Antiquity, by the ninth century AD it was a significant centre of the Armeniakon army, but its (outsider) bishop in the twelfth century could only complain of its isolation and poverty. While cities and monuments have dominated excavations and surveys in Asia Minor, the lives of most of the Byzantine rural population living in smaller settlements such as Euchaïta have been largely neglected. One of the implications is that we have little in the way of reliable archaeological source material pertaining to long periods of historically attested societal change.
In this authoritative volume, Haldon, Elton, Newhard and a multi-disciplinary team of specialists investigate Beyözü, a small settlement in a rural part of northern Turkey. Beyözü is located 125km from the Black Sea, in the Mecitözü Valley, one of several routes linking central Anatolia to the coast. At the heart of this project is the desire to integrate archaeological, historical and environmental datasets to explain the transformation of this locality from the Roman period to the present. As the title suggests, each of the 15 chapters informs at a local, regional and sometimes Anatolian scale. Reconciling a wide range of datasets presents challenges because the different sources and methods are often not suited for addressing the same kinds of topics. Indeed the writers allude to a sense of frustration in places that their own unanswered questions could not be addressed by other specialists’ narratives. Readers will find the attempts to reconcile the different kinds of data in this book stimulating.
Elton begins with research questions; the first, rather traditional-sounding aim was to establish that the modern village of Avkat (recently renamed Beyözü) was ancient Euchaïta, so that a fruitful comparison of archaeological and textual evidence could be made. Euchaïta is relatively well attested in the fourth century AD as an important pilgrimage centre for St Theodore Tiro (the ‘Recruit’), and was raised in status to a city and furnished with walls by the Byzantine Emperor Anastasius between AD 515 and 518. Its history continues through the period of Persian and Arab raids in the seventh to ninth centuries and features again in the letters of John Mauropous (archbishop c. 1050–1075). Historical, political and economic research questions follow, reflecting Haldon and Elton's concerns to understand texts relating to, for example, Euchaïta's relationship with the political-military frontier of the seventh to ninth centuries, and various shifts in administrative control between regional centres.
Newhard seeks to develop new ways to understand long-term transformations in the rural environment through quantitative methods. These complement intensive fieldwalking across 9.11km2 of the 20km2 survey area around Avkat. Newhard, Bikoulis and others employ GIS, and computer modelling with remote sensing and historical source material, as well as field data, to investigate changes in settlement and agriculture. Those familiar with fieldwalking will appreciate the difficulties faced by the intensive survey team whose official permit restricted them to collecting material only dating from the Roman period onwards. Meanwhile, Eastwood and Yığıtbaşoğlu's review of palaeoclimate and palaeoenvironmental work provides a context for anthropogenic and natural change in Anatolia during the Holocene. While their narrative is hampered by a lack of suitable proxy data in local lakes and caves, they provide important critical summaries and methodological context for the other chapters, and stress variability across Turkey.
More humanised ideas of landscape are to be found in the contributions of Craft and Vroom. Craft promises a refreshingly experiential approach to roads and pathways by stressing the importance of movement through the landscape at a micro scale. In the absence of local stratified excavated material, Vroom does not attempt a complete typo-chronological study of the coarse wares that dominate the assemblage. Instead, she provides an overview of certain groups, but primarily studies coarse wares alongside faunal, palaeobotanical and ethnographic studies to explore diet, food resources, food-preparation and consumption activities across Anatolia. Vroom's functional ceramic groups might very usefully have been integrated and explored in the GIS in a similar way to the landscape-based functional site types outlined in Appendix 3. Newhard maps datable finds and argues for a landscape of sustained stability and ‘persistent places’. Importantly for the settlement history of Anatolia, he notes a decrease in activity up until the early seventh century, with an increase from the seventh to eighth centuries linked to the use of the fortress (kale) above Avkat. This represents a striking pattern that contrasts with many studies in central and southern Anatolia, which are often explained by the impact of Arab incursions.
Bikoulis integrates many different sources, dating up to the twentieth century, to explore the agricultural potential of Euchaïta's hinterland. Byzantine military units, he concludes, must have been supplemented by districts beyond the city's own catchment area. Some of the less well-attested periods might be approached through retrogressive analysis of the complex morphology of its surviving field systems. Field boundaries could be used to investigate landscape changes over time once it “sank into rural insignificance” (p. 24).
Elton brings together geophysical surveys of important building complexes and careful recording of inscriptions and spolia often carried to villages at some distance. These data can be examined online. A biographical approach might work well to trace a narrative of their stories. Nowakowski and the late Frank Trombley demonstrate the value of presenting epigraphic evidence clearly beside its interpretation, translation and commentary. The decision to reduce cost by omitting most figures from the volume (and its pdf version) and hosting them online, makes their scrutiny rather cumbersome. Nevertheless, it is excellent to see the detailed project data archived online at http://opencontext.org/subjects/4d35ea5d-8d30-40a4-a12e-726e3d693d06.
Haldon's conclusion brings together and builds on the other studies, integrating, for example, Euchaïta's significant economic and social role as a pilgrimage centre with its situation in Anatolia during the Persian and Arab wars. The chapters in this book each serve as an important contribution to the history of Byzantine Anatolia and together have set a new standard for survey in the field.
