Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsThe Material Fall of Roman Britain, 300–525 CE By Robin Fleming. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2021. Pp. 303. $45. ISBN 978-0-8122-5244-6 (cloth).James GerrardJames GerrardHistory, Classics and Archaeology Newcastle University United Kingdom Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWe stand at an exciting point in the study of the complex transformations described in shorthand as “the end of Roman Britain.” A struggle for the heart and soul of the debate, a battle over the very relevance and validity of long-held research priorities, is being fought in the usually, but not always, polite and measured discourse of academic debate. Terminology, periodization, approach, significance, and relevance are at stake. Whether a new consensus will emerge, or a polyvocal plurality of approaches, remains to be seen.It would be easy to describe, and perhaps dismiss, Fleming’s book as a piece of revanchist neo-catastrophism that exposes, in exquisite detail, the implications of Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford University Press 2005) for the province of Britannia. I think that doing so would be to fundamentally misunderstand the nuances and implications of Fleming’s approach.What we are offered in nine short chapters is a materialist social history of the end of Roman Britain. Some of these chapters rework the arguments rehearsed by the author in the pages of academic journals, yet they are concerned not with the experience of squabbling warbands but with the lives of the masses. The disappearance of the Roman tax-pay cycle produced a time of dislocation, a loss of skills, and an economic reorientation with profound effects. Charting how those effects manifested themselves is Fleming’s task, pursued through an analysis of the life cycles of objects and materials. Some of the “orthodox” big questions around ethnicity and identity get, rightly in my view, short shrift. We have tied ourselves in knots trying to separate and define ancient avowed and ascribed identities from language, material culture, isotopes, DNA, and aDNA. Where has this gotten us? Up a creek without a paddle, writing the retrospective perceptions of a minority of Early Medieval literate men onto the physical remains of the fifth and sixth centuries. This book refreshingly demonstrates how other narratives and, most importantly, other actors—local and immigrant peasants and artisans—can be placed center stage.Interestingly, Fleming is at pains in this profoundly materialist volume to position herself as a historian (3–5). This probably explains the occasional sideswipes at archaeologists and their approaches, which smack of an unfortunate disciplinary sectarianism. This is an archaeological text, and Fleming is writing not, as she asserts, as a historian but as an archaeologist. She is right to observe that archaeological excavation reports often leave the interpretation to others, but the process of excavation and subsequent publication, driven as it is by commercial development, is often to hew the blocks of knowledge from the ground and leave them for others to assemble into a macronarrative structure. This is what she has achieved by marshaling archaeological, not historical, skills and evidence. Of course, the truth is that to write anything about the fourth, fifth, or sixth century in Britain you must be an archaeologist first and a historian second. To do otherwise is to invert the surviving bodies of evidence. I daresay the explicit articulation of the author’s “historian” identity will make this an easier book to sell to other historians.Earlier in his career, this reviewer was one of those “archaeological hewers of knowledge” referred to above. Given this, it was pleasing to see the fascinating site at Shadwell, near London (a project I was heavily involved with) discussed in some detail (76–78). It thus surprised me to learn that the inhabitants of the site were using “new-style hand-built pottery” at the end (77). Rummaging through the footnotes (231 n. 26) revealed this claim to be sourced to unpublished evaluation and post-excavation assessment reports. Much is made by Fleming and others of the value of using gray literature (4), but some cautionary words are needed. Evaluation reports and postexcavation assessments are often produced rapidly as part of the development control or planning process. Once excavated material has been assessed and an assessment written, then further, more detailed analysis takes place that leads to publication. Not everything claimed and written in an unpublished assessment may be proven true after further analysis, and this is especially true of qualitative judgments. Writing archaeology, just as with history, is an iterative and reflective process. In short, there is no “new-style hand-built pottery” at Shadwell, if this terminology is a coded euphemism for what is usually known as “Saxon” pottery; there is some typical, well-known, and utterly Late Roman (i.e., 250–400/450 CE) handmade grog tempered ware. The moral of this story: use gray literature with as much caution as you would any other text.Moving on to the main thrust of the book, it is worth noting the emphasis given to the loss of skills among Britain’s population at the end of the Roman empire. Some of this (pottery, building in stone) is a well-known and well-trodden path; other aspects, such as the apparent collapse in horticulture, are less obvious. Superficially at least, the decline in horticultural activity, as evidenced by archaeobotanical assemblages, appears to be a major transformation. Here, Fleming leaves readers to draw their own conclusions, as such a change would imply a fundamental dislocation in the way society was organized and possibly even depopulation (44–47). Yet this is a conclusion based on only eight assemblages (212 n. 78) dating between the fifth and seventh centuries. The truth is we lack any fifth- to seventh-century archaeobotanical evidence from many regions of the former province of Britannia. Similarly, the significance of the disappearance of animals (e.g., guinea fowl and peacocks) is materially different from the significance of the disappearance of grain pests. One speaks to the end of elite lifestyles, the other to widespread storage of grain. Yet the mainstays of ancient British agriculture—cattle, sheep, and pigs—continued to be reared, and there is a patchwork of evidence to suggest that in some regions field systems with Roman origins continued to be used and modified into the Early Medieval period.It is also worth unpacking the claim that it is “fashionable … to argue that the withdrawal of the Roman state … affected elites but meant little to those who were still down on the farm” (47). This is, allegedly, a thesis that could only be articulated by “academics who acquire their food from Whole Foods or Waitrose” (47). What this ignores is 20th-century historiography that accepted implicitly that the end of the Roman empire was a catastrophe, leading to population collapse and wholescale landscape abandonment. The point articulated by those academics has less to do with their shopping preferences and more to do with a desire to focus on the vast majority of the population who would have lived off the land. For them, the end of the Roman period might have led to different economic strategies, but it didn’t mean they had to starve to death. Indeed, some readings of human osteological evidence would suggest that people were better nourished in Early Medieval Britain than in the Roman period (N. Köpke and J. Baten, “The Biological Standard of Living in Europe During the Last Two Millennia,” European Review of Economic History 9.1, 2005, 61–95).The discussion of metals and metalworking is thought-provoking and subtly offers an economic narrative for the period (199–237). The author claims that after the collapse of the Late Roman metal economy, individuals spent the fifth century recycling metals, and then in the sixth century social, economic, and political complexity grew on the back of a new Frankish and Scandinavian trade in newly smelted iron. This is an interesting, if reductionist argument. Recycling was a consistent feature of Late Roman metalworking and Early Medieval Britain was, as Fleming observes, awash with metals that could be repurposed. The evidence for the importation of newly smelted iron into eastern areas during the sixth century is slender to say the least, and the fifth-century western British settlement at Poundbury has produced better-quality iron knives than its Roman predecessor. Similarly, the fifth-century western British hilltop center at Cadbury Congresbury has produced iron fittings indistinguishable from their Roman precursors. To suggest that an international trade in iron during the sixth century drove increasing economic, social, and political complexity in lowland Britain is pushing the evidence further than it can reasonably go.I would be doing future readers a disservice if I did not draw attention to one major lacuna, and this is to be laid at the door of the publisher, not the author. Almost one-third of the volume is devoted to copious and detailed footnotes. These are a valuable resource for readers, but the publisher’s decision to relegate the bibliography to a website is an unhappy innovation, made more unsatisfactory due to the link provided (9) lacking any content at the time of review (November 2021). Let us hope that other publishers do not adopt this approach in future books.What The Material Fall achieves is to present a new (and in places speculative) vision of Britain between the fourth and sixth centuries. It is fluently written and founded on a detailed understanding of a wide range of diverse evidence. To return to how I started this review: it would be easy to see this volume as simply restating the case for catastrophism. What it actually does is to attempt to chart the process of change over a period of two centuries. In so doing, it offers new approaches that sidestep the tired and probably unresolvable discussions of continuity, discontinuity, and ethnicity. This is no mean achievement. These new approaches are desperately needed by a field of research that finds itself in a state of tension over its own identity. What the future holds, and which approach, or approaches, will shape research over the coming decades remains unclear. It’s an exciting time to work on Late Antiquity and the transition from Late Roman to Early Medieval.Notes[email protected] Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Archaeology Volume 126, Number 2April 2022 The journal of the Archaeological Institute of America Views: 413 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/718640 Views: 413 HistoryPublished online January 04, 2022 Copyright © 2022 by the Archaeological Institute of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.