Radiocarbon dating the end of urban services in a late Roman town

The fall of the Roman Empire was a much bigger deal than a generalissimo’s deposition in 476 CE of Romulus Augustus (a child puppet ruling the empire’s impoverished western half), an event memorized by generations of high schoolers. Recent research has uncovered a big, complex story that still features barbarian migrations and massive religious conversion. But archaeologists have also been unearthing the economic transformations of the age, including dislocation, impoverishment, and urban decline in the western provinces in the 400s, and simultaneous dynamic economic growth and booming cities in the richer, more populous eastern half of the Roman Empire during what Holy Land archaeologists term the Byzantine period. Most specialists now consider the later Roman Empire to have been a going concern into the 600s. Written evidence continues too to grow. New online resources capture hitherto unnoticed, often anonymous, Latin and Greek written records documenting topics like the later Roman Empire’s slave society (1). Robust chronological typologies of the changing, ubiquitous, and nearly indestructible late Roman ceramic tablewares ( i ) allow archaeologists to date cheaply (and down to the century or less) different layers of their excavations, and ( ii ) enable new chronotypologies of even more common cooking and transport vessels that expand the evidence every site yields on the crucial question of chronology: When did all of this come to an end? Discarded ceramics provide a first, rough layer of dating for the rapid growth and cessation of the landfill mounds that ringed Elusa, one of the flourishing Byzantine farm towns of the Negev desert, offering a proxy measure for their economic trajectory. But a new study in PNAS by Bar-Oz et al. (2) seeks to pinpoint a turning point in the decline of late Roman or Byzantine urbanism through radiometric dating of trash heaps. The Negev agro-cities were one of … [↵][1]1Email: sohpchair{at}fas.harvard.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1