Меч или рало? Размисли относно края на късноантичната селищна мрежа в Тракия

In the Late Antiquity in the present-day Bulgarian territories, as well as in other parts of the Balkan Peninsula, processes developed that led at latest in the 6th c. to the emergence of a settlement system that was dominated not by the unfortified settlements in the plains but by fortified elevated settlements in mountainous and semi-mountainous areas. The urban centers in the region that were founded in the 6th c. had similar characteristics. In the Bulgarian scholarly literature, there is a postulate about the sudden abandonment of the elevated settlements in the Early Medieval Period and that they were resettled only in the 10th c. – to become again a common or even dominating type of settlements in the last centuries of the Middle Ages. To be honest, I believe that this picture may turn out to be very far from the reality. It tries to explain two well-known phenomena – on one hand the discontinuation of the monetary circulation in the elevated settlements at the turn of the 7th c., and on the other the absence there of material culture that is typical of the “Slavic” and “Proto-Bulgarian” settlements and necropoleis of the 7th–9th c. It is well-known that the absence of coins does not necessarily imply the absence of people (in fact, there are no coins at all other investigated Early Medieval sites), and it remains unclear why we should unreservedly expect that the Early Medieval human habitation should always manifest itself with the material culture that is typical of the settlements at Popina and Garvan or the necropoleis at Razdelna and Topola. Despite these reservations of mine, I would accept for a start that at some point between the Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages the huge majority of the elevated settlements were indeed abandoned and I will try to offer another explanation of the reasons for the end of this settlement model that differs from the generally accepted. The latter states that the model was actually dismantled in result of the Avaro-Slavic invasions in the late 6th and early 7th c., when great many cities and fortresses were destroyed and a large part of the Late Antique population was either slaughtered or driven away; the newcomers, Slavs and Proto-Bulgarians, created a new settlement model, different from the Late Antique one, and it was consistent with their own cultural and economic specifics. In my opinion, “the grеat devastations” attributed to Avars and Slavs are not supported neither by substantial written sources, nor by compelling archaeological evidence. One should look for another explanation. A quick glance at the map reveals that the majority of the 6th c. elevated settlements we know about are located in regions that have never been known as breadbaskets. The through analysis of the Late Antique tools from present-day Bulgaria, related to largescale agriculture and grain production (ploughshare, coulter, goad, and sickle) indicates that they are actually absent from 6th c. sites. It is not that there are not farm implements – quite the opposite, but what is not found are precisely those that are suited for large-scale agriculture. This fact by the way corresponds well with the written sources from the period that testify to problems with the grain production in this part of the Empire in the period under consideration. On the other hand, the consumption of grain apparently did not cease. With no production and continuing consumption, it is obvious that the population had to be supplied with grain. The claim that the lack of horrea certainly built after AD 500 indicates that the urban population was not supplied with foods appears to be ill-grounded. To begin with, the fact that no new horrea were built does not mean that the already existing were not used. On the other hand, especially in the newly-founded elevated settlements (including urban centers), there was not enough space to build imposing horrea. However, grain was kept in dolia and storage pits that are ubiquitous, as well as in the fortress towers. When the horizontal space is scarce, vertical solutions are implemented. Such discoveries are a sufficiently clear indication that there was still large-scale consumption of grain and it was hardly supplied by the meagre harvest from the infertile mountainous fields that were tilled by the individual households in the settlements. That the 6th c. population was supplied with food is illustrated by the numerous finds of amphorae (mostly LRA2) in practically every Late Antique elevated settlement investigated in Bulgaria. Recently, mostly because of the massive presence of such amphorae along the Lower Danube, they were accepted as an indication of food supplies for the army, but in fact their distribution is much wider and they have been found also in settlements where there are no reasons to presume the presence of troops. These amphorae did not necessarily contain grain, but they testify to centralized supplies of food for large groups of the population. Also, at present there is no positive evidence of production of amphorae in the present-day Bulgarian territories, which circumstance is also to be noted. Great many of the elevated fortresses were located in areas, where grain production was problematic – unlike mining and animal husbandry. One could safely presume that the involvement of large groups of the population in such activities (for which we have unequivocal indirect, but also direct archaeological evidence) was accompanied with organized supplies of grain – a practice that is well illustrated with testimonies, admittedly from much later times. As there was no large-scale grain production in the region, the supplies depended largely on the traditional breadbaskets of the empire in the Eastern Mediterranean. The loss of Egypt, Syria and Palestine as parts of the emprire, although they were not necessarily the direct source of grain for the Balkans, undoubtedly created tensions and stirred a crisis in the system of food supplies for the population. The life in the elevated settlements became ever more problematic because of the collapse of an entire economic system that made possible their existence at the scale that is observed in the 6th c., including as distributor and consumer of their own production. A change of the economic model was needed, hence of the settlement model. The reorganization of the Eastern Roman Empire in the second half of the 7th c. and the gradual introduction of the themata system, related to the appearance of the classical Byzantine farmer-soldier, was undoubtedly an attempt to overcome these problems. The abandonment of the elevated settlements and the redirection of the population towards the grain producing plains could be one of the archaeological testimonies to these processes. Such a scenario would require reconsidering the accepted thesis that only “Slavs and Proto-Bulgarians” created the Early Medieval settlement model.