Economic networks and social interactions in the Byzantine koinè: settlement pattern in the Adriatic Sea between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (ca. 600-ca. 900 CE.)

The aim of the paper is to compare the unfolding of urban trajectories in some coastal urban centers located in the so-called Byzantine koinè during the passage from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages. In this light, the contribution will focus on a few important harbors and/or coastal sites located in Dalmatia, southern Adriatic, and the so-called Adriatic crescent as famously described by Michael McCormick. Indeed, the increased focus on the coins, seals, and ceramics as yielded in stratigraphically-aware excavations allows us to sketch commonalities in the social, administrative, political, and military functions of urban and urban-like settlements located in coastal or insular areas too often regarded as peripheral to the so-called Byzantine heartland in the period under scrutiny. In fact, these areas were part a geographically scattered but economically and administrative inclusive and socially coherent set of spaces also having a common importance as vectors for regional and trans-Mediterranean commerce and social movements. Therefore, the paper takes its cue from the fragmentation of the Mediterranean as an economically disjointed, socio-politically conflictual, religiously divided, and culturally disputed space at the turn of the eighth century; nevertheless, it summons the scanty literary and documentary sources for the period to highlight the role played by major harbor-urban sites on the Adriatic coasts as they boasted a good level of socio-economic activity, as predicated upon resilient trade links, shipping routes, and social movements between the western and eastern half on the Mediterranean.