Understanding Urban Transformation in Amorium from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages

Abstract

The excavation of Amorium already from the late 1980s and until today has been pioneering a hands-on approach to the study of urban evolution by exploring a major early medieval and middle Byzantine provincial capital that after the 7th century and until the 11th played a paramount role in the forefront of Byzantine history. Especially the ‘prehistory’ of the excavation of Amorium is shown to have been an early episode in the famous Kazhdan-Ostrogorsky debate on the survival of Byzantine cities into the Middle Ages. At the same time, the paper presents how this tradition endures in the new phase of the Amorium Project by continuing on the basic principles set and expanding on new questions as the articulation of built civic space and the later medieval transition from Byzantine to Seljuk and Ottoman.