Keynote speakers
Enrico Zanini
Professor of Byzantine Archaeology, Università di Siena
Gortyn of Crete in Early Byzantine times: archaeology of an “average” city of the Mediterranean under transformation
The ongoing excavation in the so called “Byzantine District”, located close to the Pythion shrine”, at Gortyn Crete, offers a large amount of fresh archaeological data to be used in building up a new and more complex image of an “average city” in Early Byzantine Mediterranean.
Nearly twenty years of fieldwork research produced a large amount of fresh archaeological data that were used to build up a new and more complex image of the city, mainly in Late Antiquity and Early Byzantine times
Potsherds and coins, houses and workshops, streets and water urban distribution system are the archaeological markers used to sketch up a more detailed image of the “city of people” to be compared, and maybe to be counterposed, to the ideal image of the city, usually built on the base of the investigation of public monuments.
A large “hole” in the mid of an average late antique and early byzantine city allows us to investigate non only the everyday life in a medium sized provincial capital city, but also to discuss some socio-economic dynamics of the overall changement of the central and eastern Mediterranean between the 4th and the 8th-9th century AD.