Historiography is an important part of archaeological study because of what it can tell us about the development of interpretations of the past over time and what factors have influenced them. By analysing the origins of theoretical approaches, new directions can be proposed. Historiography can be useful in studies of Roman towns and the later Roman period. This is demonstrated here with a detailed examination of one important figure in the history of their investigation in Britain: Edward Gibbon. Hugely influential early archaeologists and ancient historians such as Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903), Camille Jullian (1859-1933), and Francis Haverfield (1860-1919) drew on Gibbon’s approach to empire, civilisation, and decline even as they were influenced by the social and political milieux in which they themselves were working (cf. Freeman 2007; Hingley 2000; Rogers and Hingley 2010). Equally influential later writers on the archaeology of cities and civilisations such as Vere Gordon Childe (e. g., 1950), and Sir Mortimer Wheeler (e. g., 1943, 1966) were working very much within the established context of this previous work - and they went on to influence approaches in more recent times.
Gibbon’s six-volume work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88) is probably the most famous study, at least in Britain, of the late Roman period and of the Roman Empire as a whole. It has had an enormous impact on the way in which the later Roman period has been studied, with the image of decline and fall dominating many archaeological analyses. As a work of wider popular appeal, it has been influential in late-eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early-twentieth-century society. What is less often acknowledged is that the text has also contributed towards informing views of the earlier Roman period and the period that preceded the conquest in parts of the Empire such as Britain, which is also addressed here.
Analysing Gibbon’s writing has been a major area of academic pursuit, with focus especially on its influence on historical study, on themes such as Christianity and barbarism, and also as a work of English prose in its eighteenth-century setting (e. g., Jordan 1971; McKitterick and Quinault 1997a; Pocock 1999a, 1999b, 2003,2005; Womersley 1988,1997; V. Woolf 1943). However, its impact within archaeology and on the study of settlement, continuity, and change has not been subject to very much attention. The concept of decline and fall and the depictions of both the pre-conquest to Roman transition and of the Golden Age, as expressed within Gibbon’s writing, were, in part, products of his (and contemporary society’s) attitudes towards Roman civilisation and the Roman elite. They have influenced the way in which periods of change have been approached in archaeology.
Gibbon also influenced archaeological work more directly through his examination and descriptions of Rome and its structural remains.
This chapter considers Gibbon’s attitude in The Decline and Fall to civilisation and barbarism, and to change and conquest, along with an examination of aspects of his character and upbringing that influenced his work. These elements contributed to the powerful images in his writing on decline and fall in the later Roman period. It is necessary, briefly, to examine the influences of the Enlightenment and the preceding civic humanist movement on Gibbon’s work before moving on to his attitude to the physical remains of Rome and other towns, and his thoughts on pre-Roman settlement in the West. The chapter discusses his use of antiquarian research, together with the way in which his writing style emphasised both the splendour of the public buildings during the Golden Age and also their decline in the later Roman period and beyond. Central to Gibbon’s narrative was the city, and especially Rome, around which all events revolved.9 The chapter ends with a consideration of the way in which Gibbon’s use of language depicted cities as physical representations of civilisation and how this differed from his descriptions of pre-Roman settlement, thus creating biases in archaeological study.
World History
