Upcoming Talks and Conferences

Filling Urban Structures with Life – Animal Inhabitants of a Byzantine City

Kiel, March 20-24, 2017

The 6th century AD was a time of transforming urbanism in the Mediterranean. It was a major concern of emperor Justinian I. (527-565) to restore the magnificence of the Roman Empire, not only by expanding it to the extent it had had when it was divided in 395 AD, but also by redesigning its cities, thus adapting them to the demands of the time and the transformed systems of value of the now Christian East Roman Empire.
When walking through the ruin cities of Ephesos (Turkey) or Justiniana Prima (Caričin Grad, Serbia), or when watching the 3D-animations that exist for the Byzantine periods of these cities, one can marvel at the splendour of the many churches, fortifications and houses. Nonetheless, they give the impression of ghost towns, not of formerly bustling dirty cities, crowded by merchants, artisans, soldiers and peasants, with horses, dogs and poultry in the streets and pigeons on the roofs.
A recent project of the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum in Mainz focuses on the urban ecology of the 6th century city of Caričin Grad. This city was erected by Justinian I. close to his birthplace in order to become the new administration centre of Illyricum. Its layout was meant to comprise characteristics of the Classical city (e. g., an acropolis, an upper town, a lower town, a horreum and a bath) while at the same time it incorporated the main feature of the new Christian identity: a large number of churches. Moreover, there is evidence that parts of the city were used for typically rural activities, e.g., the processing of grain, seemingly another adaption to the demands of the time that characterises the concept of »city« of this time. However, the endeavour failed and after a mere 80 years the city was abandoned and never again repopulated.
One part of this project deals with the wild vertebrate fauna of the city unearthed in different architectural structures: wild birds, reptiles, amphibians and small mammals. In the urban architecture, these animals found shelter, nesting places and plenty of food. They animated the urban surrounding and made it a place of Human-Animal-Interaction far beyond the well-known interactions with livestock. The encounters with these wild urban inhabitants shaped the human perception of their urban surroundings. Some of them – first and foremost the rodents – were vermin, while others might have been perceived as beneficial: e. g., the songbirds singing in the trees or owls and other predators preying on mice. Hence, these animals played both an ecological as well as a social and economic role in the city. These aspects of animal inhabitants of past cities, however, are still poorly understood. For the Byzantine Period, only few publications of faunal materials yield information on these animal groups because their bones are both difficult to retrieve and to identify. Even for the comparably well analysed Roman period we do not know much. Hence, for most species not even the point in time when they began to colonise urban environments is known.
The paper presents an approach to assess the role of the urban wild fauna in an Early Mediaeval city. This can first and foremost add to our understanding of the sensual (or experiential) perception of the urban surrounding and can lead to an understanding of action and reaction in urban human-animal relationships.

Graduate School “Human Development in Landscapes” at Kiel University
International Open Workshop
Socio-Environmental Dynamics over the Last 12,000 Years:
The Creation of Landscapes V
Kiel, March 20-24, 2017