It is a more complex matter to present the fortification measures in rural areas, especially when we consider on whose initiative and with what financial resources such building projects were carried out. The restructuring of central towns and urban centres by the erection of mostly reductive wall circuits largly follows the same principle. One of the most striking new element of the human landscape were the numerous fortifications that were built not only alongside the borders and in the capital cities, but also in more remote and rural areas. While the Pax Romana of the first centuries AD allowed settlements of every kind to subsist and flourish untroubled, the adverse circumstances of the 3rd century AD triggered a slow but fundamental change in the organization of the living environment. Illuminating the Burgundian kingdom’s internal dynamics and its foreign relations, this assessment revises current understandings of the circulation of gold money across sixth-century Gaul, correcting over-generalisations that can obscure the importance of political frontiers at the end of antiquity.Īt the end of the 4th century AD the landscape of the Gaulish and German provinces was dotted with dozens of fortifications of civil and military purpose. The book includes the most thorough assessment to date of the distribution of Burgundian coins found across France.
The study reveals that the frontiers of the second Burgundian kingdom (5th-6th centuries) curtailed traditional movements along one of Europe’s key riverine corridors and reshaped, temporarily, the mental geographies imagined by local Gallo-Romans, until Merovingian princes conquered the region. How did the ‘Fall of the Roman Empire’ change social and economic networks in eastern Gaul, and how did new ‘barbarian’ political frontiers shape those changes? Synthesising historical and archaeological approaches, this interdisciplinary study combines text-based prosopography with distribution analysis of ceramics and ‘pseudo-imperial’ coins in Burgundy and beyond.
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