‘The Way We Were’: a journey in the last fifty years of Byzantine archaeology (1975-2024)

Just a few months after Barbra Streisand (as Katie) and Robert Redford (as Hubbell) featured in The Way We Were, Clive Foss published the first of his many seminal works of the late 1970s and early 1980s. It focused on the transformation experienced by twenty Anatolian cities cited by Constantine Porphyrogenitus in his De Thematibus; the main idea was to prove that urban life, upon which the classical Mediterranean culture had been based, came virtually to an end following the Persian invasion and retrenched to villages and fortresses until the tenth century. ‘These conclusions, of course, apply only to [Anatolia], but … they would prove valid for the whole Byzantine empire [and] they are based almost entirely on the results of archaeology.’