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In his fragmentary De Re Publica, written between 54 and 51 BC, Cicero (d. 43 BC) explains that cities were built by gatherings of people brought together to deliberate their common future as defin...

How did the breakdown of Roman rule in the Iberian Peninsula eventually result in the formation of a Visigothic kingdom with authority centralised in Toledo? This collection of essays challenges the view that local powers were straightforwardly subjugated to the expanding central power of the monarchy. Rather than interpret countervailing events as mere ‘delays’ in this inevitable process, the contributors to this book interrogate where these events came from, which causes can be uncovered and how much influence individual actors had in this process. What emerges is a story of contested interests seeking cooperation through institutions and social practices that were flexible enough to stabilise a system that was hierarchical yet mutually beneficial for multiple social groups. By examining the Visigothic settlement, the interplay between central and local power, the use of ethnic identity, projections of authority, and the role of the Church, this book articulates a model for understanding the formation of a large and important early medieval kingdom.

Since the fall of the Visigothic kingdom in 711, analysis of its history has been tied to contemporary Spanish politics. Political and economic developments in Spain since the 1970s have driven research into the late antique and early medieval period. Most notably, archaeological evidence has come to play a much more prominent role in analyses of the Visigothic period in Spain. This article synthesises archaeological and historical research from the past 20 years. It draws on recent developments in urban and rural archaeology in order to examine key avenues of research on the period: the negotiated nature of power, post-Roman identity politics, and law and literacy.

Summary Reccopolis was a new urban foundation of the late sixth century AD, built by King Liuvigild during the period of the Visigothic state formation. The city was equipped, alongside other facilities, with an aqueduct built ex novo in the Roman technique. This has only recently been studied. The construction of a new city and a new aqueduct indicates a great economic effort by the Visigothic ruler: the event was in itself also a grand act of propaganda in addition to its obvious functional purpose. The aqueduct is itself unmatched in public constructions of this period.

The transition between the sixth and the seventh centuries in the towns of Iberia has been a matter of much discussion, leading to the development of the ‘urban renewal’ model, by which the Visigothic process of state formation generated a new urban munificence. A similar process can be seen in the towns of the Byzantine area, and our aim is to discuss the evolution of the urban settlements of the modern province of Alicante, reassessing the available evidence and comparing it with the models proposed for the Byzantine and Visigothic areas.

Most current discussions on Late Antique and early medieval archaeology are focused on issues such as the use of the landscape, the abandonment of towns, and the reorganisation of rural settlements. The common element in all these cases is that the presence of a central place is key to analysing the social, political, and economic interrelations between sites, areas, and territories. Within the academic literature, however, the notion of a ‘central place’ has been determined by the conceptualisation of Roman towns, and this is not necessarily applicable to Late Antique contexts. Discussing this, and taking the Iberian peninsula as a case study, we propose various different archaeological regional trends to define how a central place was configured in the Visigoth period. These regions are the north coast, the north plateau, the Toledo–Reccopolis axis, and the Mediterranean coastline, taking advantage of the most recent archaeological finds. For this, special attention is given to towns (older Roman settlements and new foundations), hill-forts, and other major places that had a primary economic, religious, or administrative role in a given territory. These models, in which various degrees of urbanisation and territorial organisation are noticeable, form the basis for further discussion of Iberian central places in the Late Antique Mediterranean context.

The vast transformation of the Roman world at the end of antiquity has been a subject of broad scholarly interest for decades, but until now no book has focused specifically on the Iberian Peninsula in the period as seen through an archaeological lens. Given the sparse documentary evidence available, archaeology holds the key to a richer understanding of the developments of the period, and this book addresses a number of issues that arise from analysis of the available material culture, including questions of the process of Christianisation and Islamisation, continuity and abandonment of Roman urban patterns and forms, the end of villas and the growth of villages, and the adaptation of the population and the elites to the changing political circumstances.

This paper compares the efficiency of D2EHPA and Cyanex 272 to extract the divalent manganese cation from an actual leaching solution obtained by reductive leaching of a low-grade pyrolusite ore, using SO2 gas. The studied variables were the extractant concentration in the organic phase, the pH of the leached liquor and the volume ratio between organic phase and leached liquor. It was observed that D2EHPA is a better extractant than Cyanex272. Therefore, with the best experimental conditions found, both extractants reach a manganese recovery around 95% with five extraction stages conducted under the following conditions: 25?C, O/A = 2, 10% volume of extractant concentration in the organic phase, pH of the leached liquor before the mixing between 8 and 8.5, and one minute of mixing time for each extraction stage.

In recent decades, ethnicity and ethnic identity have been one of the main issues of academic discussions of late antique and early medieval studies – including in Visigothic Iberia. Even if the tendency to correlate race and ethnicity has largely ended, the debate on the role of Goths and Romans in the Visigothic kingdom is still ongoing. Most of these discussions are based on funerary remains and how they can be interpreted, and in these contexts we find an application for comparative anthropology. However, in urban contexts there is a tendency to obviate this theoretical perspective. In this chapter I want to go beyond this duality to further develop the validity of urban identity and citizenship as a form of self-presentation outside of ethnic duality.