The End of Carnuntum: Not One Catastrophe, Then Rediscovery
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
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Transcript
Cities rarely die on schedule.
kar-NOON-toom's decline in late antiquity resulted from long-term political, economic and social change rather than one single event. The province of pan-NOH-nee-ah was ceded to the Huns in 433 AD, but settlement transformation had begun earlier. Systematic archaeological research accelerated in the late nineteenth century, especially after the kar-NOON-toom Association was founded in 1884.
End by looking at the display cases as the latest phase of kar-NOON-toom's history: an abandoned metropolis converted into evidence.
The conclusion comes from many kinds of evidence accumulated across more than a century of research.
Museums make the ancient city portable: objects excavated across kilometres of landscape can finally be compared in one room.
The frontier metropolis worked because thousands of ordinary routines supported the famous events that survive in textbooks.
Do not let the modern quietness mislead you. The ancient setting depended on traffic, labor, maintenance, noise and repeated social routines.
One of kar-NOON-toom's strengths is that archaeology can test the attractive story against material evidence—and sometimes force us to tell a better, less convenient story.
For a visitor, the value is causal rather than chronological: this stop explains why a frontier metropolis needed this particular space, system or institution.