Tyler Cowen recommends Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization as “the best integration of archaeology and economics” he has seen. It makes the point that The Dark Ages were Dark:
It is currently deeply unfashionable to state that anything like a ‘crisis’ or a ‘decline’ occurred at the end of the Roman empire, let alone that a ‘civilization’ collapsed and a ‘dark age’ ensued. The new orthodoxy is that the Roman world, in both the East and the West, was slowly, and essentially painlessly, ‘transformed’ into a medieval form. However, there is an insuperable problem with this new view; it does not fit the mass of archaeological evidence now available, which shows a startling decline in western standards of living during the fifth to seventh centuries. This was a change that affected everyone, from peasants to kings, even the bodies of saints resting in their churches. It was no mere transformation — it was decline on a scale that can reasonably be described as ‘the end of a civilization.’