ABSTRACT
Readers know very little about seventh-century Dalmatia, as written sources are silent, epigraphy disappears, there are very few coins, trade and exchange are minimal, and the corpus of material culture securely dateable to this period is relatively poor. A somewhat better situation prevails in the material culture from the eighth century, as it is possible to establish the so-called ‘Golubic horizon’ based on finds of star-shaped gold earrings of the Golubic-class and associated artefacts from closed contexts. Thus, despite a recent research, the centuries linking late antique and early medieval Dalmatia are missing key economic, demographic and social indicators about the life of the population that survived the Byzantine evacuation of the province in the ca. 620s. The evacuation of the province was truly only an apocalypse for the local elites of the hinterland, who depended on the working imperial system to sustain their social dominance through the control of mining activities and the military fortifications protecting these activities.
