This book promotes the study of material spatiality in late antiquity: not just the study of buildings, but of the people, dress and objects used within them, drawing on all available source material. It seeks to explore the material world as it was lived in late antiquity, in an interpretative inquiry, rather than simply describing the evidence that has survived until today. The volume presents a series of comprehensive bibliographic essays which provide an overview of relevant literature, along with discussions of the nature of the sources, of relevant approaches and field methods. The main section of the book explores domestic space, vessels in context, dress, shops and workshops, religious space, and military space. Synthetic papers drawing on a wide range of archaeological, art-historical and textual sources are complemented by case-studies of context-rich late antique sites in the East Mediterranean and elsewhere, including Pella, Dura-Europos, Scythopolis, and Sagalassos.

This book surveys a variety of themes relating to the late antique countryside. It covers social and economic life, the archaeology of pilgrimage and the fate of rural temples, villas, monasteries and landscape change. There is a special section on rural survey in Turkey, a region of the Roman empire for which our knowledge of the countryside is poor. A bibliographic essay, on the rural archaeology of the entire empire, provides an excellent introduction to the volume and to the subject as a whole. Essays range from Northern Gaul to Egypt and draw on many sources: from papyrology and epigraphy to field survey and paleobotany. A complex picture of differing regional trajectories emerges, whilst cultural change is everywhere apparent, in phenomena such as Christianisation, settlement nucleation and fortification. Contributors include Beat Brenk, Beatrice Caseau, Douglas Baird, Archie Dunn, Etienne Louis, Fabio Saggioro, John Mitchell, Joseph Patrich, Lynda Mulvin, Carla Sfameni, Marcus Rautman, Peter Sarris, Frank Trombley, Joanita Vroom and Marc Waelkens.

Archaeologists working on late antique sites have not spent enough time thinking about methodology. Their focus has been on recovering and cataloguing evidence, or on the study of specific historical problems. Digging has often been more important than publishing, which has rarely extended beyond the basic summaries found in preliminary reports. The re-emergence of clearance excavation, fuelled by the demands of tourism, has further reduced the value of urban excavations in the East Mediterranean. Here, late antique levels have suffered, in the hunt for photogenic early imperial architecture. This volume attempts to address this situation by offering a critique of present practice and a series of exemplars, alongside discussion articles on field technique and post-excavation analysis. The articles ranges from urban survey to the study of finds. The book also considers if we need to develop specific field methods appropriate to the study of late antiquity. Contributors are John Bintliff, Jeremy Evans, Axel Gering, Stefan Groh, Yoshiki Hori, Nikolaos D. Karydis, Veli Koese, Luke Lavan, Zsolt Magyar, Philip Mills, John Pearce, Steve Roskams, Helga Sedlmayer, Ellen Swift, Itamar Taxel, Douglas Underwood, Lutgarde Vandeput and Joe Williams.