The Late Antique Countryside: An Introduction

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.