L. Lavan “Spolia in context: the late antique city wall at sagalassos a survey 2022-25” in European Journal of Postclassical Archaeologies (accepted) . It is not published yet but accepted, subject to minor changes.

The late city wall at Sagalassos seems to represent a catastrophic rupture in the classical aspirations of a mountain-top bastion of Greco-Roman culture. Temples were commandeered, a stadium ruined, and a host of lesser buildings incorporated or demolished, for the construction of an emplekton style wall, with two skins of blocks facing mortared rubble. The impact on civic morale must have surely been negative. Thirty years ago, excavations of KULeuven dated the wall to ca. A.D. 400, revealing that the NW Gate re-incorporated architectural spolia for decorative purposes. However, the wider wall has seen only a preliminary survey, led by Lieven Loots, focused especially on the Hellenistic circuit that the late wall reuses. The present article reports the results of a survey of architectural spolia in 2005-2006 by the author and a contextual study of all types of reused material in the wall, decorated or not, carried out in 2022-23. It demonstrates: the survival of a classical aesthetic ambition in the construction of the wall; a reluctance to indulge in this when it could not easily be viewed; a pragmatic desire to reuse materials immediately to hand. Nonetheless, most building materials in the circuit were rubble blocks, likely in first use, with no facing, except a skin of mortar. New excavations, led by Peter Talloen, have redated the wall in two sections to the 6th c., a date confirmed by the phasing observations of this study. A re-evaluation of the city’s later urban development is thus now required.