Historiography And Space In Late Antiquity

The later Roman Empire was shrinking on the map, but still shaped the way historians represented the space around them.

This volume considers “lived space” as a scholarly approach to the past, showing how spatial approaches can present innovative views of the world of Late Antiquity, integrating social, economic and cultural developments and putting centre stage this fundamental dimension of social life. Bringing together an international group of scholars working on areas as diverse as Britain, the Iberian Peninsula, Jordan and the Horn of Africa, this book includes burgeoning fields of study such as lived spaces in the context of ships and seafaring during this period. Chapters investigate the history, function and use of different spaces in their own right and identify the social and historical logic presiding over continuity and/or change. They also explore the fluidity of lived space in both its physical and conceptual dimensions, analysing issues like agency and intentionality as well as meaning and social relations. Space is the fundamental dimension of social life, the arena where it unfolds and the stage where social values and hierarchies are represented; analysis of space allows us to understand history through different means of shaping, occupying and controlling space. Considering Late Antiquity through a spatial perspective offers a complex and stimulating picture of this pivotal period, and this volume provides avenues for the development of further research and discussion in this area. Lived Spaces in Late Antiquity is a fascinating resource for students and scholars interested in space and spatiality in the late antique world, as well as archaeology, classical studies and late antique studies more generally.

Late antiquity extends from the accession of the Christian emperor Constantine to the rise of Muhammad and early Islam (ca. 300-700 AD). This volume takes account of the scholarship published in the last 30 years and provide a foundational synthesis for students of late antiquity.

This study examines how cities have become an area of significant historical debate about late antiquity, challenging accepted notions that it is a period of dynamic change and reasserting views of the era as one of decline and fall.

This collection of papers, arising from the conference series Late Antique Archaeology, examines the social and political structures of the late antique period and the ways in which they are manifested in the archaeological and textual record.

This book questions the place of Armenian visual and material culture in the period known as Late Antiquity, at a time when Armenia is usually presented as an in-between space defined by surrounding external entities: the Roman and the Persian, and later Arab world. The volume includes articles that confront this notion both from the perspective of art history, architecture, and archaeology, and from a historiographical point of view, which examines the reception of Armenian arts by scholars from Italy, Russia, and France. The articles in this richly illustrated volume aim to reposition Armenia as one of the forces of artistic creation and mediation to be reckoned with within the Mediterranean and Eurasian space of Late Antiquity. This project draws on the papers presented at the conference "Re-Constructing Late Antique Armenia (2nd-8th Centuries CE). Historiography, Material Culture, Immaterial Heritage" that took place in February 2022 at the Center for Early Medieval Studies in Brno, Czech Republic.

What do we talk about when we talk about antiquity? For the majority of the population, the term immediately transports us to the notion of an ancient age or ancient world (the Parthenon, Athens, and the Coliseum of Rome), which condenses in itself the Greco-Roman world. This reduces antiquity to antiquity that was structurally essential for the construction and emergence of the civilization called occidental.For others, because of their religious backgrounds, antiquity goes back in time and enlarges, in part, its space of action, allowing the emergence of Palestine as a primordial territory.But these two visions (old and supported by a scientific ignorance of the ancient geographies and chronologies) enclose the history in a limited time and space. As if there would never have been a world before that time. As if the civilization that we comfortably call ourselves as inheritors, the so-called "Occidental Civilization" was the first step in the history of man on earth.

This collection of papers, arising from the conference series Late Antique Archaeology, examines material spatiality in late antiquity. Synthetic papers drawing on archaeological, art-historical and textual sources, are complemented by case-studies of sites, an introductory essay, and several bibliographic essays.