The Late Antique city: change or decline

The Late Antique city has seen a great deal of archaeological work in recent decades. Yet most general models of change in the period still use archaeology to provide illustrative examples; they rely instead on texts to provide the main narrative. Historians rarely exploit the full potential of material evidence, whilst archaeologists show little interest in writing urban history beyond the level of one region. In this seminar, it will be argued that the Late Antique city can be understood only by combining texts and archaeology in a more equitable manner, with a primary stress on the patterns suggested by material evidence. This analysis reveals that most general models of the Late Antique city are flawed. More specific trends can be identified, which have different chronologies in different regions, and which together combine to make the Late Antique urban civilization more interesting than it has seemed thus far.

Luke Lavan was educated at Durham, Oxford and Nottingham Universities. In 2007 he joined the University of Kent as a Lecturer in Archaeology following a post-doctoral fellowship on the Sagalassos Project at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium). Before that he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Humboldt Foundation, University of Cologne, the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara, and the Collège de France in Paris. He is currently co-director of the Kent-Berlin Ostia Project and editor of the Late Antique Archaeology series.