Secular Buildings and the Archaeology of Everyday Life in the Byzantine Empire

The archaeology of everyday life is a relatively under-explored aspect of the Byzantine world, and often takes a back-seat to the more visible aspects of Byzantine history, such as works of art and ecclesiastical architecture. This book seeks to redress the imbalance by focusing on some of the available evidence for the 'everyday' in Byzantine houses and towns: the archaeology of secular domestic structures. Several papers bring together and reinterpret much of what is known of Byzantine housing, from Italy and Greece to North Africa and the East Mediterranean rim, in the fifth to fifteenth centuries. Other topics include a review of the rich archaeological data for domestic and commercial activities from the Byzantine shops at Sardis; a re-examination of the of the relationship between domestic artefacts and religious identity in Early Byzantine Israel; and a reinterpretation of the most extensively studied (and grandest) of all Byzantine houses: the Great Palace of the Byzantine Emperors at Constantinople. (Oxbow Books forthcoming 2004)