Late Antique and Byzantine Studies

Late Antiquity Research Group
Research Centre for Late Antique and Byzantine Studies


The Late Antiquity Research Group ('LARG') was founded in 1996 to help coordinate and promote the study of Late Antiquity by British-based professional archaeologists. Its original scope was 'the Roman, and former Roman world, from AD c.300-c.700 in Europe and the Mediterranean, and related areas', but it has increasingly become involved in the archaeology of the Byzantine world as a whole in addition to these.

LARG has organised a wide range of research-related activities, including research seminars, conference sessions and fieldwork projects. For example, jointly with the Research Centre for Late Antique and Byzantine Studies, it has sponsored a Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference (TRAC) session on 'Theorising Late Antiquity' and is a co-sponsor of fieldwork in Istanbul and of the Byzantine Ceramics and Building Materials Project. In 2004, it undertook a revision of the Late Roman and Byzantine material in the collection of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology and become a sponsor for the first Czech archaeological project in Istanbul. It also has an active short monograph series publishing recent archaeological discoveries in the Eastern Mediterranean area.

LARG especially values its research links with overseas institutions and scholars. These include formal connections with Istanbul University, the University of Luxembourg, the University of Ioannina and the Universities of California and Florida. We welcome enquiries from other institutions that are interested in establishing similar links.

This project, established by the Late Antiquity Research Group in 1997 as the 'Byzantine Petrology Project', seeks to investigate ceramics and construction materials from the Byzantine Empire, using both macroscopic archaeological methods (such as pottery typology) and laboratory-based analysis. In the recently completed first stage of the project (co-directed by Dr Jill Eyers, then of the Open University), a series of samples from Byzantine ceramics in British collections were studied to investigate the geological source of their clays in relation to a typological evaluation of their date and likely place of origin. Full publication of these results is underway and samples are currently being sought for a planned second stage of the project in which both ceramics and construction materials from the same sites would be investigated.