Ferment in Byzantine Studies

For more than 50 years, Dumbarton Oaks, the prestigious Byzantine study center in Washington, D.C. run by Harvard University, has held an annual conference of Byzantine scholars from all over the world. This year’s conference,a for the first time in more than a decade, focused primarily on the archaeology of Palestine and Transjordan in the early Byzantine period. The Byzantine period is usually considered to have begun in about 324, when Constantine, the first Christian emperor, became sole ruler of the entire Roman empire, and to have ended with the Ottoman destruction of Constantinople in 1453. In the east, […]