Acknowledgements
The conference which inspired this volume met at Birkbeck College, London in November 2017 under the title “Fieldwork in Late Antique Archaeology: Burial and Funerary Practice”. The conference was convened by Luke Lavan, Rebecca Darley, assisted by Michael Mulryan. It would not have been possible without the collaboration at Birkbeck provided by Rebecca Darley. Financial support came from the School of European Culture and Languages (University of Kent), the Virtual Centre for Late Antiquity, Birkbeck, and Museum Selection. Our thanks also go out to the many people with whom we have discussed different aspects of this project for their advice and encouragement, and to the referees who read the articles contained here and offered many helpful comments. Finally, we are grateful to Dirk Bakker and Marcella Mulder at Brill for their help in overseeing the submission and page-setting of this book. We must apologise to all involved in the book, for delays in the editing, which Peter Crawford did much to minimise, caused by COVID and changes in editing personnel. This has been a frustrating experience for our authors. However, we believe the quality of papers in the volume to be high and range to be good, for what is the first overview of burial in Late Antiquity to cover a wide range of regions across the Mediterranean. It is to be hoped that the book will not only serve specialists but also bring a rich area of archaeology to the attention of mainstream late antique historians, who might better appreciate phenomena such as the cult of relics from studying mid to late antique funerary practices more widely.
Luke Lavan