Mirroring Worlds: Rural Domestic Spaces through Multidisciplinarity in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

Across many regions, the materiality of rural settlements, particularly their domestic context, tends to be poorly studied and represented. Furthermore, between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (4th to 12th centuries), the countryside was greatly transformed: changing settlement patterns, trade routes and connections all contributed to the emergence of new modes of living.

Mirroring Worlds aims to connect the domestic spaces of rural settlements from these periods with other rural contexts, such as cemeteries or production areas, which were also part of the living and organisational dynamics of the communities that inhabited them. Particularly, it focuses on approaches that study faunal, environmental, spatial or bioarchaeological data arising from funerary contexts, husbandry and crop dynamics, and/or production centres and domestic spaces, with the aim of gaining more knowledge on the associated rural settlements and/or of integrating pre-existing knowledge. Additionally, the contributions present new findings that result from systematic excavations in the broader context of landscape archaeology and that by the use of new technologies (geomagnetic, spectrometers, Lidar, drones, etc.) and archaeometric analyses, provide promising and accurate new data. Topics include human-animal or human-plant interactions, trade and exchange, populational dynamics (such as domestic and industrial spaces related to materiality), paleoenvironment, landscape archaeology, and living conditions, all expressly connected to the rural domestic settlements they represent.

Silvia Berrica, an Outstanding Cum Laude PhD graduate with International Mention from the University of Alcalá (February 2023), received an Extraordinary Doctoral Award in July 2024. Since June 2024, she has been a Postdoctoral researcher at the Escuela Española de Historia y Arqueología en Roma (EEHAR-CSIC), focusing on Late Antique Landscape Archaeology in the Mediterranean. She has been awarded a Postdoctoral Mobility Fellowship at IFAO in Cairo and has secured significant predoctoral grants and participated in archaeological projects across Italy, Spain, and the UK. Her research centres on Rural Landscape Archaeology from the Late Antique and Early Medieval periods.

Júlia Olivé-Busom completed her PhD in Bioarchaeology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in May 2023. Her research scope includes the funerary archaeology and bioarchaeology of Christian and Islamic communities during the Al-Andalus and Mudéjar periods, particularly in northeastern Iberia. She has published extensively on funerary practices, paleopathology, and isotopic dietary patterns. Currently, she is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Bonn, which has allowed her to broaden her research horizons by conducting innovative bioarchaeological studies in various cemetery areas of the Mongolian Plateau and expanding her focus on Islamic funerary archaeology to Medieval Central Asia.