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

Rural homes rarely leave their whole story behind. Walls and floors survive, but the fields that supported a household, the animals it kept and the places where neighbours buried their dead may lie beyond the excavated house. In Mirroring Worlds, Silvia Berrica and Júlia Olivé-Busom bring together studies that reconnect these fragments of country life between Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

At Dehesa de Navalvillar in Spain, researchers trace changes in a domestic space during the seventh and eighth centuries. At the late antique hilltop settlement of Zidani gaber in Slovenia, charred grains of millet and barley help reconstruct local farming. Other chapters follow fortified landscapes in the Alpujarra and shifts in burial grounds in Galicia. Plant remains, graves, landscape survey and building traces together bring households back into the countryside on which they depended.