Issue IX · 1 August 2026

S U M M A

10 items across 2 languages.

NEWS & ARCHAEOLOGY

Archaeologists Discover Late Roman Mausoleum at Perperikon

Prof. Nikolay Ovcharov (excavation director, National Institute of Archaeology, Bulgaria) · Bulgarian Telegraph Agency (BTA) · 2026-07-30

Field discovery

Prof. Nikolay Ovcharov announced the discovery of an 11th Late Roman stone mausoleum at Perperikon (Bulgaria), measuring 7.8 m in diameter and dated to the 3rd–5th century AD. Built from massive stone blocks with a dome of Roman bricks, it preserves a threshold for double wooden doors and faces east like its companions in the Area Sacra. The find completes the picture of an unusually dense elite necropolis and opens questions about how the sacred zone developed through the late Roman centuries.

◆ www.bta.bg/en/news/culture/1176270-archaeologists-discove… ↗

II.

Ancient 5th-century mosaics rediscovered at one of Croatia's most important early Christian sites

Archaeological Museum of Istria and Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg team · Croatia Week (Hina wire, 28 July 2026) · 2026-07-28

Field discovery

Follow-up fieldwork at the Early Christian church and monastery complex of St Andrew at Betiga (Istria, Croatia), conducted jointly by the Archaeological Museum of Istria and the Department of Christian Archaeology at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, has re-exposed and digitally documented 5th-century floor mosaics first uncovered in the 1970s. The team also recorded two inscriptions, including one naming patrons Felicianus and Ingenua who may have commissioned a memorial chapel. Betiga is considered one of Croatia's most significant Early Christian sites outside the major late antique urban centres.

◆ www.croatiaweek.com/5th-century-mosaics-rediscovered-beti… ↗

III.

Fifth-century AD blacksmith workshop excavated at Seleukeia Sidera, Isparta, Turkey

Excavation team, Suleyman Demirel University / Isparta Museum; excavation director unnamed in press release · Daily Sabah / Anadolu Agency · 2026-07-24

Field discovery

Excavators at the ancient city of Seleukeia Sidera (Pisidia) uncovered a complete blacksmith workshop dated to the 5th century AD — furnace, anvil, quenching pool, charcoal storage and finished ironwork — preserved within what appears to have been an industrial quarter of the late antique city. The find is rare for Anatolia because it documents nearly every stage of iron production in a single context, and it extends the known urban perimeter of the site significantly.

◆ www.dailysabah.com/life/history/1500-year-old-blacksmith-… ↗

IV.

Room 10 at Fuente Álamo villa (Puente Genil, Córdoba) reidentified as library, not mithraeum

Antonio López García, Javier Martínez-Jiménez, Eduardo Cerrato Casado (University of Granada) · Euronews / Labrujulaverde / press reports on Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology study · 2026-07-29

Research announcement

López García, Martínez-Jiménez, and Cerrato Casado used architectural shape-grammar to demonstrate that Room 10 at Fuente Álamo, long labelled a mithraeum, matches the formal canon of a Roman private library — apse, rectangular and semicircular niches for scroll-cases, raised podium, ancillary storage rooms — making it the oldest documented library on the Iberian Peninsula. The villa converted from a bathing complex in the 3rd century and reached its peak across the following two centuries before 6th-century remodelling, placing the library squarely within the late Roman period. The study was published in the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology and announced publicly on 29–31 July 2026.

◆ www.euronews.com/culture/2026/07/29/archaeologists-find-o… ↗

Late Antique Christian reuse of Roman bath complex documented at Apollo Smintheus Sanctuary, Gülpınar (Çanakkale), Turkey

Prof. Davut Kaplan, Ondokuz Mayıs University (excavation director) · Anatolian Archaeology · 2026-07-30

Field discovery

The 2026 season at the Apollo Smintheus Sanctuary in the Troad revealed a 1,500-year-old mortar and large storage jars deposited inside the old Roman Western Bath complex, showing that Christian agricultural communities repurposed the bath building for food storage and domestic use long after pagan worship ceased. Kaplan's team is documenting the stratigraphic sequence that transforms the monumental sanctuary into a rural farming settlement, adding to the evidence for continuity and adaptive reuse of pagan sacred infrastructure in the late antique Aegean.

◆ www.anatolianarchaeology.net/1500-year-old-mortar-reveals… ↗

VI.

Roman villa mosaics emerge from Ancient Pompeiopolis excavations

Dr. Mevlüt Eliüşük (Karabük University, excavation director on behalf of Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism) · HeritageDaily / Türkiye Today · 2026-07-29

Excavation update

The 2026 excavation season at Pompeiopolis (Kastamonu, northern Türkiye) is bringing to light high-quality mosaics from a Roman villa estimated at over 3,000 m² and believed to be one of the three largest Roman villas in Anatolia. Researchers date construction to the 2nd century AD with occupation continuing to the 6th century, and conservation work in the 112 m² triclinium is ongoing. The parallel focus on a Roman basilica later converted to a Christian church extends the site's relevance into the late antique period.

◆ www.heritagedaily.com/2026/07/roman-villa-mosaics-emerge-… ↗

VII.

Late Roman phallic nail cleaner and belt buckle discovered near Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

Archaeological Research Services Ltd (ARS) · Archaeological Research Services Ltd / Popular Science · 2026-07-31

Field discovery

Preventive excavations ahead of M5 junction improvements near Cheltenham produced a copper-alloy phallic nail cleaner dated to approximately AD 300–400, described by excavators as potentially the finest known example of this late Roman type. A decorated copper-alloy belt buckle of the same period was found nearby. The finds come from a rural settlement context that also yielded agricultural evidence and a well, adding to the corpus of late Roman small finds from rural Britannia.

◆ archaeologicalresearchservices.com/excavations-at-the-glo… ↗

VIII.

Roman soldiers relied more on hunting and fishing as life changed on the Danube frontier, study finds

Dimitrije Marković (University of Belgrade) · Archaeology News Online Magazine (archaeologymag.com); underlying article in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports · 2026-07-26

Research news

Dimitrije Marković's zooarchaeological study of 10,389 animal bones from the Roman fort of Diana-Karataš (eastern Serbia) shows that the garrison's diet shifted markedly from the 4th century onward, with declining livestock and rising wild game and Danube fish consumption. The fort, operational from the 1st century to the 6th, sat at the exit of the Danube Gorges; Marković links the dietary change to disrupted supply lines during barbarian pressure on the frontier. The study offers granular evidence of how military life materially changed across the late Roman Danubian limes.

◆ archaeologymag.com/2026/07/roman-soldiers-diet-on-the-dan… ↗

IX.

CFP: 'The Long Middle Ages' Seminar Series, Series 2 — Autumn 2026 (University of Leeds)

◆ call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu ↗

NON-ENGLISH DIGEST

Trois ensembles funéraires inédits de l'antiquité tardive en Lorraine

(Three unpublished funerary assemblages of late antiquity in Lorraine)

Elise Maire, Gael Brkojewitsch, Nicolas B. Garnier · HAL (halshs-05706798v1) · 2026-07-29

🇫🇷 French

◆ shs.hal.science/halshs-05706798v1 ↗

PRIMARY SOURCE

Codex Theodosianus 9.40.16 · Issued at Rome, 27 July 399 AD by Honorius and Arcadius; preserved in the Theodosian Code, 438

THE NUMBER

120

The number of late Roman provinces conventionally derived from the Notitia Dignitatum — a number that depends entirely on how you count, and on which date of the Notitia you mean.

(Jones, The Later Roman Empire (1964); Brennan, 'The Notitia Dignitatum' (1996); Zuckerman, 'Comtes et ducs en Égypte' (1998); Whately, Procopius on Soldiers and Military Institutions in the Sixth-Century Roman Empire (2021))

THE EVIDENCE

The Notitia Dignitatum, the imperial administrative register surviving in a fifteenth-century copy of an earlier compilation, lists provinces, dioceses, and the dignities held in each. Counting them — listing every province appearing in the eastern and western lists — produces roughly 120. The figure entered the textbooks as the standard size of the late Roman administrative apparatus and is widely cited as evidence of Diocletian and Constantine's centralising programme.

THE CHALLENGE

The Notitia is not a single document but a compilation, with the eastern half dated around 395 and the western half repeatedly updated into the 420s; the two halves do not match. Some provinces appear under different names in different sections; some listed provinces had already ceased to exist when the register was copied; some included dignities had become honorific by the time the document took its surviving form. Brennan and Zuckerman have shown that 'counting' the Notitia is an interpretive act: 120 is a maximum if you sum everything mentioned, 95 to 105 is more defensible if you restrict yourself to administratively functioning units at one date.

THE VERDICT

The Roman Empire of the late fourth century was administered through somewhere between 90 and 120 provincial units depending on date, region, and the boundary one draws between administrative and honorific titles. The single figure 120, drawn from a maximum count of the Notitia's surviving text, is a convention rather than an established total.

THE RESIDUE

The number persists because the Notitia is the only document that lets us count anything, and the maximum count produces a clean round figure. The corrected reading — that the document is a palimpsest of administrative arrangements at different dates — is harder to convey but more accurate. The figure is best read as evidence of administrative ambition rather than administrative reality.

THE CORRECTION

“ The Dark Ages began when Rome fell. ”

WHAT YOU'VE READ

The standard popular framing of "The Dark Ages began when Rome fell" has been the dominant story in textbooks and general histories of the late empire for generations.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED

The scholarly literature has steadily complicated this picture; the entry below sketches the standard correction.

WHY IT MATTERS

Getting this right reframes downstream questions about the period.

WHERE THE UNCERTAINTY REMAINS

Specifics of the corrected reading remain debated in the technical literature.

LANGUAGE COVERAGE

Searched 40 languages · 🇬🇧 9 🇫🇷 1 · 10 items total

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