The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Late Antique Art and Archaeology

LEONARD V. RUTGERS is Professor of Late Antiquity in the Department of History and Art History at Utrecht University. He is an archaeologist and a historian of religion. He is the author of the award-winning Jews in Late Ancient Rome: Evidence of Cultural Interaction in the Roman Diaspora (2000) and several other books, including The Hidden Heritage of Diaspora Judaism (1998), Subterranean Rome (2000), and, most recently, Making Myths: Jews in Early Christian Identity Formation (2009). He directs fieldwork in Italy where his projects include the use of radiocarbon dating, stable isotope analysis, GPR, 3D digital imaging and work in the field of aDNA. Major publications in that area include articles in Nature (2005) and the Journal of Archaeological Science (2009) and Cell (2022).

NEIL J. C. CHRISTIE is Professor of Medieval Archaeology at the University of Leicester in England. His research focuses on towns and rural development from late Roman to medieval times, especially in Italy, but also within Britain. Other interests cover defences and church archaeology. He is closely engaged with the Society for Medieval Archaeology (SMA) and is reviews editor for two UK-based journals. Recent publications include: A. Carneiro, N. Christie & P. Diarte-Blasco (eds), Urban Transformations in the Late Antique West: Materials, Agents, and Models (2020); P. Diarte-Blasco & N. Christie (eds), Interpreting Transformations of People and Landscapes in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Archaeological Approaches and Issues (2018); The Fall of the Western Roman Empire. An Archaeological and Historical Perspective (2011).

ROBIN M. JENSEN is the Patrick O'Brien Professor in the Department of Theology, and concurrent faculty in Art History and Classics, at the University of Notre Dame. She is also the author of From Idols to Icons: The Emergence of Christian Devotional Images in Late Antiquity (2022) and The Cross: History, Art and Controversy (2017), co-editor of The Routledge Handbook to Early Christian Art (2018), and co-author of Christianity in Roman Africa: The Development of Its Practices and Beliefs (2014). She recently completed a revised version of her first book, Understanding Early Christian Art (2023, originally 2000).

JODI MAGNESS is the Kenan Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence in Early Judaism at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She has published thirteen books, three of them award-winning, and dozens of articles in journals and edited volumes. Magness has participated on twenty excavations in Israel and Greece, including co-directing the 1995 excavations in the Roman siege works at Masada. Since 2011, she has directed excavations at Huqoq in Galilee. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an Honorary (Past) President of the Archaeological Institute of America.