The Inner Lives of Ancient Houses ─ An Archaeology of Dura-Europos

Dura-Europos, on the Syrian Euphrates, is one of the best preserved and most extensively excavated sites of the Roman world. A Hellenistic foundation later held by the Parthians and then the Romans, Dura had a Roman military garrison installed within its city walls before it was taken by the Sasanians in the mid-third century. The Inner Lives of Ancient Houses is the first study to consider the houses of the site as a whole.

The houses were excavated by a team from Yale and the French Academy of Inscriptions and Letters in the 1920s and 30s, and though a wealth of archaeological and textual material was recovered, most of that relating to housing was never published. Through a combination of archival information held at the Yale University Art Gallery and new fieldwork with the Mission Franco-Syrienne d'Europos-Doura, this study re-evaluates the houses of the site, integrating architecture, artefacts, and textual evidence, and examining ancient daily life and cultural interaction, as well as considering houses which were modified for use by the Roman military.

J. A. Baird is Senior Lecturer in Archaeology in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London. She previously held a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship at the University of Leicester. She was co-editor of Ancient Graffiti in Context (2011), and has recently published articles on archaeology and Roman Syria in theJournal of Roman Archaeology, American Journal of Archaeology, andEuropos-Doura Varia.