• January 9, 2026 | 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM
• Continental 8/9, Ballroom Level

5D: Technological Change and Professional Knowledge in Late Antiquity (Workshop)

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Sponsored by:
Society for Late Antiquity (SLA), Co-sponsored by the Medieval & Post-Medieval Archaeology AIA Interest Group

Organizers:
Amelia R. Brown, Macquarie University, and Colin Whiting, Dumbarton Oaks

Overview Statement:
This workshop is a two-hour forum to discuss and debate new findings and theoretical frameworks in the development of new technologies and the transmission of professional knowledge in late antiquity. Each presenter will give a brief (ca. five-minute) overview of their recent work related to this subject before a broader discussion with participants. From large to small changes in technology, its human transfer, and its teaching practices, and from the evidence of sites to artifacts to related literary sources, recent research is showing how the practices and transmission of both technical and professional knowledge changed dramatically in late antiquity, around the Roman Empire, and far beyond.

Planned presentations span textiles in museum collections, and their treatment in ancient lexica; the relationship between changing lime kiln technologies, and urban sociology; shell- to frame-first ship-building and lateen-rigged sailing technologies; legal texts and practices in the epigraphic and manuscript traditions; Christianization of knowledge; and beyond. Our goal is to encourage greater dialogue between archaeologists working in the field and historians working primarily with texts, both at a fundamental level (i.e., how archaeological finds inform textual sources, and how textual sources inform archaeological finds), and within a more theoretical framework—how and why we understand the past, and the significance of late antique technological change in relationship to changing modes of teaching, working, and knowledge transmission among a range of professional people and groups.

Archaeologists still connect sites and evidence for “decline” with shifting economic, social, intellectual, technological, and religious changes of late antiquity. From Diocletian’s price edict to Mark Lettney’s (2023) The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity, from water wheels to industrial installations in the Athenian Agora, late antiquity was an era of rapid and significant technological and cultural change. Yet too few scholars ask who were the professionals (not) making or (not) teaching new practices in age-old professions, and how the material record intersects, or not, with new literary and religious preoccupations, demolition and construction, iconoclasms and extended trade routes. This workshop brings together these different strands of archaeological and historical scholarship, and examines the agents and continuing impact of rapid technological and social change in late antiquity and beyond. The intersection of material culture and intellectual history will guide our workshop forum and discussion: understanding late antique processes of knowing, doing and teaching in an era of rapid change better can only help to illuminate our own, contemporary processes too.