Meet our Team

Luke Lavan is lecturer in archaeology at the University of Kent since 2007. He specialises in the secular civic life of the late antique city, having written his PhD on Provincial Capitals of Late Antiquity (Nottingham 2001) and being the author of the monograph Public Space in the Late Antique City (2020). He is the founder and series editor of the Late Antique Archaeology series, published by Brill since 2001, and has directed excavation and survey work on late antique levels at Ostia port of Rome (2008-2012) and at Roman period sites in the UK, and at Sagalassos as a post-doc on 4th-6th c. traces (2004-2006). He undertakes fieldwork case studies that develop methods suited to the specific evidence issues of late antique cities, especially in response to the depredations of traditional clearance excavation. This often involved removing or ignoring late antique levels to create sanitised classical tourist spaces, whilst simplifying the chronology of building work in favour of earlier centuries. His current research focuses on studying the significance of ‘spolia’ to urban chronology on a large-scale. He read Gibbon aged 12 and is inspired by a mixture of family connections to the Mediterranean, the writings of Tolkien, and reading of late antique texts, from Ammianus Marcellinus Res Gestae to the Life of Symeon the Fool. His favourite historical figure is Theodore of Tarsus, who brought Greek learning to Canterbury, just as it began to fade in the East. He loves Turkey, where he discovered the many advantages of the classical city. Despite all that, his heart remains in the wet green woods and cold white beaches of the West of Britain, on the farthest fringes of the late antique world.