In memory of my parents, Christos and Leslie Cassis, both of whom passed during the writing of this book.

This book is the direct result of being asked repeatedly over the years where the church is at the site of Çadır Höyük. While I have worked there for twenty years now, we still have no evidence for the things we take for granted in East Roman archaeology: churches, elite housing, cemeteries. We have the messy remains of daily life, used and reused between the Late Roman and Seljuk periods. In my view, however, these are the remains that help us widen our scope from the more traditional, seemingly characteristic, elite and religious material culture of the period. It has taken me a long while to become comfortable with letting go of the traditional definitions of the period, but I hope here to illustrate just how important it is for us to do so if we are to fully come to grips with the Late Roman and medieval periods of the East Roman world.

In coming to these ideas, I have been supported by so many scholars, both in my field and in others. Sharon Steadman, Gregory McMahon, Jennifer Ross, and Burcu Yildirim have been my archaeological family for so long, and I continue to be grateful to them every single day. Endless important talks with Darlene Brooks Hedstrom, Fotini Kondyli, and Christian Raffensperger have helped me really come to terms with my own views of this material. John Haldon has been a friend and mentor. But I have also been helped by the approaches of others not in my field: I learned about modern historiography in the History Department at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where I first had to teach it, and I will be forever grateful to my colleagues there for introducing me to The Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. At the University of Calgary, Lisa Hughes has helped me rethink space and Courtnay Konshuh has challenged me to think about wider medievalisms.