In 2019, I was invited to join a group of scholars assessing Syriac remains in the Tur Abdin in eastern Türkiye for the Kültürel Mirası Koruma Derneği (Association for the Protection of Cultural Heritage). This trip was pivotal in my approach to the East Roman world, because, although I had studied these churches for many years, it was only on seeing them and walking through the undocumented villages and cemeteries surrounding them, that I came to understand how much we are actually missing in terms of our understanding of the medieval East Roman world by siloing localized and liminal communities from what has traditionally been termed “Byzantine” archaeology. These particular communities in eastern Türkiye drew from so many disparate places, from the imperial Roman world, from the Sasanian past, from the Islamic caliphates, and from local Mesopotamian traditions. This is a distinctive archaeology that has to be understood in the wider context of the region, because doing so enriches our understanding of the complexity of the period.

One of the lasting legacies of the nineteenth century European approach to studying the past is a tendency to categorize communities. This is one of the reasons that the term “Byzantine” is so problematic; it automatically excludes those who do not fit our understanding of the dominant group. Many of these communities have been traditionally excluded from the narrative, but were connected by trade, faith, and/or imperial policies. Their exclusion sometimes lies in their geographical distance but it can also be due to the varying local languages (such as Syriac, Coptic, Armenian) and religious beliefs, which often separated them further from the Orthodox church (such as the Syriac churches in Mesopotamia). In other cases there were communities that technically fell under East Roman control (depending on the time frame), but which sat on the edge of the empire, including places like Sicily, Cyprus, and the Balkans. These were all regions deeply affected by both East Roman traditions as well as local ones.