by Stefan Ardeleanu and Jon C. Cubas Díaz (first published on www.hsozkult.de)

Although funerary contexts represent a major proportion of the entire material evidence from Late Antiquity, until today no comparative pan-Mediterranean panorama exists on this central topic of Late Antique everyday life. Therefore an international conference organized by researchers at Heidelberg University’s Collaborative Research Centre 933 “Material Text Cultures“ united 30 specialists for Late Antique funerary habits. The first focus was given to questions on how funerary inscriptions were incorporated in mortuary practices, how they were perceived and in which ways they were treated in Late Antique societies. The conference’s second pillar stressed the many regional differences of burial practices that emerged across the Mediterranean in Late Antiquity and which can be understood notably better today based on an amazing amount of multidisciplinary approaches.