This article addresses a notable gap in the scholarship on rural settlement in northeastern Noricum (today’s Lower Austria/AUT), an area often overlooked despite its extensive archaeological sources. Employing underutilized data, the study scrutinizes settlement patterns in the Danube limes hinterland from the mid-1st to the late 5th c. CE. It identifies key centers – Arelape, Favianis, Augustianis, and Cetium – as essential nodes of functional regions in a diverse landscape of “integrated Roman rural complexes.” However, there was a shift from diversity to more centralized settlement in Late Antiquity, signaling the extensive decline of rural structures. The article examines several factors contributing to this decrease within a “system of ups and downs,” including demographic changes, geopolitical crises, and climatic fluctuations. Crucially, it situates these developments within a broader systemic framework, positing a multi-causal, long-term decline. The study’s findings provide vital insights into volatile societal changes and their implications for current global crises.

Late Antique Cyprus – autocephalous in relation to the Christian ecclesial systems of organization, with island ports accepting the traffic of continental Mediterranean cities, replete with beautiful mosaics, still echoing with the powerful voice of heresiologist-bishop Epiphanius – deserves even more attention than it has received of late. The two volumes under review attend to the island and inspire future directions for research. The collected papers in Cyprus in the Long Late Antiquity: History and Archaeology between the Sixth and Eighth Centuries (2023), edited by P. Panayides and I. Jacobs, and G. Deligiannakis's A Cultural History of Late Roman Cyprus (2022) come at a moment when academic inquiry into this region and period is actively raising new questions with new data, while also reevaluating points long considered.

This article presents a case of osteomyelitis variolosa from a skeleton excavated in the Western Cemetery at Cirencester (Corinium) in Britain, dated to the 3rd or 4th c. CE. This osteological condition is caused by the variola virus, the causative agent of smallpox, and is found in some individuals who have survived a childhood smallpox infection, the condition manifesting many years later. The significance of this discovery is that it indicates that smallpox had been introduced into the Roman world, and to Britain in particular, by the late 3rd or 4th c. CE. Rather than postulating a separate and unrecorded introduction of smallpox into the Roman empire, we suggest that this discovery strengthens the case for seeing the 2nd-c. Antonine Plague as an early form of smallpox.