I’ve been in a deep writer’s funk lately and struggling to get projects going, to make progress on existing projects, and to wrap things up on time and to spec. It’s been beyond frustrating. 

So it is with a bit of relief that I offer a preprint of the introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Archaeology that David Pettegrew and I have been working on for well over a year. As readers of this blog know, David and I adopted a rather unorthodox strategy that involved writing almost 30,000 words and then editing it down to a more manageable and appropriate 8,000-10,000. At that point we invited comments from everyone including our contributors and tweaked and massaged the text up to around 10,500 words or a little over 12,500 with bibliography.

You can download a PDF draft here.

We’re under no illusions that this is the final word on Early Christian archaeology, but we think that as a standalone text and as the introduction to our Oxford Handbook, it makes a meaningful contribution (and perhaps can be read alongside Kim Bowes 2008 article, “Early Christian Archaeology: A State of the Field,” from Religion Compass).  

We have a couple more weeks before the entire Oxford Handbook gets sent into the black box, so if there is a glaring problem with the draft, please do not hesitate to let us know!