I know I’ve been promising to share a draft of our introduction to our Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Archaeology, but haven’t come through, 

Today, that changes. Here’s a link to a draft of our introduction to our Oxford Handbook project.

The challenge of this introduction stems our effort to do three things. First, we offer a brief survey of the history of Early Christian archaeology with particular attention to the Anglophone scholarship. Second, we introduced past, current, and future directions in archaeology as a discipline and argued for their impact on our understanding of Early Christianity. Finally, we offer a brief survey of the content of the volume. 

I do hope that some readers with an interest in Early Christianity and the Archaeology of the Early Christian world will take the time to offer suggestions, comments, or critiques of this draft introduction. We realize that it has some warts and some stylistic infelicities, but hope that this draft captures the general direction of our work.

As in the past, I’m using Hypothes.is to allow comments on our introduction. It’s a free, open-source application for commenting on the web! 

Check out our introduction here.