Marmora Bizantina: A digital corpus of marble finds from the southern Levant

Abstract

Archaeological excavations in the Levant have provided a significant number of marble finds dated to the early Byzantine period (4th – mid-7th century CE). Information on these objects is, however, scattered over numerous publications, hindering synthetic studies of marble imports that reached this part of the Mediterranean world. A way to address this problem was to create a database facilitating access to the dataset of marble finds from the southern Levant. This paper presents the Marmora Bizantina database, describes its content and interface, and discusses the geographic and chronological scope of the dataset. Some uses of the database are discussed, remarking on the limitations that need to be taken into account. The paper also provides information on the analytical tools available on the database website.

Keywords

• archaeological database
• marble
• Levant
• early Byzantine period
• ancient trade