“An Old Woman’s Summer”

There are several terms in European languages that describe unseasonably dry and warm autumns in the northern hemisphere. The Anglophone reader should be most familiar with the term ‘Indian summer’, but in the majority of European languages it is described as an ‘Old Woman’s Summer’. The province was affected by late antique social changes present in the entire Mediterranean world from the fourth century onwards, such as: the appearance of Christianity as a state religion, the transformation and fortification of settlements, the disappearance of the villa economy and new ways of expressing of elite identity. After centuries of relative peace, Dalmatia became an important battleground for a few years during Justinian’s Gothic Wars, mostly because of its strategic significance and proximity to Italy. The written evidence for sixth-century Dalmatia is patchy, and the material record from the hinterland lacks the quantity of evidence and even more so the quality of research that would synthesise information dispersed across individual excavations.