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Over the last two decades, the study of the Christianisation of territory in Late Antiquity (4th–7th c.) has generated an extensive historiographical production that has substantially improved our understanding of religious change in rural settings. Despite these advances, the archaeological invisibility and uneven preservation of many rural churches and cult sites continue to pose major interpretative challenges, limiting our capacity to assess the real spatial, social and territorial impact of the construction of Christian landscapes in Late Antiquity. The growing availability of archaeological, textual and topographical data now provides an increasingly solid documentary basis for comparative and large-scale analyses. In this context, the use of spatial technologies—such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), remote sensing techniques and network analysis—opens promising perspectives for revisiting long-standing questions from new methodological angles.

The aim of this workshop is to bring together scholars in order to investigate, through the use of spatial technologies, the distribution of rural churches and cult places within late antique landscapes, and to examine the social, political, religious and territorial factors that shaped these patterns. Particular attention will be paid to the relationship between ecclesiastical infrastructures, systems of mobility and strategies of territorial control, with the goal of assessing whether the organisation of Christian space resulted from coherent institutional planning or from more fragmented, locally driven initiatives.

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