73 73 4 The Archaeology of the Earliest Monasteries Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom and Hendrik Dey Intensive regional surveys and a growing interest in monastic archaeology are providing new evidence for the history of the earliest monastic settlement in both East and West, and demonstrating above all the enormous variety in the morphology of monastic structures and the contexts in which early monastics lived. Monks reoccupied and modified older, sometimes derelict structures such as villas, farms, temples and sanctuaries, and urban houses; they lived in caves and rock-cut chambers; and they constructed new complexes of the most varied typologies, from small clusters of huts built in perishable materials to large, elaborate structures in stone and mortared masonry. 1 The recent surge of attention to the architectural contexts and the material culture of early monasticism has also effectively highlighted the limits of current knowledge regarding the constructed environments inhabited by early monks, and begun to rectify past misconceptions, many of them resulting from past generations of scholars’ reliance on the textual corpus at a time when well-documented, scientifically excavated monastic sites were few and far between. 2 The extant hagiographical and prescriptive texts, while quite numerous for both East and West before 600 c e , are nearly always frustratingly vague on the physical contours of monastic settlement, and very often misleading. Texts produced by or for monks naturally stressed their otherness, their separation from the world, and the distinctiveness of their unique calling. Moreover, pre- scriptive or normative documents, monastic rules above all, tend to impart 1 Amr al-Azm and Daniel J. Hull, “The Hauran Monastic Landscapes Project,” Newsletter of the Council for British Research in the Levant (2004): 31–2; Béatrice Caseau, “The Fate of Rural Temples in Late Antiquity,” in Recent Research on the Late Antique Countryside, ed. William Bowden, Luke Lavan, and Carlos Machado (Leiden, 2004), 105–44; Olivier Delouis and Maria Mossakowska-Gaubert, eds. La vie quotidienne des moines en Orient et en Occident (IVe–Xe siècle) (Cairo, 2011); Federico Marazzi, Le città dei monaci. Storia degli spazi che avvicinano a Dio (Milan, 2015). 2 Delouis and Mossakowska-Gaubert, La vie quotidienne des moines. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781107323742.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press