Since its “discovery” exactly one hundred years ago, the site of Dura-Europos (Syria) has loomed large in narratives of society, culture, religion, and military on the eastern edge of Rome’s empire. If the site is not quite the “Pompeii of the Syrian Desert” that Mikhail Rostovtzeff trumpeted it to be, Dura has become the type-site for the dynamics of a medium-sized provincial town in the Roman East, and for Roman army-civilian interactions in the region. The Hellenistic/Arsacid city fell under Roman control in 165 CE, and came to house a major Roman military base whose facilities were inserted into the fabric of the earlier Parthian town, at least until the site faced siege(s) and abandonment(s) in the 250s CE. The largest portions of the site were excavated between 1928 and 1937, and the results mostly published in a substantial series of Preliminary Reports. These were exactly what they professed to be: preliminary. Uncertainties and questions remained among the original excavators, and some excavated areas were largely (or wholly) ignored in print. Still, the partial narratives the Preliminary Reports crafted around and freighted upon the site’s archaeology have had remarkable (and problematic) longevity in shaping understanding of the site, its significance, and images of military-civilian interactions in the Roman East.

Simon James’ new account of the base and its community—in many ways the Final Report envisaged by the excavators but never written—shows just how problematic those preliminary narratives are. Drawing on archival data and new fieldwork to reassess the archaeology of the military presence at Dura, James not only makes novel and compelling arguments about interpretation of the site, but fundamentally transforms and remakes the archaeological record of Dura itself. The present volume should become the foundation and the model for subsequent work on Dura, and a guide for using legacy archaeological data to achieve substantial new results.