When students arrive in courses on the Roman Empire's end, they often expect a story of barbarian invasions and civilizational collapse. What they encounter instead is a field transformed by fundamentally reconceptualized narratives and new methodological approaches. Over the past generation, the study of the period ca. 250–850 CE has been radically transformed, twice over. The first of these transformations was the historiographical revolution that ushered in the concept of "Late Antiquity," replacing a simple declensionist model of the "Fall of Rome" with one that stressed transformation rather than a precipitous collapse. The second involved the integration of new evidence bases and scholarly techniques. Broadly, these techniques derive from the natural sciences, and include paleoenvironmental proxies for paleoclimate modeling, ancient pathogen (and human!) genetics, and many more. Together, these have made the new scientific approach to Late Antiquity a driving forces in the field’s recent historiography.

The new scientific Late Antiquity has been controversial, with dozens of article appearing in recent years presenting new evidence and dozens more disputing and defending historical claims based on that new evidence. Questions about the role of pandemic disease (especially but not limited to bubonic plague) and climate change (seen as abrupt or gradual) on the health and stability of the Roman Empire have proved particularly fraught. Much of the debate hinges on the interpretation of types of evidence (aDNA phylogenies, tree ring and speleothem data, isotopes) that historians tend not to be have trained on. Many papers are thus interdisciplinary projects appearing in journals dedicated to the natural sciences. The volume of material appearing regularly, in multiple venues and across disciplines, makes keeping up with these debates difficult. It makes it even harder to teach.

This panel presents, for the first time, a discussion of these themes and methods as they relate to pedagogical practices. We will introduce the major themes and debates of this new scientific Late Antiquity, often presented by participants in the debates themselves, and then share how we teach them to students. The panel will focus on two themes. The first is the role of disease, and how to approach it in the classroom, with particular focus on integrating the ancient written sources with new archaeoscientific approaches. The second is using archaeoscientific tools to better study individuals and populations that are often missed by the written sources—such as peasants, whose lives are revealed to us in the materiality of their pots, teeth, and bones.