The view of Late Antiquity as one of complete urban dereliction with a selection subsequently re-settled from the 7th century onwards is out-dated, inaccurate, and overly simplistic as new evidence, along with new ways of interpretation, points to vastly altering and changing townscapes – and yet ones revealing a continuity of life within them. This model of historical developments been directly challenged by more recent scholarship, and this project is contributing to this a new breed emerge for the topics under study. Other major development of this archaeological research project that make quite possible an empirically far better grounded approach, capable of yielding a much more accurate picture is the use of quantitative technologies of the archaeological data of the whole townscape and the excavation of a crucial settlement associated to the most important Iberian late antique city. The ULP.PILAEMA project is also exploring the success and wealthy of the cities under study in the Late Antiquity beyond the concept of Christianization of the Roman townscape. The idea that the episcopal group was predominantly an urban phenomenon can be maintained, as concluded the 15th International Congress of Christian Archaeology. But late antique cities alongside their surroundings land estates were very also administrative, tax-collecting and military centres of the late Roman Empire in Britain, Gaul and the Iberian. Other role was to house the new urban leaders. Evidence of prestige housing, privileged burials, urban walls and overseas trade are some of the most important indicator of local elites activities and the characterisation of power places. The organization of new political powers has been also the focus of much scholarly reappraisal in the last few years, but not so enough to explain the realities of power from archaeological data and even for the whole and diversified territory of the Iberian Peninsula. This project explains this lack focusing in the fact that the disintegration of the older Roman urban model happened slowly in the Iberian Peninsula. The suburban area of Toledo expanded in the sixth century, the royal foundation of Reccopolis and the urban walls of Idanha demonstrate that no new paradigm of urban life replaced the former before the mid-6th century. The monumental Christianisation that Barcelona, Mérida and Valencia experimented in the ecclesiastical buildings can also confirm it. Oviedo, the Christian Asturian capital settled in northern Spain after the fall of Toledo in the 8th century, is understood in this research framework as the last, or the end, of a long Mediterranean transformation process.
