Connecting Late Antiquities is the initial phase of a collaborative project to create open, digital prosopographical resources for the Roman and post-Roman territories between the third and seventh centuries AD. Our ultimate aim is to digitise, unite and link existing resources to make them more accessible and enhance their reach and utility. This enterprise will dramatically improve access to information about late-antique people for all scholars of this period and allow the easy integration of prosopographical material with online geographical, textual, epigraphic and papyrological resources. 

The need for a late-antique prosopography has long been recognised, with Theodor Mommsen planning such a project after the completion of the Prosopographia Imperii Romani. In the second half of the twentieth century, the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire and the ongoing Prosopographie chrétienne du Bas-Empire have done much to realise this aim, although no electronic version is available for either of these invaluable reference works. 

Technological developments have provided new opportunities for prosopography, including allowing for both constant updating and an expansion beyond the traditional focus on the higher echelons of society. The Prosopography of the Byzantine Empire and Prosopography of the Byzantine World projects provide excellent examples of the greater possibilities allowed by this approach. Our long-term intention is to draw together material from a variety of major printed prosopographies and specialist digital databases, as well as incorporating entries for 'non-elite' individuals who are attested in ancient sources, but have not been included in earlier publications. This approach will allow more extensive research into understudied figures and their social connections. 

The pilot phase of the project commenced in 2023 with two years of funding from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and Germany’s Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Its main aim is the digitisation of the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, with permission from Cambridge University Press. This reference work is being transformed into a searchable online resource, complete with internal cross-references and the marking up of places, dates, roles and offices. The Digital Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire will be made openly available online and will be a very useful resource for scholars in its own right, as well as providing the foundation for our larger project. 

Finally, we are exploring the possibility of publishing the results of historic projects on late-antique prosopography. Foremost among them is the Prosopographia Imperii Romani saec. IV-VI, an archive of 70,000 paper files from a project initiated by Theodor Mommsen and Adolf von Harnack in 1902, but never completed. With Prof. Dr. Stefan Rebenich at the University of Bern, where the archive is currently kept, we have initiated a project of manual and digital transcription of sample files. We also now have access to the original working files of the PLRE itself, which have kindly been made available by John Martindale, and are intending to digitise these and make them available alongside the Digital Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire. We have conducted a feasibility study by digitising a first tranche of materials and associating them with their relevant entries in the printed PLRE.

The project involves a large number of participants and collaborators, including an Advisory Board and Consultative Committee made up of experts in late-antique prosopography and Digital Humanities, as well as representatives of a range of other relevant projects and online resources. The current AHRC-DFG funded stage is led by a core team at Exeter, London and Bonn (details below). We are very keen to welcome other collaborators into the project, including scholars who are working on related projects which could be linked to ours.