Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World

Javier Martínez Jiménez is a classical archaeologist by training, specializing in late antique urbanism and water supplies in the Western Mediterranean. He is currently an EMERGIA Post-doctoral research fellow in the University of Granada's Department of Prehistory and Archaeology. At Granada, his work is focused on the CAUAT – Cultura del Agua Urbana en la Antigüedad Tardía (Urban Water Culture in Late Antiquity) project, a four-year project in which he is assessing the dialectics between water infrastructure and local urban cultures in the late antique Mediterranean, working with published data on urban water infrastructure from across the Mediterranean, combining it with anthropological understandings of local culture and Place Theory. The study will culminate in text that presents the cultural importance of water in four different aspects of the late antique city: civic culture, religious cults, social habitus, and industrial activities. 

Martinez Jimenez's doctoral thesis is on the aqueducts of the Iberian Peninsula between the fifth and tenth centuries AD, completed at Oxford (2014) under the supervision of Bryan Ward-Perkins. His postdoctoral publications include a handbook on late antique and early medieval archaeology of Iberia (Amsterdam University Press, 2018), the monograph resulting from his thesis (Gorgias Press, 2019), the papers derived from his field projects at Reccopolis (Journal of Roman Archaeology 36.1, 2023) and Casa Herrera (Studies in Late Antiquity 6.1, 2022), and two collaborative articles on applying new methodological approaches to late antique archaeology (Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 28.1, 201; Early Medieval Europe 31.1, 2023).