Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

What if the fall of Rome wasn't a collapse, but a rebrand?

Well, in today's episode, Alice Roberts delves into the dramatic

transformation of the Roman world and the rise of Christianity, from cliffside burials in Wales

to imperial politics in Constantinople. Speaking to Danny Bird, she reveals how early Christianity wasn't a grassroots movement

at the poor, but a strategic shift embraced by elites, bishops and emperors.

Alice, what drew you to this particular moment in history, the collapse of the Roman Empire and

the rise of Christianity?

This is a particular period in history that I've been interested in for a long time.

I think the main attraction for me is that particularly in Britain,

it's a period where we don't have much history.

Sounds like an odd choice to write a history book about a period where you did it, how much history.

But it means that archaeology really comes to the fore, and it kind of forces us to look at that

archaeology, the material culture of the fourth, fifth, sixth centuries and try to understand

what's going on. And really this book came out of a fascination with burial

archaeology, which has been something that I've been researching and writing about for many years.

And it takes me back to particular burials that I was excavating on a cliff in Wales 20 years ago.

And we were excavating these burials because there were bones eroding

out of a cliff falling onto the beach below and we wanted to establish how big the cemetery was.

There wasn't a church associated with it. It was just on its own. And we wanted to establish

the age of it as well. And we excavated down to one of the graves up on the top of the cliff. And these graves were kissed graves. That means they have a stone lining. It's almost like building a coffin into the ground. So somebody would have dug the grave and then lined it with stone slabs, put the body in it and then put a lid on the top. And as we lifted one of the

slabs that formed the lid of one of these graves, it had a cross on it, a roughly hewn cross.

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