This chapter introduces the book and its intellectual schema. It addresses the relationship between postcolonial theory and Byzantine Studies and argues for why a more nuanced approach to the debate, which moves away from a singular view of Byzantium as a ‘historiographical victim’, is important to recognising the discipline’s close relationship to systems of European colonial rule in the East Mediterranean after 1800. The chapter also explores Byzantine Studies’ close intellectual relationship to the development of Biblical Archaeology in the region after 1840. Byzantium provided early biblical scholars with information key to the identification of biblical sites and was used by early archaeologists in their efforts to reclaim ‘lost’ biblical places. The final section of this chapter also establishes the main case study of the volume—the development of Byzantine Archaeology in the Negev and the Colt excavations at Auja Hafir—and problematises current geographical paradigms which continue to shape our approach to the region and the reconstruction of its Byzantine past.