This volume revisits archaeological evidence from Syria, Palestine, the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq and Egypt describing a variety of land-use patterns and the development of a particular type of settlement across the Near East. 1. Pierre-Louis Gatier, Villages du Proche-Orient protobyzantin (4eme-7eme s.): Etude regionale 2. Henry Innes Macadam, Settlements and Settlement Patterns in Northern and Central Transjordania, c. 550 - c. 750 3. Yoram Tsafrir and Gideon Foerster, From Scythopolis to Baysan - Changing Concepts of Urbanism 4. Ali Zeyadeh, Settlement Patterns: An Archaeological Perspective. Case Studies from Northern Palestine and Jordan 5. Robert Schick, The Settlement Pattern of Southern Jordan: The Nature of the Evidence 6. Donald Whitcomb, The Misr of Ayla: Settlement at al-'Aqaba in the Early Islamic Period 7. George T. Scanlon, Al-Fustat: The Riddle of the Earliest Settlement 8. G. R. D. King, Settlement in Western and Central Arabia and the Gulf in the Sixth-Eighth Centuries A.D. 9. Mikhail B. Piotrovsky, Late Ancient and Early Mediaeval Yemen: Settlement Traditions and Innovations 10. Michael G. Morony, Land Use and Settlement Patterns in Late Sasanian and Early Islamic Iraq 11. Alastair Northedge, Archaeology and New Urban Settlement in Early Islamic Syria and Iraq This volume presents a much needed addition to the history of the transit from Byzantine to Islamic administration and a welcome survey of recent archaeology of an understudied period (Gladys Frantz-Murphy)