The recently published Langgut et al. article claims that there was over-exploitation of the Byzantine Negev Desert. They suggest that the over-exploitation worked in conjunction with the Justinianic Plague and the Late Antique Little Ice Age (LALIA), and caused the decline of the Negev settlements in the middle of the 6th century CE. The current article wishes to respond to Langgut et al. article and show that what they found cannot be used to claim that there was an over-exploitation of the land. Moreover, contrary to what they suggest, their finds indicate and support the fact that the decline occurred later. As part of this rebuttal, we will also show that the dating used in this article, like the other articles published by the project titled "NEGEVBYZ," is incorrect.

The advent of Covid-19 in 2020 abruptly halted countless academic projects, including a conference scheduled to be held in Rome in March 2020 entitled 'Perspectives on Byzantine archaeology from Justinian to the Abbasid Age (6th-9th centuries AD)'. The two conference organisers, Angelo Castrorao Barba and Gabriele Castiglia, decided to convert the conference into a book instead as they wished to place their own two projects about the Byzantine period-one on Sicily and one on the Horn of Africain the larger context of Late Antiquity and Early Medieval society.