Early Christian Archaeology Religion Compass

Religion Compass 2/4 (2008): 575619, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00078.
Early Christian Archaeology: A State of the Field

Kim Bowes*
Cornell University
Abstract
This article considers the history and trajectory of early Christian archaeology.
Focusing principally on the built environment, it addresses the status of research
on third-century Christian domus ecclesiae or house churches, urban topography,
Christian euergetism, pagan/Christian temple conversion, monasticism and
pilgrimage, parish churches, and rural Christianity. It suggests that this largely
conservative field continues to wrestle with its relationship with Christian texts,
and remains dominated by formalist and positivist paradigms. The expansion of
the discipline into adjacent fields in recent years signals something of a shift, but
more holistic studies are needed that contextualize Christian remains within their
local topographic, social, ecclesiastical, and, above all, economic circumstances.
From a discipline that was once confined largely to one city (Rome) and
one constellation of sites (the catacombs), the study of Christian material
culture has witnessed a certain thematic explosion. A quick glance at the
recent meetings of the International Congress of Christian Archaeology
now reveals subjects as diverse as rural topography and human anthropology,
as well as a preponderance of the more traditional architecture and art
historical approaches. Thus, to attempt a summary of the whole field in a
single article would either make the article impossibly long, or the coverage
pointlessly superficial. This short summation thus focuses on the archaeologies
of buildings and space, leaving images for separate discussion. Within those
confines, it addresses only a selection of the major themes that have
preoccupied the discipline third-century archaeology, urban churches
and topographies, monastic archaeology, and the countryside and limits
even these considerations to material of late antique date, that is, from the
third to sixth centuries ad. The growing numbers of excavations and the
felicitous, albeit limited expansion of the discipline beyond the demonstrably religious into social history writ large, means that even with these
constraints, much will still be left out or glossed over. Nonetheless, it is
hoped that even such a sketch will provide a sense of the disciplines
history, its trajectory, and the challenges it faces, particularly regarding its
relationship with Christian textual history, as a conservative field in a
changing scholarly world.
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Journal Compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
576 Kim Bowes
Historiography
Christian archaeology was born in post-Reformation Rome under the
auspices of the Catholic church, and these circumstances, both geographical
and denominational, would have a formative impact on the fields subsequent
development. The earliest formal excavations of Christian sites were
catacomb excavations, begun by Antonio Bosio in the early seventeenth
century and taken up again by Giovanni Battista de Rossi in the nineteenth
century (De Rossi 18641877; Baruffa 1994). It was work whose ideological
cast was oddly bifurcated. On the one hand lay the baldly stated desire to
use material culture to prove Apostolic presence, demonstrate the extent and
sophistication of Christian origins, particularly in Rome, and more tacitly,
to use that Apostolic splendor to bolster a weakening post-Enlightenment
church. On the other hand, particularly De Rossis masterful surveys
of the catacombs and painstaking collection of Christian inscriptions
were monuments of mid-nineteenth-century encyclopedic data collection,
meticulous products of an ecumenical accumulation of knowledge for its
own sake, and a desire to preserve a friable historical record for posterity
(De Rossi 1864 1877, 18611888, 1922 ).
Whatever their Janus-faced ideological cast, these early excavations and
the surveys that summarized them for broader consumption (e.g. Marucchi
1902; Testini 1958) shared a confidence in what constituted Christian
objects or monuments. As the burial places of the Roman martyrs and
the (wrongly) presumed refuge of the persecuted, the catacombs and all
that lay within them were assumed to be products of specifically Christian
efforts; similarly, the Roman-period remains beneath the titular churches
like San Clemente were likewise identified as early Christian domus ecclesiae
or house churches (Mullooly 1869; cf. Guidobaldi 1992). The assumptions
derived in large part from a reliance on textual sources, often of later date
or dubious interpretation, to make sense of material remains. To blame,
too, was a tendency to use inverse deductive reasoning to analyze a sites
evolution: if the site had demonstrable Christian presence in a later phase,
one could safely assume that the earlier phases also accommodated Christian
functions, whether or not the remains actually indicated this or not (e.g.
Kirsch 1918, critiqued by Duval 1978; Pietri 1978b). The confidence that
a discernibly Christian material culture exists and can be archaeologically
defined has been challenged by a series of new studies (Elsner 2003;
Rebillard 2003) that question the degree to which religious affiliation is
reflected in the material record, and highlight the amorphous and
misleading quality of pagan/Jewish/Christian categorization.
By the mid-twentieth century, these assumptions were being gradually
undercut and the discipline began a slow revolution. Richard Krautheimers
magisterial survey of the churches of Rome, begun in the years before the
Second World War, applied the newly developed principals of architectural
stratigraphy, or buildings archaeology, to the tangled remains of Christian
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577
buildings (Krautheimer et al. 19371977). In place of inverse deduction,

he offered neutral phase analyses, using masonry styles as chronological
indicators. His work and those of his peers, like Friedrich Deichmann
(e.g. 1948) and Andr Grabar (e.g. 1946), also witnessed a new emphasis
on architectural typology, both as dating tool and, eventually, as functional
indicator. Their strenuous debate over the form and function of martyria
typified the formalist method (Ward-Perkins 1965; Krautheimer 1969b;
Deichmann 1970). Architectural form, plan, liturgical furnishings, roofing
solutions, etc., became the principal analytical tool for approaching Christian
architecture (Deichmann 1948, 1983; Khatchatrian 1962; MacDonald
1962; cf. Mango 1976, pp. 911; Krautheimer 1986). Local forms were
identified and parsed, and regional catalogs of churches began to appear
in ever-increasing numbers. Indeed, this remains one of the principal
methodologies of Christian archaeology today, as exemplified by the
forthcoming pan-European catalog of pre-Medieval churches, organized
by region.1 These studies have rejected, often vociferously, the earlier
methodologies reliance on texts or text-based categories to understand
material remains (e.g. Apollonj Ghetti 1978; Duval 1978). Form and to
a lesser extent, stratigraphic analyses are the principal analytic tools of studies
whose goal is the careful dating and categorization of forms themselves.
Be it the plan of a church, the profile of an altar table or the form of a
baptismal font, form provides both a beginning and an end in what remains
a largely positivist enterprise.
While that positivism is to be found more or less wherever specifically
Christian-oriented archaeology is practiced, its supporting evidentiary
corpus varies enormously in quality and quantity from region to region.
Romes early history of Christian archaeology and concomitant early
detailed study of Christian remains is, in this respect, something of an
oddity: in many areas, particularly Greece and Turkey, a preoccupation with
Greco-Roman remains and dismissal, even distaste, for later periods led to
the wholesale destruction of Christian-period buildings and stratigraphy
in pursuit of what lay beneath. In these areas, the study of Christian
archaeology has lagged behind that of its classical sister disciplines, the
disparity exacerbated by educational and governmental apparatus in which
Christian-period archaeology is a minority discipline. Conversely, in other
areas, such as Britain, France, and Italy, a deep interest in Christian remains
has produced a plentiful corpus with its own problems. A tacitly nationalist
agenda drove much of this archaeology, intent on proving the particularly
early, particularly pious, or particularly local brand of Christian expression.
So intense was the desire to find Christianity that many sites were identified
as Christian on insufficient evidence the so-called basilica at Silchester
(King 1983) or the many misidentified oratories in Aquileia (Holden
2002) are some examples. Nowhere, however, has Christian archaeology
carried more overt political baggage than in the Holy Land; from the
Franciscan identification (now largely discredited) of the house of Peter in
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Capernaum (see below), to the wholesale destruction of a major circular

church by the University of Pennsylvania in order to uncover the acropolis
temple at Beth Shean, to the almost total lack of real archaeology at the
Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem (the exception is Biddle 1999),
Christian archaeology in the Holy Land is a poster child for the challenges,
from neglect to fanaticism, facing Christian archaeology, and a warning of
the agendas inherent within even the most neutral cataloguing effort.
Alongside these cataloguing projects developed more historically oriented
studies. Since the early twentieth century, historians of Christianity like
William Ramsay (1893); Adolf Deissman (1901, 1912); Adolf von Harnack
(1908), had used material culture in their narratives, where it was used to
bolster or prove textual accounts, particularly as part of a Protestant effort
to elucidate the authentic church of the Apostolic age. A later generation
of historians, like Charles Pietri (1976) and W. H. C. Frend (1952, 1984,
1996), in contrast, had absorbed the cautionary lessons of their archaeologist
contemporaries regarding texts; instead, they interrogated material
evidence to tell the stories left out of texts, issues like church wealth,
Christian demographics, popular belief, and doctrinal debate. A florit of
such social historical studies have appeared in the last two decades, the
most influential of which have been the works of Peter Brown, and it is
now the case that much Christian social history is written with at least a
nod to material evidence.2
If there is anything that distinguishes Christian archaeology from its
sister discipline of classical archaeology, it is perhaps the strident voice of
its concomitant texts, which, as defining parts of the field, demand to be
reckoned with in some way. Despite the new sensitivity to evidentiary
issues, however, the relationship between archaoelogy and texts remains
strained. Theological treatises may be used to interpret iconography,
apocalyptic writings are used to make sense of settlement patterns, and
anti-pagan treatises have been adduced to identify archaeological instances
of Christian idol smashing (e.g. Murray 1981; Brogiolo & Chavarra
2005; Sauer 1996, respectively). The problem is exacerbated by the nearabsence of a theoretical discourse on texts and material culture; although
the adjacent field of biblical archaeology has meditated long and hard on the
problem, with the exception of Morelands (2001) brief but stimulating
survey, there still exists no theoretical apparatus to help scholars of
Christianity mediate between the world of things and the world of words.
This lacuna may reflect the disciplines distrust of theory generally;
preoccupied with fact-finding, text verification, or historical narrative,
Christian archaeology has rarely spared a moment for meditations on itself
or its processes. With some few exceptions (mostly in Anglo-American
scholarship) (e.g. Elsner 1995, 2001; Wharton 1995), it has remained largely
insulated from literary, anthropology or archaeology-based theoretical
models that have so transformed its sister disciplines. One searches in vain
for the writings of a Foucault, a Geertz, or a Hodder in the footnotes of
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Christian archaeology as the field clings resolutely to its positivist heritage.

While in part this conservatism can be traced to disciplinary training
within art history, history and classical archaeology departments, the problem
may again be a product of Christian archaeologys particular relationship
with its attendant texts. Many of the most potentially useful theoretical
models ritual theory, cognitive archaeology and post-processualism
were developed to understand prehistoric societies, that is, text-less
worlds. The Christian world was one of frantic text production, and
while that those texts cannot be used to decode the material, neither, as
generations of Christian archaeologists have intuitively known, can it be
wholly ignored.
Christian Origins
THE DOMUS ECCLESIAE
The archaeology of third-century Christianity is one of those topics over

which the amount of ink spilled is inversely proportional to the evidence
at hand. Excavations carried out in the late nineteenth and first half of
the twentieth century in Rome claimed to have unearthed traces of early
Christian activity, particularly the houses used by Christians for worship.3
The term domus ecclesiae was paraphrased from a more complex ancient
vocabulary to describe these presumed meeting houses, reflecting the
assumption that since early Christians met in homes, and since the later
Christian basilica was derived from domestic architecture, there must
have existed some sort of distinctive and recognizable proto-church
architecture.4 The 1931 discovery of a well-preserved, mid-third-century
Christian meeting house at Dura Europos seemed to offer definitive proof
for house-based Christian meetings (Baur 1934; Hopkins 1934; Kraeling
1967) (Figure 1). At Dura, the house in question had been altered to
accommodate a meeting hall with raised dias, and a baptistery decorated
with frescos depicting miracle scenes, like Christ Healing the Paralytic and
the Maries Approaching the Tomb. The discovery of Dura spawned a series
of teleological histories tracking the evolution from house to basilica (e.g.
Lowrie 1947, pp. 10528; Deichmann 1964; Gamber 1968, critiqued by
Klauser 1968/9; Duval 1978). For many scholars, this evolution manifested
Christianitys own departure from ur-Christian norms, and adoption of
a Greco-Roman belief in the sacrality of place (as noted by Finney 1988).
The most clinical of these, formulated by Richard Krautheimer, posited
three stages of architectural adaptation, prompted by the groups changing
socio-economic circumstances (Krautheimer 1969a, 1986, pp. 2337). In the
Apostolic and Pauline periods, Krautheimer posited, meetings took place
in dining rooms as Christian ritual focused on the agape or communal meal.
In the mid-second to mid-third centuries as Christian groups increased in
numbers and prominence, basic liturgical equipment was inserted into the
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Fig. 1. Reconstruction, Dura Europos house-church, third century

fig. 18).
AD
(after White 1990,
house itself, which, now owned by the communal group, was physically
modified: this phase he labeled the domus ecclesiae and pointed to Dura
Europos as its principal exemplar. Rising wealth and numbers in the midthird century produced the so-called aula ecclesiae, large, even free-standing
axial spaces that Krautheimer claimed to have discovered at San Crisogono
or San Clemente in Rome. Despite the similarities with basilican architecture,
Krautheimer denied any direct tie between aula ecclesiae and later basilicas,
ascribing to Constantinian agency the use of the Roman secular basilican
form for the first Christian basilicas in Rome and Jerusalem.
As L. M. White, the most recent scholar to address the problem, has
observed, all of these theories were preoccupied with architectural form,
and assumed the so-called domus ecclesiae constituted a distinctive Christian
architecture (White 1990, 1997, reviewed by Finney 1992). His own study
emphasized the adaptive quality of all unofficial Roman cult buildings, from
Mithraea (Figure 2) and Jewish synagogues to Christian meeting houses,
all of which modified pre-existing private buildings to accommodate ritual
needs. White argued that the form of the original building and, above all,
2008 The Author
Fig 2. Phased plan, mithraeum, Dura Europos, second to third centuries

fig. 8).
AD
581
(after White 1990,
the cults changing size and economic power produced the buildings
architectural form, rather than some impulse towards basilican forms.
All these theories share a conviction that architecturally adapted Christian
meeting houses existed in some numbers by the third century, that is, that
something like the domus ecclesiae actually existed. Yet, even this assumption
is highly problematic. The number of definite third- and early fourthcentury worship spaces has been steadily eroded as earlier excavations are
re-evaluated and new chronological evidence brought to light. San Clemente
and San Crisogonos earliest Christian phases may now be dated as late as
the later fourth or early fifth century (Guidobaldi 1992; Cecchelli 2001,
pp. 2327), and other purported sites, like Peters House in Capernaum
(Corbo 1969), have been critiqued for demonstrating no evidence of early
Christian activity (Strange & Shanks 1982). The recent discovery of an
alleged third-century meeting house in Kefar Othnay, Israel, remains to be
definitely dated (Tepper & Di Segni 2006). In other words, Dura Europos
is emerging not as the tip of a domus ecclesiae iceberg, but as an unicum. It
is beginning to appear that even in cities with relatively large Christian
populations, like Rome, third- and fourth-century Christians may not have
modified their buildings for meeting purposes, but simply continued to
meet in the homes of their wealthiest members (Pietri 1978b; Cantino
Wataghin et al. 1996, p. 27), perhaps in the increasingly popular apsed
audience halls, without causing any archaeologically discernable changes to
these structures (Guidobaldi 1993, 1999, 2000). Conversely, the adaptation
of the house at Dura seems could be understood not as normative, but
quite possibly the opposite, a radical break from Christian practice in
other cities, produced by particular local exigencies. Given the frenetic,
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check-by-jowl character of religious building at Dura, with a mithraeum,

a synagogue and the Christian church all on one street, plus the thriving
cults to the Palmyrene and other eastern deities, the Dura house church
may be a particular product of socio-religious competition in a heterogeneous
garrison town (Elsner 2001). Thus, the Dura House church may tell us
very little about Christian origins writ large, but rather a lot about what
it meant to do religion on the edges of the empire.
Second- and third-century material culture, be it Christian or not, has
played an increasingly central role in Christian social histories. These
studies, produced largely by historians of religion, have endeavored to
de-ghettoize Christianity from a position of ontological uniqueness, and
integrate it more firmly in second- and third-century Greco-Roman or
Judeo-Roman contexts. Recent studies have juxtaposed Christian and
Greco-Roman houses and households, relying on a diverse evidentiary
grab-bag, including the Dura house church, Pompeiian and Palestinian
houses, the Pauline and Deutero-Pauline letters, and the apocryphal acts
(Meeks 1983; White 1989; Moxnes 1997; Osiek & Balch 1997; Balch &
Osiek 2003). They have noted the similarity between Christian (i.e. Dura)
and non-Christian living spaces, and/or used Pompeian or Palestinian
houses to add flesh to the bare-bones biblical narratives that describe a
house-based Christian world. Others have drawn on the totality of material
culture of Roman and late Roman Palestine to reconstruct Christianitys
Judeo-Roman environment (Meyers & Strange 1981; Manns & Alliata
1993). Through these imaginative combinations of evidence, first- through
third-century Christian communities are provided a lively mis-en-scene,
their families and their houses blending into an ancient cityscape. These
scenes are often generated through a simple juxtaposition of pagan,
Jewish, and Christian evidence (the categories remain uncontested),
privileging sameness over difference to emphasize Christianitys kinship
with its formative Roman and Judaic contexts.5 Material culture often
provides a generic stage set that is re-peopled by texts; it thus remains uninterrogated for its own stories, often ignoring the recent archaeological
literature that has emphasized the regional and chronological diversity of
house forms and social conditions (e.g. Nevett 1999; Grahame 2000;
Baker 2002; Hales 2003).
THE CATACOMBS
If the study of the house churches has suffered from a lack of evidence,
the same cannot be said of the Roman catacombs. With their miles of
galleries, their frescoed decoration and their volumes of inscriptions, the
catacombs comprise the majority of material evidence for third- and early
fourth-century Christianity. However, to what extent this evidence is
third and early fourth-century in date and to what extent it is even Christian
have all been questioned in recent studies.
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The phenomenon of mass underground burial grounds was not limited

to Rome smaller examples are known in Syracuse and Naples, for
instance but it was the particular confluence of geology and economic
expediency that allowed them to flourish in the capital city. Land for
burial in the Roman suburbs was in short supply and, by the first century
ad, extraordinarily expensive (Purcell 1987; Hesberg 1992, pp. 910).
The soft, yet resilient tufa beneath Rome proved easy to excavate and thus
provided a cheap alternative to surface burial (De Angelis dOssat 1930
1932). Gravel pits, like that at San Sebastiano, could be expanded through
their sides; early underground water channels, like those at Ss. Pietro e
Marcellino, might be widened and lengthened, and from these re-used
spaces, wholly new systems could be dug with relative ease and speed.
The cheapest and most abundant burials lined these long corridors; loculi,
or burial shelves, where individual bodies were superimposed, the loculus
cover each time being sealed with re-used tiles, the deceased perhaps
remembered by a rudimentary inscription. More expansive settings were
provided by acrosolia, tombs covered by an arched niche, or by cubicula,
small chambers holding both arcosolia and loculi.
Dating catacombs is notoriously tricky: with little masonry to date and
very few stratigraphic excavations, most of the Roman catacombs have been
dated by their earliest inscriptions, the style of their wall paintings, or their
association with a particular martyr.6 More recent studies have carefully
mapped the inscriptional and frescoed evidence onto the structural history
of the catacomb, creating more reliable histories for these multiphased
monuments (e.g. Deckers 1987, 1991, 1994; Guyon 1987; Saint-Roche
1999; Spera 2004). The earliest phases of the catacomb of Callistus have
been dated to the final years of the second century (see Figure 3), but for
the most part, it is only in the third century when underground gallery
systems the hallmark of the catacomb appear in at the catacombs of
Priscilla, Praetextatus, and Domitilla. The heyday of building in most of
the catacombs seems to take place in the later half of the third century
and in some instances, such as the well-studied network at Ss. Pietro e
Marcellino, the first two decades of the fourth century. Thus, the bulk of
catacomb construction took place in the 75 years or so between the
mid-third and first quarter of the fourth century, rather than earlier, as is
often supposed (Fiocchi Nicolai et al. 1999).
Catacombs are often described as the burial of the poor, and certainly
their underground location made them potentially cheaper than the same
space allotment above ground. However, it is notable that while in some
catacombs like Domitilla and Praetextatus, galleries and loculi comprised
the bulk of burials spaces, in many others like Ss. Pietro e Marcellino,
Priscilla, Callistus (Figure 4), the third and early fourth century saw the
expansion of cubicula and arcosolium tombs, that is, more expensive burials.
Most of the Christian paintings in the catacombs date from this period
and are found in cubicula. By the late third century, catacombs could no
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584 Kim Bowes
Fig. 3. Plan, early phases of catacomb of Callistus, late second to mid-third centuries
(Fiocchi Nicolai, Bisconti, & Mazzoleni 1999, fig. 6).
AD
longer be categorized as spaces of cheap, collective burial, but had taken

on the character of above-ground cemeteries, namely, a mixture of poor
and rich, jumbled together in which the rich were ever more the focus
of attention. Although the paucity of in situ inscriptional evidence
(much of which was removed by the eighteenth excavators of the
catacombs) makes it difficult to know who commissioned the cubicula,
it seems likely they served, as did their sister-mausolea above ground, to
hold families and burial societies. That is, the increasing emphasis on
cubicula shifted the emphasis from collective burial to small-group or
family burial.
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Fig. 4. Plan, catacomb of Callistus, late third to fourth centuries

Bisconti, & Mazzoleni 1999, fig. 30).
AD
585
(after Fiocchi Nicolai,
Below-ground burial had never been the exclusive province of Christians;

from the time of the Scipios, pagans had constructed subterranean hypogea
chambers used for inhumation and/or cremation burials (Hesberg 1992,
pp. 7693). The Scipios hypogeum was a purposeful attempt to evoke
ancient (probably Etruscan) burial habits, while economic exigency motivated
the majority of such spaces, like those on the Via Appia or Via Aurelia.
The catacombs, however, have traditionally been viewed as a special case:
the description of collective burial grounds in texts like the Refutatio
of Hippolytus (9.12.14), the particular gallery form with its emphasis on
collective, cheap burial and most importantly, the association of catacombs
with martyr burial and cult, have all lead scholars to suppose that catacombs
were exclusively Christian burials spaces, run by the institutional church
for the exclusive use of its members. The discovery in 1955 of a small,
late fourth-century catacomb on the Via Latina displaying both pagan and
Christian-themed frescoes is seen as a late exception that proves the rule
(Ferrua 1991). A new study by John Bodel, however, has questioned this
most basic assumption: using rough calculations of Romes morality rate,
the maximum number of Christians and the number of extant, excavated
graves, the author notes that it would be a highly unlikely that Romes
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586 Kim Bowes
catacombs could contain exclusively, or even a majority of Christians

(Bodel, forthcoming 2008). The study is convincing not least because it
uses as its statistics those numbers that would be most likely to disprove its
conclusions (i.e. an overly high estimate of Christian numbers, an overly
low mortality rate).7 If it is correct, not only must we imagine a far more
heterogeneous catacomb population, but we must also disabuse ourselves
of the notion of segregated Christian burial.
Indeed, the assumption of church-controlled, exclusive Christian burial,
both in the catacombs and more generally, has also been recently questioned.
Departing from the very texts that have been used for argue for church
control of burial as well as the archaeological evidence itself, a group of
studies, mostly prominently by Eric Rebillard, have suggested that bishops,
including the bishop of Rome, showed little interest in either maintaining
segregated Christian burial grounds or controlling the rituals that went on
inside them (Harries 1992, p. 61; Rebillard 1993, 1997, 2003; Johnson
1997). Families, not the church, continued to bury the dead and provide for
their commemoration, and families were as often as not, of mixed religious
persuasion. The catacombs, which had begun as private burial plots, thus
continued to be controlled and managed by families at least through the
mid-fourth century. Both of these studies, when taken together, posit a much
smaller and weaker Roman institutional organization than archaeologists
had previously supposed, a notion supported by some textually based
histories (Brent 1995, critiqued by Simonetti 1996). They also present a
wholly new social context in which particularly the catacombs paintings
must now be situated, a context of far more fluid Christian identity, of
shared rituals and thus potentially eschatology with pagan neighbors,
or, conversely, of neighborly competition.
Christianity in the Late Antique City
While the last 20 years has seen virtually no new evidence for thirdcentury Christianity, the reverse is true for the post-Constantinian period.
Major excavations in cities as diverse as Rome, Tarragona, Carthage, and
Caesarea, and a burgeoning interest in late antique urbanism generally
have produced explosion of publications, both monographic and analytical,
on urban Christianity of the fourth through sixth centuries (e.g. Rich
1992; Christie & Loseby 1995; Brogiolo & Ward-Perkins 1999; Brogiolo
et al. 2000; Lavan 2001; Liebeschuetz 2001).
Ancient cities were organisms of constant, restless change. Construction
and abandonment were continuous, the building programs of the emperors
transforming city centers into construction sites for decades, while the
projects of their predecessors were allowed to fall into gentle decay until
political mileage might be gained through their restoration. In this respect,
the later Roman city was no different, except, perhaps, that the ratio of
abandonment/rebuilding had shifted toward the former, first in the West
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and later in the East, and new construction was changing in type, patronage
and timing. The monumentality of the Roman city was a product of that
characteristically Roman practice of euergetism: civic philanthropy, very
often in the form of buildings, produced political capital that the giver
translated into ever-higher offices, and, in turn, into ever more magnificent
acts of generosity. As proximity to the imperial court and its bureaucratic
apparatus became the principal avenue for advancement, and as that court
became increasingly peripatetic, the political advantages of either building
new buildings or repairing the old shrank. Building was gradually monopolized by the emperors and where the emperors took no interest, little or
no building happened. As local politics took a back seat to imperial
action, the local town councilors or curiales found no benefit, and little
funding, for infrastructure maintenance. The Roman city, itself a fragile
product of a particular political climate, began inexorably to change.
Tracking those changes is complicated, however: the changing character
of euergetism brought about a decline in the epigraphic habit, that is,
the propensity to mark (and thus date) ones gifts with inscribed words.
The absence of inscriptions that are the principal source for urban building
projects may mean a decline in building, or it may simply describe a
decline in inscriptions: excavation is required to tell the difference. Despite
these difficulties, it is becoming clear that in Italy and perhaps northern
Gaul, the process had already begun in the later third century (WardPerkins 1984). In North Africa and parts of Spain, the process did not set
in until the fifth century (Lepelley 19791981, 1994). In the East, the process
began later, typically in the later fifth and sixth centuries (Rouech 1989;
Lewin 1991). While the timing varied significantly from region to region,
the result was same: water-supplies and drains failed; baths shrank in
numbers and size; footpaths took the place of streets choked with debris
and everywhere the great public buildings of the high empire were
modified for private use as stables, houses, and graveyards. Conversely,
in the fourth and fifth centuries, the houses of the wealthy were enlarged,
taking up a greater proportion of the cityscape. The late antique city
became predominantly a place of private, rather than collective, enterprise.
THE FOURTH CENTURY
The exception to these trends, we are told, was the church. In many cities,
churches were the only new, monumental structures, the product of their
communities collective donations. With the conversion of Constantine,
each city was soon covered with a carpet of churches, its old civic
topography replaced by a web of Christian presence. However, the picture
as it is emerging in excavations from Spain to Syria is more complex.8
Perhaps most significant is the generally slow pace of church construction:
the vast majority of urban churches in both East and West date to the fifth
century and later. Only a small number can be definitely attributed to
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Constantine and his house, and in general, fourth-century church

building was a limited affair, restricted in most part to the final years of
the century. There are exceptions, like the great Constantinian projects
of Rome and Jerusalem, and martyrial basilicas in North Africa and
Dalmatia, but when good archaeological evidence is available, church
dates are trending later rather than earlier. The implications are significant.
Many cities have fourth-century Christian communities described in texts,
but no contemporary basilica: where, then, did they meet? Very likely
where they had always met in house-based meetings (Pietri 1976, vol.
1, p. 116, and Krautheimer 1980, p. 18; Cantino Wataghin et al. 1996, p. 27).
The Christian house-based community seems to have had a far longer life
than was previously supposed, and for Christians in the hundreds of smaller
cities throughout the empire and even in Rome, it remained the locus of
their collective devotions for a century. A series of recent studies on
Christian wealth and demographics suggest that it could hardly have been
otherwise; while texts like Ambrose attacks on pagan practices and
Augustines sermons to crowded churches seem to describe the churchs
rapidly growing wealth and power, the vast majority of episcopates had
limited resources and limited political clout throughout the fourth and
much of the fifth centuries (Sotinel 2005, 2006). The actual number of
Christians in these communities is likely to have remained relatively low
in comparison with non-Christians through this period (cf. Hopkins 1998),
and it is only in the early fifth century that the truly wealthy joined the
church in any significant numbers (Pietri 1978a). The fourth-century church,
in other words, resembled in wealth and popularity its third-century
predecessor far more than was previously thought, and its physical presence
was correspondingly fairly limited.
CHRISTIAN TOPOGRAPHIES
The Christian topography of the late antique city is also coming into
sharper focus. In the many cities, Christian presence was Janus-faced. One
center lay outside the wall in the urban necropolei. Some of these churches
show signs of early martyr cult and most accommodated burial. As was
the case in the third century, the graveyard remained the focus of Christian
material presence in the fourth century, and it may have been the activities
of families and/or small groups that provided the catalyst, if not the funding,
for churches whose raison detre remained strongly funerary. Conversely
in some cities, such as Milan and Rome, these extramural churches can
be more definitely linked to episcopal intervention (Figures 5 and 6). Here,
Ambrose (Krautheimer 1983, pp. 6892) and Damasus (Ferrua 1942; Trout
2003), respectively, are credited with marking major approach roads with
martyr shrines, and using the cult of the saints to vanquish rival claimants
to the episcopal throne. In the case of Damasus, the martyrial structures
were small in scale, and commemoration occurred principally through a
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589
Fig 5. Map of Milan showing churches century 400 (Krautheimer 1983, fig. 63).
series of finely carved verse inscriptions. The sites chosen for commemoration and the content of the inscriptions were not simply reflective of
popular piety, but reflected a subtle attempt on Damasus part to discredit
his rival, Ursinus, and bolster support for his tumultuous episcopate.
Cities other center of Christian presence was intramural churches,
presumably associated with the episcopate. Their location varies, as does
the evidence for episcopal presence. In Italy, for instance, intramural churches
are located in a wide variety of habitation areas, although not typically in
the monumental forum area (Testini et al. 1989). The inconsistent location
of these churches is probably a product of the vagaries of private donations;
churches were built wherever land was provided by private donors and
the ability of bishops, even in cities like Rome, to effectively plan church
topography was probably very limited. Thus, the oft-noted absence of
churches in Romes forum area was both a product of a traditionallyminded elites control of those areas, but also a by-product of euergetism:
most churches were built on donated land and that land lay in residential
neighborhoods, not the forum area where almost all the land was public
2008 The Author
590 Kim Bowes
Fig. 6. Map of Rome showing churches century 400 (after Elsner 1998, Imperial Rome and
Christian Triumph, Oxford/New York, fig. 96).
(Krautheimer 1980; Fraschetti 1999; cf. Reekmans 1989). Constantinople

and Antioch, cities with more permanent imperial presence, had imperial
euergetes and thus the possibility of building on more centrally located
plots (Krautheimer 1983).
Nonetheless, even in these cities as well as other smaller centers, what
constituted the bishopss church, might be highly fluid. The issue is typified
by the location of urban baptisteries, typically assumed to indicate episcopal
presence: in Italy generally, baptisteries quickly appeared in the extraurban funerary and martyrial churches (Testini et al. 1989), while in Rome,
the Lateran soon vied with the splendid early fifth-century Sta. Maria
Maggiore, and titular and martyrial churches with baptismal fonts (Fiocchi
Nicolai 1999; Saxer 2001; Cosentino 2002). Even in Constantinople, the
Constantinian Holy Apostles, rich with imperial associations, sometimes
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591
vied with the Hagia Sophia for cathedral status (Ullmann 1851, p. 223; cf.
Mayer 2000).
Newer work has broadened topographic analysis beyond the individual
city to the region and meta-region. The location of major urban churches
within a region often reflected, and indeed, produced, local economic and
political realities. The recent discovery of a series of large, unusually rich
fifth-century churches in southern Italy, for instance, may be read as a
product of a local economic boom, carefully calculated episcopal expansion,
and the regions strategic position in Byzantine/Roman relations (Volpe
2007). In Asia Minor, a careful consideration of early church building is
laid against the rich textual evidence for religious practices of all kinds,
revealing a land in which pagan, Jewish, and Christian distinctions
remained highly fluid (Mitchell 1999). In some areas, the archaeological
corpus has become large enough that the topography of silence may be
carefully probed for historical significance. In Hispania, for instance, the
general paucity of material evidence for martyr cult prior to the fourth
and even fifth centuries contrasts starkly with a post-Reformation Catholic
historiography claiming the opposite; late antique Hispania, far from being
fervently Christian, is emerging as region where Christian centers remained
few, far-between, and ill-funded and where the few martyr shrines were
limited to local heroes (Duval 1993; Castillo Maldonado 2005).
CHURCH TYPOLOGIES
Typology the planar and other formal qualities of Christian buildings

continues to provide one of the most popular analytic approaches in
Christian archaeology. Since the master works of architectural historians
like Richard Krautheimer and Andr Grabar, churches continue to be
studied through an assessment of their plan type, liturgical furnishings
(baptismal fonts, chancel arrangements, location of martyrs relics), and
structural apparatus. Most of these studies are now regionally based (either
modern countries or ancient provinces), with their goal the articulation
of local church forms and liturgical habits.9 The evolution and liturgical
raison dtre of North Africas striking double-apsed churches (Duval 1973);
the square-ended, triple chancels of Hispania with their counter-choirs
(Godoy Fernndez 1995) (Figure 7), so similar to their brethren in the
far-off Syrian uplands with their ubiquitous tiny martyr shrines (Crosby
Butler 1929; Tchalenko 19531959; Lassus 1957; now Pea et al. 1987, 1990,
2003) (Figure 8); and the Judean desert monastic churches (Hirschfeld 1992,
1993); comprise just some of the regional forms elaborated in these
careful encyclopedic studies. Other recent collections of church architecture
organized along these lines include catalogs of material from Tunisia,
Dalmatia, France, and various Italian regions.10 These regional collections
have served as a critical step in the further investigation of Christian activity
in their respective areas, for they not only provide a clear picture of
2008 The Author
592 Kim Bowes
Fig. 7. Plans of some Spanish churches (after Palol 1999, Els edificis religiosos, in Del Rom
al Romnic, Barcelona, pp. 16372.).
Christianitys local physical face, they also offer a critical analysis of Christian
building chronology, the presence or absence of the cult of martyrs, and
frequently the only evidence for local Christian liturgies. What all this
means in terms of the nature of local Christian communities, their scale
and wealth, episcopal power, that is, the social conditions in which these
buildings were produced, tends not to form part of these collections. Texts
are interrogated only insofar as they provide basic dates and episcopal reigns
under which buildings might be categorized. Thus, stripped of other
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593
Fig. 8. Plan, Dar Quita, Syria, fifth century (after Krautheimer 1986, fig. 97).
contextualizing delimiters, these detailed and exacting catalogs of churches,

liturgical equipment, and martyrs cults tell a simple story of growing
Christian material presence, and thus, seemingly, growing Christian power.
In its artless simplicity, however, lies a troubled logic: buildings do not
necessarily equal power, but rather, like their sister texts, serve as rhetoric
in stone, projections of an ideal, and not necessarily reflective of a reality.
Indeed, were the churchs progress measured by church building activity,
one would have to conclude that Christianity suffered a serious set-back
in the eighth century, when very few urban churches were built and many
fell into disrepair.
That this simple teleology is not the only story has been suggested by
the few studies that have attempted to integrate typology and social history,
archaeology and texts, to examine the fullness of circumstances surrounding
the construction of particular churches or groups of churches. One new
study, for instance, suggests that the development of basilican architecture
was not simply a result of tweaking civic basilicas for Christian use, but
was fundamentally impacted by local burial patterns and communal memory
(Yasin 2002). Detailed studies of individual buildings or communities,
such as those for Rusafa in Syria and its patron, Saint Sergius (Fowden
1999) (Figure 9), or the complex built by the aristocrat Paulinus at Nola,
Italy (Lehmann 2004), have combined an analysis of the archaeological
remains with the social histories of site and its attendant politics. The result
in each case reveals the church site as a particular organism, the product
not simply of local architectural or institutional imperatives, but also the
motivations of individual actors and the exigencies of place, economy, and
local expectations. At Rusafa, frontier realities of trade and defense produced
a Janus-faced church, a bulwark against invaders and a meeting place of
cultures, while Paulinus complex emerges as both testament to the power
of a local (originally) lay aristocrat to shape local martyr cult, and to the
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594 Kim Bowes
Fig. 9. Plan, St. Sergius, Rusafa, sixth century
AD
(after Krautheimer 1986, fig. 221).
influence of pre-existing structures, both on architectural form and

Paulinus well-documented perception of his project.
CHRISTIAN EUERGETISM
The complex process by which cities slowly shed their earlier monumental
trappings and grew a new, often thin, skin of churches is not only illuminated through the archaeology of buildings, but also of words. Epigraphic
studies have revealed how Roman euergetistic habits mutated under
Christian influence (Brown 1982; Caillet 1993; Duval & Pietri 1997;
Pietri 2002). It is a tale of both remarkable continuity and equally radical
change. The wealthy and even moderately wealthy continued to direct
their excess wealth into building projects, simply of different form. Whereas
earlier Roman euergetes poured their monies into baths, statues, and
spectacle production like the great amphitheater games and circus races,
Christian philanthropists, while continuing in some cases to continue these
projects, funneled ever more of their pious capital into church construction,
charitable foundations like homes for the sick and elderly (xenodochia and
gerontochia), and monasteries. In some sense, the changing physical character
of the late antique city can be tracked through the changing direction of
aristocratic donations. On the other hand, philanthropic psychology began
to change in ways that would have been wholly foreign to a Roman of
the first century ad. Dozens of anonymous donations, unthinkable in a
world in which the whole point of giving was self-presentation, were used
to pave the churches of Italian towns (Caillet 1993) (Figure 10), or to
purchase liturgical equipment for local churches in Asia Minor (Moralee
2008 The Author
Fig. 10. Floor mosaic, cathedral church, Aquileia, fourth century
AD
595
(after Sotinel 2005, fig. 5).
2008 The Author

596 Kim Bowes
2004). Votives gifts to the gods in exchange for health, success, and safety,
a particular form of quid pro quo euergetism, had helped to populate the
ancient city with statues and buildings. Now, one channeled ones hopes
for salvation into the larger stream of the church collective, and instead of
stand-alone monuments, an individuals gifts formed pieces the chancel
legs, the altar top, the oils for the lamps of the collective edifice. If
Roman modes of giving did not simply promote, but actually helped
shape individuals identity, the Christian transformation of euergetism
signaled a new way of regarding the self and his or her relationship with
the broader collective.
TEMPLES TO CHURCHES
As described above, the processes by which the ancient city became

Christian were far more complex than simply building churches. Thus,
archaeologists and historians have been understandably fascinated by one
type of transformation that seems to sweep away the ambiguities and glacial
pace of late antique urban change and distill it in one building and one
dramatic gesture. This is the transformation of pagan temples into Christian
churches. For no less a historian than Gibbon, wandering through Santa
Maria in Aracoeli on the Capitoline and pondering the fate of the
Capitoline Jupiter, temple-church conversion embodied late antiquity itself,
the victory of one faith over another, the imposition of an authoritarian
institution over a collection of amorphous traditions.
A series of recent studies on temple-church conversion have disabused
us of these notions, exposing the phenomenon in all its complexity and
local variation (e.g. Deichmann 1939; Speiser 1976; Caillet 1996; Cantino
Wataghin 1999; Ward-Perkins 1999; Rothaus 2000; Bayliss 2004). Much,
and in the West, perhaps even the majority of superimposed churches
seem to have been built long after the temples in question had fallen into
disrepair, even ruin. The conversion of the Pantheon in Rome into Santa
Maria dei Martiri took place in 609, centuries after pagan ritual ceased
there. In the East, where the majority of the textual descriptions of
violent conversions and destructions are set, conversion seems to begin
earlier, in the fifth and sixth centuries, and is potentially, at least in Egypt,
far more common (Frankfurter 1998a,b). An active debate exists as to
whether these conversions were motivated by a dim memory of their
previous function, or simply the practical reuse of an extant, centrally
located building (Ward-Perkins 1999). In the West, where temple
conversion began in an era when demographic decline had produced lots
of empty lots and extra building materials, the exigency theory is less
persuasive. In the East, however, where some convertive episodes began
while cities were still densely populated, building plots were at a premium
and some temple conversion may have been simply an astute real estate
transaction.
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597
It is unlikely, however, that exigency was ever the sole factor. Ancient
cities were landscapes of memory, nowhere more so than in their monumental, temple-filled downtowns. The construction of a church on the
forum or agora at the very least signaled the coming-of-age of its bishop
impressarios, whose cathedra now sat where the emperors representatives
had governed. This changing of the guard was glaringly apparent to
Quodvultdeus in Carthage (Lib. prom. 3.38), who witnessed the construction
of a church inside a temple of the local goddess Caelestis; the similarity
between the local bishops name, Aurelius, and that of emperor Marcus
Aurelius whose dedication inscription still emblazoned the buildings
faade, confirmed the conversions triumphant inevitability. Similarly,
even in the case of some late temple conversions, such as the Parthenon
(Frantz 1965) (Figure 11) or the temple of Jupiter at Baalbeck (Caillet 1996,
p. 195), the builders might take special care to preserve the temples
peripteral colonnade or tenemos those parts of the building that most
clearly broadcast its previous function while inserting the church into
the temples cella or courtyard. The buildings past was thus proudly
claimed by its new owners. Other examples, like the temple of Aphrodite
at Aphrodesias, seem to exhibit a more overt eradication of memory (Herbert
2000): here the building was reoriented, the dipteral colonnade converted
into nave supports, and the whole encased in a new wall temple literally
swallowed by church. The meaning of these various technologies of conversion is rarely clear (Gutteridge 2004): do they reflect a church inserting
itself into the citys glorious civic past, or the churchs victory over that
past? Or both, simultaneously?
Textual descriptions of temple-church conversion tend to linger on
incidents of violent conversion. These texts seem to cluster in certain
regions in Egypt, in Gaul and monks are often listed as the impresarios
of the attacks (e.g. Gaddis 2005). Archaeologically, instances of violent
destruction are hard to locate: while it is tempting to associate broken
statuary and burning levels with purposeful violence, the slower violence
of abandonment, accidental burnings and other acts of nature produce
similar results. Attempts to match the Egyptian and Gallic evidence with
archaeological proof are thus not always convincing. The removal of
Isaic reliefs and the insertion of a cross at the temple of Isis at Philae, for
instance, probably did not occur until some time after the initial temples
conversion (Grossman 1984) (Figure 12), while the broken statuary in
rural Gallic sanctuaries (Sauer 1996, 2003; cf. Gordon 1999) is hard to
attribute to Christian hands when Christian numbers were so few in those
areas (see below). Rather, it is probably better to understand the texts
themselves, rather than the characters and events they describe, as having
the real power of destruction. These texts mapped onto a still-active pagan
cityscape a language of struggle and resistance that it very possibly lacked,
urging its readers to see their cities (and countryside) with eyes alert to
the power of the pagan daimones (Caseau 2001).
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598 Kim Bowes
Archaeology of Asceticism and Pilgrimage

In no area of Christian archaeology is the relationship between texts and
objects more immediate and confounding than asceticism. Archaeologists
have relied particularly heavily on ascetic texts in the interpretation of
sites, not least because these texts, from the Rule of the Master to the
Apophtegmata patrum, are often unusually rich in physical detail, providing
exacting information on location, types of buildings, number of inhabitants,
frequently written by eye-witnesses. It is easy to forget that ascetic texts,
particularly early ones, are powerful, polemical documents whose physical
language is meant to invoke powerful, convertive responses in their readers;
monastic rules and tales from the desert are not reportage, but carefully
constructed efforts to produce, through the effort of the word, a not-yetextant world. The example of pre-Christian Jewish ascetic site at Qumrn
is indicative (Vaux 1961): Qumrn has been associated with the Essenes,
a group who, according to Josephus, Pliny and so-called Dead Sea Scrolls
found near the site itself, often disavowed marriage, withdrew from society
and gave up their belongings. The site of excavated at Qumrn is a large,
almost monumental collection of well-built buildings, complete with a
sophisticated water system, scriptorium, ceramic workshops, and a large
communal hall. Clearly, this product of a communal effort is far wealthier
than one might expect from an uncritical reading of the texts. Similarly,
a careful examination of the extant Christian archaeology suggests a very
different picture than that implied in the writings of Jerome or Benedict.
Identifying ascetic sites and distinguishing them from other kinds of
sites is particularly problematic. In the West, ascetic practice took place
principally in homes, both urban and rural, until the sixth or seventh
centuries. Rules, established hierarchies, and necessary renunciation of
property only become systematized with the sixth-century monastic rules,
like that of the Master or Benedict, and it is only then that we can really
begin to speak of monasticism per se. Thus, the early ascetic abodes were
simply houses, and as such, indistinguishable archaeologically from other
houses (Duval 1986; Cantino Wataghin 1997). Even in the East, where
coenobitic monasticism was established already in the mid-fourth century,
distinguishing monasteries from houses, fortresses, or other types of settlements is often difficult.
For this reason in the West, there exists no monastic archaeology per
se in the fourth through seventh centuries. No definitive monastery of this
date has been excavated, although many have been proposed. The most
convincing of these proposals are based on textual information the
proposed monastery at San Sebastiano in Alatri (Fentress et al. 2005),
mentioned in the Dialogues of Benedict, or the earlier domus near the church
at Hippo (Bizot 2005), where Augustine described his own monastery.
But the former has no convincing sixth-century remains (Hodges 2007),
while the later is simply a domus, with no outward signs of anything
2008 The Author
Fig. 11. Plan, Parthenon, showing church phases, seventh century

Parthenon, fig. 4).
AD
599
(after Beard, 2003, The
specifically monastic, such as cells or a common eating area. Other

examples, such as the complex at Diaporit near Butrint in Albania (Bowden
& Przhita 2004), or that discovered outside Tarragona at Parc Central
(Mar et al. 1996), display physical signs we associate with later monasteries
such as a church accompanied by a range of rooms around a courtyard,
2008 The Author
600 Kim Bowes
Fig. 12. Philae, Ptolomaic reliefs damaged during Christian phase, fifth century
AD
(author).
but that have also been plausibly identified as the hostelries of martyr shrines.
It is only in the later seventh and eighth centuries that charter evidence
and archaeology together convincingly allow us to more convincingly
identify monastic sites, although again, typically only the church is preserved
(Cantino Wataghin 1997; Cantino Wataghin et al. 2000). When other
buildings are preserved, such as at Roumainmotier or Augsberg, there
does not seem to be any consistent monastic architecture per se, but rather
a variety of site arrangements centered around the monastic church.
The cloister only really appears as such in the eighth century, and is used
sporadically and in a variety of forms, as the well-excavated site of
San Vincenzo with its small garden and open courtyard, indicates
(Hodges 1993).
In the East, identifying ascetic sites is helped by a superabundance of
texts, while the faster growth and popularity of the ascetic movement here
produced a larger body of early ascetic sites. Fourth-century anchoretic
sites are mostly to be found in Egypt, where excavations at Kellia, Sketis,
and Esna have produced some remains, while coenobitic monasteries, such
as those of Pachomius at Pbow (Lease 1991) or Shenoute at al-Dayr alAbyad (Grossman 1991), have also been identified. In many cases, however,
early excavations interpreted the remains principally through the texts and
seem to have dated them accordingly. The more recent excavations at
Kellia, for instance, have found very few fourth-century remains and
instead revealed a site whose heyday was the sixth and seventh centuries.
Similarly, few convincing remains of Pachomian age have yet been unearthed
at Pbow. While new, scientific excavations are needed in abundance to
clarify the picture, fourth-century monasticism was probably more limited
than has previously been supposed, and the eye-witness accounts by
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Jerome or Rufinus, who counted monastic communities numbering in

the several thousands, should be taken with some caution. Similarly, studies
on monastic topography have revealed that many Egyptian monasteries
were set near populous villages, and few were located in the true desert,
but rather near or within fertile agricultural zones (Wipszycka 1994;
Goehring 1996). The flight to the desert so touted by monastic writers
thus often took place in a bustling rural landscape, not only the windswept desert these texts call to mind (Goehring 1993).
Eastern ascetic sites display strong regional characteristics. In the Egyptian
oases, semi-excavated miniature houses, complete with a courtyard, kitchen,
pantry, latrine, two or more cells, and an oratory, all decorated with frescos,
are the norm in the sixth- to seventh-century phases at Esna (Sauneron
& Jacquet 1972) and Kellia (Daumas & Guillaumont 1969; Haeny &
Leibundgut 1999; Henein & Wuttmann 2000) (Figure 13). In the Nile
Fig. 13. Plan, cells at Kellia, area QR 195, sixth to seventh centuries
2000, fig. 2).
AD
(Henein & Wuttmann
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602 Kim Bowes
valley, however, cliff-sides and, above all, earlier Pharonic tombs were used
for cells (OConnell 2007). In Palestine, particularly in the Judean desert,
cave and cliff-based structures are most common, consisting of more
rudimentary, smaller habitations, and a cave church (Patrich 1995; Hirschfeld
1992). The archaeology of coenobitic sites is similarly varied: Palestinian
coenobia tend to be built on flat ground, unlike the cliff-based lavras, but
their plans varied from orthogonally planned sites like the monastery of
Martyrius outside Jerusalem to the more irregular Judean desert monasteries.
Boundary walls, however, are common to all. In Egypt, the archaeology
of fourth- and fifth-century Pachomian monasticism is very much the
archaeology of the village: not only did Pachomius earliest coenobitic
settlement at Tabbenese bear that name, but his foundations were often
set in deserted villages, or near living ones (Wipszycka 1994; Goehring 1996).
Similarly in Syria, monasticism flourished in and near populous villages;
Tchalenko (1953 1959) claimed to have located a series of coenobitic
establishments near town churches, while in the agricultural hinterland,
towers were built or reused for anchoretic practices, with the anchorite
inhabiting the top and a helper or two stowed in the ground floor (Pea
et al. 1980, 1983). It is in this town and village hinterland, too, that the
great stylites like the elder and younger Simeon plied their trade.
When one considers the archaeological corpus as a whole, what is
perhaps most striking is the blurriness of the anchoretic/coenobitic
boundary (Goehring 1990, 1993; Wipszycka 1996), which seems so neatly
encapsulated in the sources, and which seduced both ancient western
observers like Jerome and John Cassian, as well as a previous generation
of modern scholars. From Sabas first coenobetic monastery with its handful
of monks to the great Kellian lavrae with dozens occupying a single cell
by the sixth and seventh centuries if not earlier, many sites seem to blur
the solitarycommunal distinction, and display a whole spectrum of monastic
solutions born of individual choice and local exigency.
Local economic activities buying and selling property, serving as
landlords, making and exporting wine and oil had a formative impact
on monastic life in all these areas, and monks, in turn, seemed to have
played a central role in local economies (Wipszycka 1972; Goehring 1990;
Hirschfeld 1992, pp. 10311; Bagnall 1993; Heiska 2003). Indeed, the
heyday of eastern monastic material culture coincides in many cases with
that of their general region; Egypts late agrarian florescence and Palestines
burgeoning caravan and wine-export markets both parallel monastic growth,
and current research finds monks well-entrenched in, if not dominating these
booming economies (Banaji 2001; Wickham 2005, pp. 242 55; 419 28;
759 69; 770 80; 443 59).
Closely allied to the phenomenon of asceticism is that of pilgrimage,
itself a form of ascetic devotion as the pilgrim displaced him- or herself
from home and country to seek the foreign holy, be it a place or a person.
Sources as diverse as the travel account of Egeria, Vigilantius attack on
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pilgrimage, and relic collecting, not to mention the hundreds of so-called

pilgrimage ampullae, flasks containing holy oil or dust and imprinted with
images of a holy site, suggest a world that had suddenly tuned in and
dropped out (cf. the contributions in Ousterhout 1990). But how prevalent
was late antique pilgrimage? How did pilgrimage impact local communities?
The answer is predictably different for the different halves of the empire.
Field surveys around the suburban martyr shrines in Romes hinterland
(e.g. Quilici & Quilici Gigli 1993, cf. Fiocchi Nicholai 2002) have identified
only a handful of contemporary clustering structures and habitations,
nothing like the apparatus one would expect from a reading of Prudentius,
who describes frenetic late fourth-century Roman pilgrimage traffic. One
is left wondering how prevalent pilgrimage really was in most areas of the
West prior to the Early Middle Ages. In the East, at least by the sixth
century, the matter was different (see now Frankfurter 1998a,b): the
still-impressive remains at Qualat Siman with its octagonal church built
around the column of Simeon Stylites include a huge complex of buildings
to accommodate visitors, echoing the rambunctious accounts of buying,
selling, fighting, and consensus described in the saints vita. Jerusalem and
its environs itself must have seen considerable pilgrim traffic, and the great
basilicarotunda complex at the Holy Sepulcher built by Constantine and
the Bethlehem octagonal church over the grotto of the Nativity hosted
Egeria and her successors. One must be careful, however, of assuming
these grand structures were built with pilgrimage in mind: many, if not
most, of the Holy Lands major locus sacer monuments were the product
of imperial eurgetism, and at least among the Theodosian empresses, had
become a de rigueur marker of imperial piety. While often commemorating
an imperial visit, it is unclear to what degree these great churches imply
concomitant pilgrim hoards, or describe an effort to emulate Constantinian
euergetistic practice.
The most important pilgrimage in any case was not the trans-Mediterranean
variety such as Eugerias, but local, and it is here where the pilgrimage site,
much like the monastery, intersected with local and regional economies.
As Peter Brown (1971a) pointed out over 30 years ago, the Syrian holy
man was born of a bustling Syrian economy (see now Tate 1992) for
which the ascetics roost acted as both mediation point and market place.
Conversely, the remains at Qualat Siman (Crosby Butler 1929) and Abu
Mina (now Grossman 1998) in Egypt find pilgrimage sites as major new
rural centers, complete with baths, markets, and other quasi-urban amenities.
Like the temple complexes that sprouted up in newly Romanized Gaul,
these centers were a product of not only their holy occupants, but also of
a socially charged rural landscape (contra Tate 1992) where hobnobbing,
production to meet tax demands, and trade all went hand-in-hand. To
sponsor ones local stylite and to monumentalize his site was to put ones
pious capital where it would be most productive, in the countryside,
before ones landed peers and tenant dependents.
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Christian Landscapes
Just as Christian activities in the city were profoundly shaped by the social
and economic qualities of those cities, so, was Christianity in the countryside
a product of its particular environment. The late antique countryside is
now a very different place than was imagined even 20 years ago: earlier
narratives were populated by abandoned lands (agri deserti), maurading
barbarians, and a latifundia system that destroyed the small landowner and
transformed the free tenant (colonus) into a slave (e.g. Jones 1964). Much
of this picture has been revised or rejected through a reconsideration of
the historical sources and above all by an exponential increase in rural
archaeology (Ouzoulias et al. 2001; Bowden et al. 2004; Christie 2004;
Wickham 2005). Field surveys and excavations of everything from rural
ceramic workshops to rural churches have multiplied and dozens of
volumes now appear each year on some facet of the Roman and late
Roman landscape. The results have emphasized both the heterogeneity of
rural life across the empire, as well as some major trends. In certain areas
of the West, such as Hispania, southern Gaul, southern Italy, and Pannonia,
the fourth- and early fifth-century landowners built on a scale unprecedented
in those regions. While the shine was coming off the buildings in local
cities, the countryside gleamed with new or rebuilt villas large rural
estate buildings covered with mosaic floors and stuffed with sculpture
collections. By the later fifth century, this monumental apparatus, too, was
crumbling, as export markets plummeted. In the East, the boom begins
somewhat later, in the fifth century, and took the form of a carpet of small
farms and booming villages as landscapes from Greece to the Syrian
highlands were pushed to produce for profitable export and currency
markets (Banaji 2001).
In both East and West, Christianitys first material signs appear in the
context of the respective economic booms that transformed first the
western, then the eastern countryside. In many regions of the West, such
as Britain, Hispania and parts of Gaul, and Italy, the first Christian buildings
appear in the same places where building and elite competition was most
intense, namely, the villa (Figure 14). These structures, frequently mausolea,
memoriae, or chapels, were often not churches strictly defined, nor
typically meant to serve the wider population, but rather the owners
family and perhaps some dependents (Bowes 2007). Thus, they were not
convertive tools as would be the later parishes, but rather, like the great
villas of which they were a part, monuments of personal power and
identity. Indeed, in these same areas the later parish churches were built
over or near the remains of earlier villas, serving either residual populations
or reusing a conspicuous landmark of power for proselytic purposes
(cf. Chavarra 2007).
In the East, particularly in the Aegean, Egypt, and Asia Minor, the first
churches likewise appear as part of an increasingly bustling fifth- and
2008 The Author
605
Fig. 14. Plan, La Cocosa villa, showing villa and Christian (?) mausoleum, first to sixth century
AD (author, after Palol 1967, Arqueologa Cristiana de la Espaa Romana. Siglos IVVI, Madrid/
Valladolid, fig. 57 and Schlunk & Hauschild 1978, Die Denkmler der frhchristlichen und
westgotischen Zeit, Mainz am Rhein, fig. 6).
sixth-century landscape of villages, small farms, and occasional villas, either

located within these entities or set some distance away.11 These churches
frequently served as a nexus of new settlements, although it is often
difficult to know if the church attracted habitation or vice versa. Martyr
shrines sometimes appear at the fringes of these villages or in solitary points
in the landscape, serving, as did the rural pagan sanctuaries of the archaic
period, as points of mediation and competition for a ring of local villages.
In both East and West, then, the growth of local rural economies seems
to have played a profound role in church building patterns. The appearance
of Christian buildings, however, is not necessarily synonymous with Christian
institutional growth. In the West, throughout the fourth, fifth, and even
the early sixth centuries, institutional Christianity remained an urban religion
as bishops found their hands full managing their urban flock, and the
countryside was left to rural elites whose Christian impulses were largely
confined to their immediate families. The parish church, it is becoming
clear, became a real factor only much later: previous work on the origins
of the parish assumed that parishes, at least as territorial units, sprang into
being with the constitution of the public church in the fourth century, a
basic element of church organization (e.g. David 1947; Griffe 1947). The
notion was seemingly supported by fourth-century church councils in
which rural populations are termed parocchiae. Recent studies, however,
have noted that the fourth-century sources use the term only infrequently,
2008 The Author
606 Kim Bowes
Fig. 15. a. S. Vittore di Sizzano. b. S. Lorenzo di Gozzano, late fifth to sixth centuries AD
(Pejrani Baricco 2003, Chiese rurali in Piemonte tra V e VI secolo, in GP Brogiolo (ed.), Chiese
e insediamenti nelle campagne tra V e VI secolo, Mantova, fig. 15).
when it rarely carries the notion of a territory or institutional framework

(e.g. Fvrier 1994; Monfrin 1998). It is only in the mid-fifth and sixth
centuries that the term appears with any frequency: the correspondence
of Gelasius and Pelagius finds the popes trying to impose distinctions
between private churches and such parrochiae, restricting certain rituals
like baptism and burial to the latter, while later Gallic and Spanish councils
gradually place private clergy and estate churches under the control of
parish administration (Violante 1982; Pietri 2002, 2005). In other words,
not only do these sources describe a much later development of clearly
defined parish boundaries and responsibilities, but they also suggest that the
concept of parish itself the various liturgical acts that contributed to the
so-called care of souls stemmed not from an a priori notion of diocesan
organization, but grew out of a tension-filled dialectic with private churches
that claimed the same rights. Archaeological evidence is tending in the
same direction, although identifying parish churches in the archaeological
record is tricky. Seemingly clear markers of parish identity, such as
baptisteries or collective graveyards, turn out to be false friends. Cautious
studies in Spain, France, and Italy, have unearthed the earliest probable
parish buildings beginning in the later fifth century and expanding in the
sixth century (Pergola 1999; Brogiolo 2003; Delaplace 2005) (Figure 15).
Interestingly, although church councils describe parish systems as expanding
in numbers and complexity through the seventh century, with the exception
of Hispania, relatively few new seventh-century rural churches have been
found and almost none of eighth century date, a product probably of our
poor understanding of seventh- and eighth-century ceramics that would
date these buildings, and/or the general economic collapse that took place
at the end of the sixth century.
2008 The Author
Fig. 16. Temple of Apollo, Nettleton, Britain, fourth century

Buildings of Roman Britain, Stroud, fig. 135).
AD
607
phase (Bdoyre 2001, The
In the East, Christianitys institutional presence began somewhat earlier

and took a different, more decentralized form. Chorepiscopi sub-bishops
dependent on a local urban episcopate and responsible for a rural territory seem to have organized rural flocks as early as the later fourth
century (Leclercq 19071953). Their spread throughout the fifth and sixth
century is paralleled by an explosion of rural church construction in those
centuries, although as in the West, the precise institutional status of a given
church is rarely clear from the archaeological evidence. The finely-built
churches with martyrs relics and baptisteries that peppered Syrian villages
(Tchalenko 1953 1959; Lassus 1957; Tate 1992), for instance, might be
built by local elites, local villagers, or episcopal largess, and supervised by
a chorepiscopus, local priests, or some combination.
Christianity in rural North Africa assumed a form particular to its own
demographics, rural economy, and sharply polarized origins. Here, regular
bishops (not chorepiscopi) were frequently stationed in villages and great
estates (Markus 1979; Dossey 1998). In part, these rural bishops were a
product of North Africas extraordinary rural demographics, in which
estates, vici, or castella might rival the size of a small city (Lepelley 1979
1981, 1994). The DonatistCatholic split also resulted in two bishops in
many centers and the inflation of episcopal numbers on both sides by
using rural ordinations (Frend 1952, 1967, 1979). Despite the presence of
rural bishops and other institutional agents from the mid to late-fourth
2008 The Author
608 Kim Bowes
century, Christian church building seems to have lagged. While well-dated

buildings are rare, most seem to date to the fifth and sixth centuries, when
they were built by local coloni, elites, bishops, or some combination.
Monks and bishops both deride the persistence of pagan practices in
rural areas, bemoaning the unrepentant ignorance of the peasantry and the
reluctance of local landowners to interfere with a notoriously touchy and
rebellious workforce (Dlger 1950). Archaeological traces of active paganism
are harder to find although by no means non-existent: in Britain, for
instance, small, but richly appointed fourth-century shrines have been
interpreted either as a sign of resurgent, grassroots paganism, or as part of
the broader elite monumental building culture (Watts 1998; cf. Millett 1990,
pp. 195 6) (Figure 16). On the other hand, despite the accounts of an
active, even aggressive local paganism, Martin of Tours battles with pagan
daimones seems to have taken place in a landscape of largely abandoned
rural temples (Fauduet 1993, p. 120; cf. Sauer 2003). In Egypt, the region
best supplied with accounts of deeply entrenched paganism, rural public
shrines seem to have dwindled in popularity or converted to Christian use
beginning in the fifth century; practices may then have moved inside to
the domestic sphere, where statuettes of Harpocrates, Bes, and other deities
continue to appear with some frequency (Frankfurter 1998a,b).
Conclusions
Forcing some kind of concluding order on a body of material that is not
only impossibly broad, but frequently not in dialogue with itself, is bound
to be something of an artificial exercise, an act of imposing self-reflection
on a discipline that has generally refused it. Some very basic observations,
however, both on the material and the field, might be cautiously offered.
The first regards the historiographic dilemma with which this essay
began the particular relationship between Christian archaeology and
Christian texts. In many ways, Christian archaeology finds itself in a more
fortuitous position than its sister discipline of biblical archaeology: embedded
ever more firmly in the study of late antiquity, Christian archaeologists are
surrounded by colleagues whose training and outlook is resolutely, and
increasingly, interdisciplinary. Younger scholars particularly are comfortable
using both texts and material culture to tell stories. The next step, perhaps,
is a new discomfort, a recognition that, like Wittgensteins lion, our
understanding of one kind of historical language does not provide us
sufficient empathy to understand the other. A new level of theoretical
discourse in which we ask how texts and material culture speak, and how
we think we understand their languages, seems in order.
Our increasing knowledge of the material itself is already providing
some fine fodder for this discourse. The problem of dating is illustrative:
archaeologically derived dates for Christian structures be they the
alleged third-century house churches in Rome or the fluorescence of
2008 The Author
609
Christian buildings in cities and the countryside more broadly are all
trending later. In other words, Christianity now seems to have had only
a limited material presence until the fifth century and in places, even later.
The implications for textual history are enormous: first, it is ever more
important to get times and places right when juxtaposing texts and objects.
The fifth and sixth centuries are now patently a very different world than
the fourth, and Gregory of Tours or Shenoute cannot be used to make
sense of fourth-century Gallic or Egyptian remains. Second, the disjunction
between the ecstatic voices of a Athanasius or Damasus and the paltry
Christian churches over which they presided should patently not convince
us that one or the other kind of evidence must be wrong, or that they
have nothing to say to one another. To imagine Damasus striding through
a Rome in which the episcopate was relatively poor and weak and the
majority of his parishioners still met in houses allows us to see his (and
Prudentius and Jeromes) images of fourth-century Christian Rome for
what they are science fiction, imaginings of a world that might be, that
could be made to be by the sheer power of the word. Damasus inscriptions
thus become not a grand belt of holy power, but more like the carefully
carved epitaphs of early imperial freedmen, small-scale appropriations of
the script of Roman power, designed to channel some of that power to
his own, embattled episcopate. In other words, a healthy divorce between
texts and material culture empowers both forms of evidence, and produces
far richer histories, than an unproblematized marriage.
Conversely, aspects of Christian life that fall wholly outside the textual
radar have not been probed as much as they might. The economy is one
such area: a number of recent studies on property management have
attempted to elucidate what one scholar has called a Christian salvation
economics the various habits and attitudes toward pious giving and the
institutional churchs management of those gifts (e.g. Marazzi 1998; Trout
1999). But economies of giving are only the tip of a much larger economic
iceberg with which Christians collided. It is gradually becoming clear
that the development of Christian urban and particularly rural topographies
are not simply the product of episcopal prosyletization, but also of local
economies elite seigniorial economies, trade economies, and tax economies.
Archaeology in the form of pots, luxury goods, road networks, or
building technologies is often the only way this economic landscape
becomes visible and Christian archaeologists are thus well-positioned to set
churches and other ritual remains within their local economic universes.
That they have not done so reflects disciplinary divides that have rendered
to Caesar what is Caesars and to God what is Gods: even the burgeoning
scholarship on the late Roman economy has largely ignored Christianitys
contribution either as institution or as an economic mind-set such
that one can barely trace Christianitys progress in any of the great
new economic histories of the period (McCormick 2002; Wickham
2005). How Christian attitudes influenced wealth production and
2008 The Author
610 Kim Bowes
management, how settlement and trade became tied to Christian institutions,

how lay elites competed with and colluded with the ever-more powerful
institutional church for land, people, and influence these are all stories
that have yet to plucked from pots and walls.
Slowly and in fits and starts, the archaeology of Christianity is moving
in these directions, edging out of its disciplinary moorings in art and
architectural history toward the broader stream of late ancient history. By
reckoning more fully with its concomitant texts and by breaking down
still-confining disciplinary boundaries, it may finally cast itself free.
Short Biography
Kim Bowes received her PhD from Princeton University and completed
a post-doctoral fellowship at Yale University. She has published on subjects
ranging from Christian archaeology and domestic architecture to settlement
dynamics and the late Roman economy, and has excavated Roman and late
Roman sites around the Mediterranean. She is currently an assistant professor of archaeology in the Department of Classics at Cornell University.
Notes
* Correspondence address: Kim Bowes, Department of Classics, Cornell University, 120 Goldwin
Smith Hall, Ithaca, NY 14850, USA. Email: kimberlybowes@yahoo.com.
1
Atlante Europeo di Architettura Cristiana, organized by Miljenko Jurkovic of the Center for Late
Antiquity and the Middle Ages in Zagreb.
2
Browns hugely influential World of Late Antiquity made abundant use of material culture as
illustrative material: Brown 1971b.
3
For example, San Clemente: Mullooly 1869; Ss. Giovanni e Paolo: Germano di Stanislao
1907; S. Martino ai Monti: Vielliard 1931; San Crisogono: Mesnard 1935, among several. See
also the survey in Marucchi 1902; Kirsch 1918, for the early excavations.
4
The Latin term domus ecclesiae does not appear in any second- or third-century sources,
but only in post-Constantinian contexts where it means a house for the bishops or clergy: c.f.
Saxer 1988, who intimates that the term and its Greek equivalent oikos tes ekklesias appear
in the third century, but provides no supporting citations.
5
On the paradigms of samness and difference in comparative studies of early Christianity and
paganism; Smith 1990.
6
See the instructive debate about the dating of one of the most thoroughly studied catacombs,
that of Ss. Pietro e Marcellino: Guyon 1987; Deckers 1992. More generally, see Fiocchi Nicolai
& Guyon 2006.
7
For a recent discussion of Christian population numbers generally, see Hopkins 1998.
8
Surveys of church building and topography include: France: Gauthier & Picard 1986;
Italy: Testini et al. 1989; Turkey: Sodini 1989; Syria: Lassus 1957; Ulbert 1986; North
Africa: Gui 1992; Duval 1989; Berthier 1943; Gsell 1911; Palestine: Piccirillo 1989; Tsafrir
ed. 1993; Constantinople: Janin 1953; Dagron 1974; and Rome: Pietri 1976; Reekmans
1989.
9
The systematic study of the eastern Mediterranean has generally lagged behind that of the
West, often owing to less interest on the part of the respective countries in documenting their
Christian (versus classical or Islamic) remains and thus a smaller number of researchers working
in these areas.
10
See, for instance, Gui 1992 (Algeria); Chevalier 1996 (Dalmatia); Duval 19951997 (Gaul);
Testini et al. 1989 (Italy).
2008 The Author

611
11
On the Greek landscape in late antiquity, see Alcock 1993; Avrama 1997; Sanders 2004; on
churches in Greece, see a partial catalogue in Caraher 2003; on Syria, Tchalenko 1953 1959;
on the late Roman economy in the East generally, see now Wickham 2005; Banaji 2001.
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Religion Compass 2/4 (2008): 575619, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00078.

Early Christian Archaeology: A State of the Field

576 Kim Bowes

Early Christian Archaeology: A State of the Field

buildings (Krautheimer et al. 19371977). In place of inverse deduction,

578 Kim Bowes

Capernaum (see below), to the wholesale destruction of a major circular

Early Christian Archaeology: A State of the Field

Christian archaeology as the field clings resolutely to its positivist heritage.

The archaeology of third-century Christianity is one of those topics over

580 Kim Bowes

Fig. 1. Reconstruction, Dura Europos house-church, third century

(after White 1990,

Early Christian Archaeology: A State of the Field

Fig 2. Phased plan, mithraeum, Dura Europos, second to third centuries

(after White 1990,

582 Kim Bowes

check-by-jowl character of religious building at Dura, with a mithraeum,

Early Christian Archaeology: A State of the Field

The phenomenon of mass underground burial grounds was not limited

584 Kim Bowes

longer be categorized as spaces of cheap, collective burial, but had taken

Early Christian Archaeology: A State of the Field

Fig. 4. Plan, catacomb of Callistus, late third to fourth centuries

(after Fiocchi Nicolai,

Below-ground burial had never been the exclusive province of Christians;

586 Kim Bowes

catacombs could contain exclusively, or even a majority of Christians

Early Christian Archaeology: A State of the Field

588 Kim Bowes

Constantine and his house, and in general, fourth-century church

Early Christian Archaeology: A State of the Field

590 Kim Bowes

(Krautheimer 1980; Fraschetti 1999; cf. Reekmans 1989). Constantinople

Early Christian Archaeology: A State of the Field

Typology the planar and other formal qualities of Christian buildings

592 Kim Bowes

Early Christian Archaeology: A State of the Field

contextualizing delimiters, these detailed and exacting catalogs of churches,

594 Kim Bowes

Fig. 9. Plan, St. Sergius, Rusafa, sixth century

(after Krautheimer 1986, fig. 221).

influence of pre-existing structures, both on architectural form and

Early Christian Archaeology: A State of the Field

Fig. 10. Floor mosaic, cathedral church, Aquileia, fourth century

(after Sotinel 2005, fig. 5).

2008 The Author

596 Kim Bowes

As described above, the processes by which the ancient city became

Early Christian Archaeology: A State of the Field

598 Kim Bowes

Archaeology of Asceticism and Pilgrimage

Early Christian Archaeology: A State of the Field

Fig. 11. Plan, Parthenon, showing church phases, seventh century

(after Beard, 2003, The

specifically monastic, such as cells or a common eating area. Other

600 Kim Bowes

Early Christian Archaeology: A State of the Field

Jerome or Rufinus, who counted monastic communities numbering in

(Henein & Wuttmann