רשת מדעי הרוח והחברה

"Beyond Categorization: New Perspectives on the Funerary Monuments for Pagans, Jews, and Christians in Late Antiquity." Studying material from Late Antiquity, it is nearly impossible to get past the attribution of a “religious identity/category” to artifacts, especially artifacts retrieved from spaces for rituals such as funerary contexts. But, for many reasons, this systematic – but necessary? – use of religious classification can be a bit reductive. Our starting point here is to ask: is there potential for blurred lines? This session will consider funerary monuments for pagans, Jews, and Christians from multiple perspectives (e.g., epigraphic, iconographic, archaeological perspectives). This includes a wide variety of (portable) monuments, such as funerary reliefs (e.g. loculi), sarcophagi, gold glasses, lamps, and grave goods, addressing especially, but not exclusively, the following questions: On which scholarly grounds do we assign certain types of monuments to pagans, Jews, or Christians, as opposed to their co-religionists? In which sense were these monuments embedded in their local cultures; in which sense could these take on distinctive features? How were patterns of commemoration inflected by overlapping categories of social organization, such as status, age, gender? In other words: …

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