Resumen de Ritual Sites and Religious Rivalries in Late Roman North Africa by Shira Lander (review)
[...]Lander uses the archaeological record to read against the grain of the literary one, thereby flouting scholarly conventions that prioritize textual evidence. [...]she identifies the rhetorical spatial strategies that Nicene Christians ("Catholics") deployed to distance themselves from other sects, whom they variously cast as "Donatists," "Novatianists," and "Jews." [...]given the popularity of graffiti in marketplaces and theaters in the Roman East, which constitute forms of religious competition, one wonders whether comparable attention to data from African civic spaces might enhance this regional study (Angelos Chaniotis, "Memory, Commemoration and Identity in an Ancient City: The Case of Aphrodisias," Daedalus 145.2 [2016]: 88–100). Published excavation reports from the Naro synagogue (Hammam Lif) record discoveries of multiple "Christian" lamps, suggesting some historical Christian presence (or potential displacement, or reuse?) at that site (Karen B. Stern, Inscribing Devotion and Death: Archaeological Evidence for Jewish Populations in North Africa [Leiden: Brill, 2007], 245–47).
