Conversion and Material Culture

The study of conversion through archaeology has seldom theorised the relationship between material culture and religious practice. Often the relationship between the two is assumed to be simple, with different religions having distinct cultural practices. The process of tracking conversion then becomes a process of mapping the changing distribution of these diagnostic elements over time and space. However, the relationship between belief and practice is never so clear. The creation of models for early Christianity derived from textual evidence or archaeological material from a much later period means that there is a danger of forcing the evidence into an interpretative straight-jacket; any religious practice which is not attested textually or found in another period is relegated to a ‘pagan’ status. This creates an essentialist and abstract model of Christian practice, which fails to take account of local variation.

While Christian belief may be seen as mapping onto a set of archaeologically diagnostic criteria (Thomas 1981; Watts 1988, 1991, 1998; Mawer 1995), the basic concept that there is discrete set of Christian ritual practices that are recognisable in the archaeological record has recently been challenged (Cookson 1987, Kilbride 1996; Millett 1995a, b). In his Christianity in Roman Britain to AD 500 (1981) Charles Thomas argues for the continuity of Christianity into the fifth century, calling on a wide range of evidence: historical, linguistic and material. Dorothy Watts in her Christians and Pagans in Roman Britain (1991) further studies criteria for identifying buildings, artefacts, symbols and inscriptions as Christian, a project continued by Frances Mawer (1995). In this line of reasoning, objects or attributes identified as signifying Christianity are given an appropriate weighting and plotted on a map, and the distribution taken to indicate the relative intensity of Christian practice (Thomas 1981: 96–101, Fig. 16; Watts 1991: Fig. 28). I would like to use this work as a point of departure for examining how far these distributions are owed to variations in depositional practice, or in the way that religion was expressed, as opposed to a variation in the distribution of Christianity itself. The principal example I will use is that of the lead tanks, an accepted Christian signifier.

Roman Lead Baptismal Tanks

These circular containers are unique to Roman Britain. At least twenty examples have been found, many of which carry either a single or multiple decorative motifs, often in panels divided by vertical banding.