Religious Markers on the Graves: Co-produced Displays of Religious Affiliation in Late Antique Cemeteries

From the 3rd century CE, new religious images emerged, arguably in line with the growing rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire. One of the places where these new visual vocabularies could be used was in cemeteries, and in particular in the catacombs. These sites, shared by individuals from different religious backgrounds and supplied by the same workshops, were places of familial and individual expression, and, most importantly, were not administered by religious authorities, unlike what became the norm in the West during the Middle Ages. A strongly delimited canon of funerary imagery had not yet emerged, and there was thus in this early period more room for selection from a wider variety of cultural and religious motifs, making for an interesting laboratory wherein modern scholars can see how the selections of families of different faiths inter-related and sometimes co-produced.