Iconoclasm, Religious Identities and Aniconism in the Roman to Byzantine Period at Central Coastal (Sharon) Plain, Israel.

The potency of images in the Roman world carry some aspects of a person’s presence into posterity, making them a prime object for memory sanctions. By the Late Republic, many conflicts between different aristocrats and factions in Rome were conducted through the creation, worship, and destruction of images, including penalties such as denying a postmortem memory to enemies of the state. A discourse of image destruction and memory erasure arose just after Augustus by the time of the Principate. During Late antiquity, Jewish, Christian, and Samaritan positions differ from the Roman polytheistic religion, and particularly attitudes towards to material culture aid in the search to understand what could have shaped the Byzantine iconoclasm in Near East itself. Despite no religious group has ever been devoid of “images” of any kind, Judaism, Samaritans, and early forms of Christianity have been notable for a restriction on anthropomorphic depictions of divinity. Iconoclasm is the social belief in the importance of the destruction of icons and other images or monuments, most frequently for religious or political reasons. Aniconism, by its turn, may be defined as a representational style that systematically avoids specific kinds of figural representation, most specifically anthropomorphic images of the deity or deities. The so-called “Second Image War” is considered an internal development from Eastern Christianity, a period when the image as object-to-think was a powerful discursive and polemical weapon without any precedent in the Western tradition. In this sense, the Apollonia site in Israel was chosen to be our showcase to think about who were the groups present in the landscape during Jewish Diaspora? to where Jews went after 138 CE when they were expelled from Jerusalem, named Aelia Capitolina after the rise of new province Syria-Palaestina? How Jews, Samaritans, and Christians are related to the ideas of Iconoclasm and Aniconism in the material culture?

Marcio Teixeira-Bastos is Postdoctoral Visiting Scholar at Stanford Archaeology Center. He is also Postdoctoral at the State University of São Paulo - UNESP - Brazil; and researcher associate at Tel Aviv University - TAU - Israel. Teixeira-Bastos is engaged in a variety of studies such as, spatial and material analysis, the changes that underwent from Roman to Byzantine periods, with a special interest in their religion and cult contexts, as manifested in the material culture, also the contacts in the Mediterranean, ancient pottery, Microarchaeology, ancient networks, Jewish Diaspora in North Africa, Judaism and Christianity in Israel. Currently, his research deals with spatial analysis (GIS), virtual reality (VR) and Digital mapping in order to investigate archaeological sites in Israel and approach the encounter between Roman Paganism and Judaism, and the rise of Christianity in the East during Late Antiquity. The methods and theoretical interests include spatial analysis, network analysis, global heritage, socio-politics, cultural identities, and materiality which are framed within a broad discussion about Digital Humanities and Archaeology.