Christianization in the Aegean: Pilgrims, Ports, and Pottery

Rebecca J. Sweetman of the University of St Andrews examines how Christianity spread and became monumentalized across the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean during the Roman and Late Antique periods. First, she introduces a St Andrews project digitizing an unprovenanced private collection of 184 Cypriot artifacts donated to the university. Her team created 3D models and had a local potter replicate a lamp and a spindle whorl to test how museum visitors respond to glass cases, handling boxes, and digital screens; while visitors preferred handling objects, digital interaction produced stronger memory retention. She also asks for help identifying a Cypriot figurine of a seated woman flanked by two rams.

In the main lecture, Sweetman applies network theory to the earliest churches, arguing that monumental Christianization resulted from strategic and emergent processes rather than social tension. Using the Peloponnese as a model, she outlines three stages: initial churches at ports and active sanctuaries such as Kenchreai and Epidaurus, spread through social competition to urban gateways and cemeteries at Corinth and Argos, and a later tipping point into rural areas. Comparing Salamis in Cyprus (with the fourth-century church of Ayios Epiphanius), Paroikia on Paros, Antioch, Ephesus, Athens, and Edessa, alongside Apamea and Pergamon, she shows that distance from Jerusalem, missionary visits, and trade networks seen in Cypriot Sigillata and Eastern Sigillata A do not explain why some cities built churches in the third or fourth centuries and Athens and Apamea in the fifth. Instead, she argues, uninterrupted civic investment, imperial patronage, and pilgrimage were decisive. Questions afterwards touch on Corinth, Athens, and churches in Hellenistic and Roman cemeteries in the occupied north of Cyprus.